Kit and your ATS
What an ATS records, and what a conversation adds to it.
Speak to Kit is an AI hiring system built for quality of hire. The hiring manager says what a top performer delivers in their first 12 months, Kit speaks to every applicant about the way they work, and the hiring team sees who to meet, and why. How Kit works, step by step.
What the leading ATSs say they do
Greenhouse calls itself "Hiring. Orchestrated." and offers "Sourcing, interviewing and ATS solutions in one place". iCIMS describes "a comprehensive enterprise-grade applicant tracking system and AI-powered recruitment software". Ashby calls itself "The all-in-one recruiting platform that evolves at the speed of AI."
Each of them is where a company's jobs, applicants, stages, interviews and offers live. That record is how a talent team knows who applied, where each person stands and what was decided. Speak to Kit keeps it that way. The ATS stays the system of record, and what Kit learns lands on the applicant's record inside it.
Why the pile of applications keeps growing
Greenhouse's own Hire Standard report, published in March 2026, counted 640 million applications at more than 6,000 companies. Applications per job more than doubled, from 116 in 2022 to 244 in 2025. Over the same years, the number of recruiters per company fell from 10.43 to 4.62.
Ashby looked at 109 million applications in April 2026. It found applications per hire tripled from 2021 to 2024, and that candidates are about half as likely to reach interview as five years ago. With hundreds of people for each role, the CV becomes the filter, because it is the only thing anyone has time to read.
What happens when every applicant gets a conversation
With Speak to Kit linked to the ATS, every new applicant is invited to speak to Kit on the day they apply, by phone or in writing. Kit asks each person about the same things: what the hiring manager said a top performer delivers in the first 12 months, and the hard part of the job. Kit's notes, its reasons and the full transcript go back onto the applicant's record.
At Rhaelm, 66 of the 70 applicants who started a conversation with Kit finished it. Their recruiter met a candidate she says she would have passed over on paper.
“I probably would have looked over her, which sounds awful. Just in the structuring of her CV, it looks a bit odd.”
What changes inside the ATS, and what stays the same
Nothing about the way a team runs its ATS has to change. Kit adds a conversation and a recommendation at the start, then steps back.
- Jobs are still posted from the ATS, to the careers site and the job boards.
- Stages, interview scheduling, approvals and offers still run in the ATS.
- Each applicant's record gains Kit's notes, the transcript and a recommendation with reasons.
- The hiring team still decides who to interview and who to hire.
Which ATSs Kit links to
Live today: Greenhouse, Pinpoint, Workday and SAP SuccessFactors, and Speak to Kit links to any other ATS on request. Kit also works with no integration at all. Put Kit's link in the advert and applicants reach Kit directly, and the team reads every conversation in Kit.
One part of the job is easier to show than to describe. In Greenhouse, the recruiter opens the morning email, sees who Kit recommends, and requests the interview from the candidate's record, with Kit's notes already on it.
Does Kit agree with a good recruiter?
Mostly. A recruiter at a pharmaceutical manufacturing customer looked at the 20 people Kit recommended on one job. She said 15 of them were people she would have picked from their CVs straight away. The other five came from the conversations.
Every recommendation shows its reasons in the applicant's own words, so a recruiter can check Kit's judgement in a minute rather than take it on trust. When a strong person speaks to Kit, the team gets an email the same day, with what they said, so it can move first.
“15 of the 20 would have been people I would have flagged and gone with based on their resume immediately anyway.”
Every source, one standard
An ATS collects people from many places: the careers site, job boards, referrals, agencies and people the team found. Kit holds all of them to the same standard, written from the hiring manager's words. Over time that shows which sources bring the people who match, not just the most people.
What it is worth
An ATS shows who applied. The cost sits in who gets hired. In UK small firms, 16 in 100 new hires leave within their first year, and one failed hire on £80,000 costs about £51,000 by the time the replacement is up to speed. Reading applications costs time too: on a role with 350 applications at a minute each, a recruiter spends almost 6 hours on CVs before the first call. For example, an airline software company hiring about 500 people a year has about 80 first-year leavers, costing about £2.2 million a year. Halving that would be worth about £1.1 million a year (estimate).