The ATSpro blog
Practical guides for UK recruitment agencies — compliance, AI, data hygiene, and growth. Written for recruiters, by a recruiter. No fluff, no gated e-books.
How to Write a Job Advert That Actually Attracts the Right Candidates
A job advert should help the right candidates recognise a worthwhile opportunity—and give everyone else enough honest information to decide that it is not for them. Here is how to write adverts that are specific, inclusive and useful rather than recycled job descriptions filled with vague promises.
Read the guideWhy Recruitment Emails Land in Spam — and What Actually Improves Deliverability
Poor reply rates do not always mean poor copy. Your messages may be rejected, delayed or filtered before the recipient seriously considers them. Here is how authentication, recipient complaints, address quality, sending patterns and UK marketing rules affect recruitment email deliverability.
Read the guideRecruitment Automation: What to Automate, What to Assist and What to Keep Human
Not every recruitment task should be automated, but "keep humans involved" is not a complete strategy either. A practical framework for deciding when software should complete the task, when it should support a recruiter and when a person should remain firmly responsible for the decision.
Read the guideRunning a Temp Desk: Where the Margin Leaks and How to Stop It
A temp placement is not a completed transaction. It begins a recurring cycle of hours, approvals, worker pay, employment costs, invoicing, credit control and compliance. Here is where temp desks lose margin—and the controls that stop small weekly errors becoming expensive habits.
Read the guideExecutive Search Done Well: Process, Evidence and the Reports Clients Remember
Executive search earns a retained fee through more than finding several senior candidates. It requires a clearly defined mandate, disciplined market research, documented assessment, careful candidate handling and advice the client can defend. Here is what a rigorous search process looks like from brief to appointment.
Read the guideWinning the Client Is Half the Job: How Recruitment Agencies Earn Repeat Business
Winning a client creates an opportunity, not a relationship. Repeat business is earned through delivery, honest advice, dependable communication and a clear understanding of the value the client expects. Here is how recruitment agencies turn an initial assignment into a durable, commercially healthy account.
Read the guideHow to Migrate Recruitment CRM Without Losing Your Data—or Your Mind
Moving recruitment CRM is not simply an exercise in exporting contacts and importing them somewhere else. A reliable migration preserves relationships, history, documents, permissions and operational meaning. Here is how to plan, test and cut over without discovering the damage after the old system has been switched off.
Read the guideCandidate Experience: The Recruitment Advantage Agencies Can Actually Control
Candidates judge more than the vacancy. They judge whether the process is clear, relevant, fair and respectful of their time. Here is how recruitment agencies can improve communication, feedback, accessibility and consistency without replacing human care with automated messages.
Read the guideThe Recruitment Metrics That Actually Help You Run an Agency
Recruitment agencies can measure almost everything, but more data does not automatically produce better decisions. Here is how to define conversion, speed, quality, profitability and fairness metrics—and avoid dashboards that reward activity while hiding poor outcomes.
Read the guideHow to Build a Talent Pool That Compounds Instead of Rotting
A talent pool is only an asset if you can actually use it. Here is how to build and maintain a talent pool that gets more valuable over time — segmentation, nurture, and the CRM hygiene that stops it decaying into dead weight.
Read the guideAI Candidate Matching: How Semantic Search Finds People Keywords Miss
How AI candidate matching and semantic search actually work — why keyword and Boolean search miss good candidates, what "semantic" really means, and how to get shortlists you can trust with the reasoning shown.
Read the guideUmbrella, PAYE and IR35: A Recruiter’s Guide to Contractor Pay Models
A plain-English guide to how contractors get paid — PAYE, umbrella companies, and inside/outside IR35 — what each means for your agency’s admin and liability, and how your CRM should handle timesheets, margin, and the Key Information Document.
Read the guideHow to Choose a Recruitment CRM in 2026: A Buyer’s Guide
A vendor-neutral framework for choosing a recruitment CRM in 2026 — the questions that actually matter on pricing, AI, compliance, migration, and support, and the traps that catch UK agencies during the buying process.
Read the guideRight to Work Checks in 2026: What UK Recruitment Agencies Must Get Right
A practical guide to Right to Work checks for UK recruitment agencies in 2026 — manual, digital identity (IDVT), and Home Office online share-code checks, who is liable, penalties, and how your CRM should track it all.
Read the guideBusiness Development Outreach for Recruiters That Actually Gets Replies
A practical guide to BD outreach for recruitment agencies — how to find the right decision-makers, write cold emails that get answered, and run multi-touch sequences without sounding like every other recruiter in their inbox.
Read the guideReg 15 and Reg 17 Explained: A Plain-English Guide for UK Agencies
What Regulation 15 (Assignment Confirmation) and Regulation 17 (Key Information Document) actually require under the Conduct Regulations — when they apply, what must be in each, and how your CRM should generate them automatically.
Read the guideATSpro vs Atlas: Which Recruitment CRM Is Right for Your Agency?
An honest comparison of ATSpro and Atlas (recruitwithatlas.com) for UK recruitment agencies — pricing, AI, compliance, and who each is actually built for. Atlas targets enterprise; ATSpro is built for lean UK agencies at £49/user.
Read the guideWhy UK Agencies Are Leaving Enterprise Recruitment CRMs
Enterprise recruitment CRMs are expensive, add-on-heavy, and often US-built. Here is why a growing number of UK agencies are switching to simpler, transparent, UK-native software — and what to check before you move.
Read the guideConnect Your Recruitment CRM to Claude: A Recruiter’s Guide to MCP
MCP lets you run your recruitment CRM from inside Claude — searching candidates, drafting outreach, and pulling reports in plain English. Here is what a connector is, why it matters for recruiters, and how ATSpro’s MCP integration works.
Read the guideBlind Recruitment and Reducing Bias: What Works and What Is Theatre
Blind recruitment can reduce hiring bias, but the evidence is more complicated than the slogans suggest. One major trial even found that anonymising CVs disadvantaged some minority candidates. Here is where blind screening helps, where it does not, and how it fits into a fairer recruitment process.
Read the guideAI That Actually Does the Admin, Not AI That Summarises It
Most recruitment AI writes summaries and drafts you still have to action. The useful kind takes the action. Here is the difference between a chatbot bolted onto a CRM and an AI assistant that can actually run your desk.
Read the guideWhy Your CRM Should Make Standalone CV Formatting Software Redundant
Most agencies pay for separate CV formatting software on top of their recruitment CRM. Here is why branded CV formatting should be built into your ATS — and what goes wrong when it is bolted on or done by hand.
Read the guideData Decay Is Costing You Placements (And You Cannot See It Happening)
Recruitment data decays silently — people change jobs, emails bounce, numbers die. Here is what data decay costs UK agencies in missed placements, and how a living database keeps candidate records accurate without manual clean-up.
Read the guideUK GDPR for Recruitment Agencies: What Your CRM Should Do For You
A plain-English guide to UK GDPR for recruitment agencies — lawful basis, candidate consent, retention, and the right to erasure — and the CRM features that make compliance automatic rather than manual.
Read the guide