Online recruiting software is straightforward to start using and less straightforward to move onto, and the migration is the part most small desks under-plan. The question is not whether the new product is good but what happens to the hiring you are already doing: the applicants currently in process, the roles half advertised, and the history that your figures are computed from. Losing the history is the expensive part, because cost per hire and time to hire only mean something as a trend, and a trend that restarts at the migration is a trend you cannot use for a year. On the worked example a desk hiring six times a year takes 31 days per hire, so a year of history is a small number of data points to begin with and losing them matters more than it would at volume. This page sets out what to move, what to leave, and how to keep the figures continuous across the change.
Move the history, not just the live pipeline
Applicants in process are obvious and easy. The closed ones with their source, stage dates and outcome are the ones that make your figures work, and they are the ones most migrations drop because nobody asks for them.
Keep computing the figures during the change
Work cost per hire and time to hire on the free sheets here immediately before you switch and immediately after. If the new system cannot reproduce them, you will find out in the first week rather than at the first board meeting.
Do not migrate a mess
A migration is a good moment to decide which fields you actually maintain. Moving four fields you keep properly is worth more than moving twenty you fill in sometimes, and the second option makes the new system look unreliable from day one.
Questions people ask about online recruiting software
How long does a migration take for a small desk?
Usually days rather than weeks, and most of the effort is deciding what to bring rather than moving it. The history is the part worth spending time on.
Should I run both systems for a while?
Briefly, for the live pipeline only. Running both for long means neither is the record, which is worse than either alone.
What if my current record is a spreadsheet?
That is the commonest starting point and it migrates cleanly, provided the spreadsheet has dates. If it only has current status, the history is already gone and the new system starts your trend from now.