Field notes on hiring, open source and recruiting ops.
Practical guides from teams running their own applicant tracking system. No thought leadership, just what worked and what broke.
What is an applicant tracking system?
A plain guide to what an ATS is, what it does, why hiring teams use one, and how to choose the right system for yours.
Mar 2026How does an ATS work?
From application to offer: how an ATS parses resumes, moves candidates through stages, automates the busywork and ranks a shortlist.
Mar 2026The hiring process steps, from open role to signed offer
A practical walk through the six steps of hiring, where each one leaks time, and how to keep candidates moving.
Mar 2026Recruitment metrics that matter, and how to read them
Time to hire, cost per hire, source of hire, pipeline conversion and offer acceptance: the numbers worth tracking and how they check each other.
Mar 2026The five pipeline stages most teams get wrong
Applied, screening, interview, decision and offer: the failure that hides in each stage, and the change that fixes it.
Mar 2026Scorecards that reviewers actually fill in
Long scorecards get abandoned and rebuilt from memory. How to design one interviewers finish in two minutes, and why it makes debriefs faster.
Mar 2026Answers people search for
Short, direct answers to the questions that bring teams here. Each one links to the full explanation.
Browse the full FAQAn applicant tracking system whose source code is public, so you can host it yourself, read how it handles candidate data, and change it. RabbitHR is MIT licensed and free forever in the Community Edition.
Yes. One Docker host with Postgres and object storage covers a team hiring at normal volume, and setup takes about ten minutes.
No. Agents rank and summarise so a human reads a shortlist instead of a pile. Advancing a candidate stays a person's decision.
Stop reading about pipelines and run one.
The Community Edition is free forever and installs in about ten minutes.