It’s no secret, or at least I hope it’s not, that we’re trying to fix the god awful state of hiring for smaller companies by leveraging AI and Web3. Now one of the things that I personally find jarring across the whole industry is lack of customer alignment.

Just like most recruiters will place a body to make a commission irrespective of if the candidate is a good fit for the role, ATS platforms use dark user experience patterns to place HR managers and companies into gilded cages. 

Simply put companies like Lever and Greenhouse mask a deeper problem: the gradual surrender of control over your recruitment process, which undoubtedly results in sub par processes, inefficient and expensive usage costs and sup par product. 

The Vendor Lock-in Trap

When you as a leader sign your company up for a level ro greenhouse ATS, you’re committing the organization’s entire recruitment ecosystem to a single vendor, creating lock in -  a situation where the cost of switching to a different solution becomes prohibitively expensive, both in terms of time and resources.

This means a couple of things. 

Your data is held hostage, yes you can export CSVs / JSON but limited in terms of historical data, workflows. 

You’re stuck using their tools. Want to use a smart resume filterer? Want to leverage AI interviewers to facilitate growth? No dice, you have to do it manually, or ask your busy dev team for an integration. 

Innovation and tools are limited. Because they have you locked in, they know they don’t need to provide the best tools, so your HR and recruitment teams lag those of your competitors, and you lose out on the best talent. 

Finally, high switching costs, moving from a lever or greenhouse to a system which is open and forward thinking will cost considerable resources, so companies get stuck in loops of inefficiency. 

You see, closed platforms, by their nature, stifle innovation. While they may release new features periodically, these updates are dictated by the vendor's roadmap rather than your specific needs. The lack of open APIs and limited integration capabilities means you're restricted to the ecosystem of tools they choose to support, not what you need to be successful. 

NoFUD is building an Open Platform. 

We are building on a fundamentally different philosophy: your recruitment data and processes should belong to you, not your vendor. By being open and giving you back your access to your data, we’re also forcing ourselves to innovate, to listen to our customers, and to provide you with the best customer service. 

You see, we must compete on merit alone. Without the ability to trap customers through vendor lock-in, we are forced to innovate continuously and provide superior customer service. This competition drives rapid improvement and ensures that our platform remains responsive to user needs. 

Send us your HR Managers, your Recruiters, your beaten and wounded. 

We believe that the future of recruitment technology is verifiable,  open, and interoperable, and while we have ideas, we want to hear first hand from the people who are in the trenches. HR Managers, Recruiters, Operations Professionals, we are building our platform for you and if you have any frustrations with your current ATS / HRIS software suite we want to know what they are.

After our platform launch later this month we will be launching two AI Agents for recruitment teams, each is set to provide you with direct value and save you hours of work monthly. So come talk to us and … 

Take Action

For smaller companies who are not yet on these closed systems, we recommend taking a few minutes to calculate the true cost of ownership, including potential migration costs, and opportunity cost of other faster moving platforms. Make sure to evaluate the platform's data export capabilities, review the API documentation and integration limitations, and of course consider the growing ecosystem of open alternatives. 

For those already using closed platforms, start planning your exit strategy, if you’re not doing it, document your current workflows, think about optimizing them, these platforms weren’t built with you in mind, make sure to export all available data regularly, access to historical data is limited and identify critical integrations

The recruitment technology landscape is evolving, and the future belongs to those who maintain control over their tools and data. Don't let brand name recognition and startup perks of closed platforms compromise your organization's long-term recruitment, operations and HR/People Ops department productivity.