Why Your ATS Alone Can’t Scale Volume Hiring - and Why You Need AI

When ATS technology came on the recruitment market, the promise was clear: automation will streamline your recruitment workflows, candidate tracking will eliminate any potential chaos or missed opportunities, and integrated systems will create hiring efficiency across the board.

But here's what teams began to discover when using an ATS to manage a volume hiring process: even with the most modern ATS features and add-ons, your team still hits a wall when hiring in large volumes.

The candidates keep coming, but your recruiters are drowning in manual work that no amount of workflow optimization can solve. It’s a trap that most high-volume hiring teams will be all too familiar with.

So while it’s true that we owe so much to ATS technology as an industry, we need to accept that an ATS is no longer enough to fully support a high-volume hiring strategy in the current climate.

Let’s take a look at why your ATS can’t scale volume hiring on it’s own - and how AI is transforming how organizations manage rapid growth.

What your ATS does well, and where it falls short

First, let's be clear about what your ATS already excels at:

• Workflow automation works its magic, keeping your hiring process moving, ensuring there are no bottlenecks that lose you top talent.
• Candidate tracking ensures you always know where your candidates are in the hiring process, where they came from and where in your pipeline they should be going next. With candidate tracking, you never have to worry about a qualified candidates falling through the cracks, even when you’re dealing with hundreds of applicants at a time.
• Compliance features create audit trails, ensures all potential candidates have the right documentation and keeps your candidate database GDPR-friendly.
• Serves as an integration hub that connects all your hiring tools into one cohesive system.

But even the best ATS platforms have their limits. For example, an ATS doesn't actually "know" your candidates beyond the data points manually entered into fields. It also can’t provide any real context on candidate motivations, personality nuances, or soft skills that determine cultural fit.

Your ATS system still relies entirely on recruiters to collect and input critical information from screening calls, emails, and interviews. And most importantly, it lacks the ability to provide real-time, human-like candidate engagement that builds relationships and drives conversion.

In regular recruitment, this isn’t always a bottleneck. Recruiters have more flexibility when it comes to filling positions, and can adjust their ways of working on the go to keep the time to hire and cost per hire low.

In high-volume hiring, though, you can’t work with tools that need that much input from recruiters. Because you’re processing hundreds of job applicants for hundreds of vacancies, and onboarding multiple new hires every day, any change in your hiring needs can mean tons of wasted time and effort.

The misfire of "scalable" hiring tech

When the recruitment technology market understood that volume hiring is different, it responded to these ATS limitations with a wave of new automation tools.

These new tech promised scalable hiring: asynchronous assessments, one-way video interviews, gamified testing, and chatbots, just to name a few.

In theory, these tools made sense — automate the human-intensive parts of screening and let technology handle the volume.

But unfortunately, the reality has been disappointing.

In practice, these new automation tools have been terrible for candidate experience, often negatively impacting the employer brand of those organizations that threw themselves into using them.

With so much asynchronous activity, the result is naturally high candidate drop-offs. Even candidates who do complete automated assessments often disengage before reaching human contact.

Not only did these tools make the recruitment process way too impersonal, but they still required a fair amount of input from recruiters - input that they didn’t have the capacity to give.

And the result? Large numbers of job seekers left hanging, with no feedback or engagement during the interview process.

The unfortunate reality is, these tools don't meaningfully reduce workload – they just shift work downstream to later stages or create more follow-up tasks that hiring teams can’t keep up with.

This happens because the technology can optimize specific tasks, but it can’t solve the two things that matter most at scale: genuine candidate engagement and intelligent decision-making.

And this is why you need AI.

AI shifts the game: Human-like intelligence at scale

The introduction of AI-powered platforms like Carv have fundamentally changed the high-volume recruiting game.

Unlike traditional automation or ATS workflows, AI software can support recruiters with a series of tasks previously considered inherently human.

Engage candidates directly after application, through their own preferred channels

AI assistants can engage job seekers in a human-like way over SMS, WhatsApp, social media channels like LinkedIn — or even through voice calls.

Instead of forcing candidates through rigid application process, AI can run dynamic, two-way pre-screening conversations that feel natural to job seekers.

An off-shot of this is that the timeframe of when a candidate shows an interest in your job posting to them.

Detect the nuanced information that determines hiring success

Things like candidate motivations, preferences, availability, and cultural indicators. Any intelligence the AI gathers from candidate interactions is fed back into your ATS, creating rich candidate profiles that help recruiters make better hiring decisions.

Source automatically from existing talent pools

Carv's AI checks your vacancy criteria and job description to automatically surface the right candidates who fit your roles, engaging with them in a human-like way without any recruiter input.

Make data-driven hiring decisions in seconds

AI supports you to make smarter decisions faster: when a candidate is deemed qualified, the AI can automatically manage interview scheduling with hiring managers by syncing with their calendars.

This massively improves your time-to-fill metric while keeping human touchpoints to a minimum.

The result is recruiter-quality engagement delivered at machine-like scale, without the negative candidate experience and drop-off rates that come with traditional automation.

Your candidates get the attention they deserve and your recruiters get pre-qualified, engaged candidates ready to move to the next stage and engage directly with your recruitment team.

Real scalability = ATS + AI working together

So again, the path forward isn't about replacing your ATS – it's about augmenting it. These systems aren't in competition, but complementary.

That’s why AI recruitment platforms like Carv are built to integrate seamlessly with virtually any major applicant tracking systems on the market.

While your ATS remains the system of record; the operational backbone that tracks compliance, manages workflows, and integrates your hiring stack, AI becomes the system of action.

It provides that crucial layer of intelligence that drives candidate engagement, captures decision-making insights, and accelerates your recruitment process without the need for any human input.

Together, they create what individual tools cannot: truly scalable hiring that maintains quality relationships with candidates while reducing manual work for your team.

Think of it as adding a brain to your hiring infrastructure. The infrastructure stays the same, but now it can think, engage, and learn in ways that transform how efficiently you can operate at volume.

Don’t rip and replace, augment to scale

If your team is trying to scale high-volume hiring by tweaking ATS settings, adding more automation tools, or hoping that workflow optimization will solve capacity constraints, you're capping your own potential.

By implementing AI into your ATS, your team can scale with quality, maintaining candidate relationships and making data-backed hiring decisions while operating at the speed and volume your business demands.

Request a free Carv demo to get a tailored insight into what integrating an AI workmate into your ATS will look like.

See first hand how it can transform your high-volume recruitment process, improving your quality of hire while supporting rapid company growth — without adding any extra headcount.