When we set out to build Candidly, we had a clear goal: to create an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that actually helped businesses hire—not just another clunky, outdated system that frustrates recruiters and turns candidates away.

Naively, we thought we could do it in six months for under £300,000.

Oh, how wrong we were.

The £4M Reality Check

Fast forward a few years, and Candidly has cost over £4 million to build—and we’re still evolving. Because here’s the truth: an ATS is never truly finished. Recruitment technology moves fast, candidate expectations shift, and if your system isn’t improving constantly, it’s becoming obsolete.

Yet, I still hear HR tech providers confidently say, “We can build an ATS in a few months.”

Sure, you can cobble together some job posting forms and a database in that time. But will you have a system that recruiters trust, candidates love, and hiring teams rely on to make smarter decisions? That’s an entirely different challenge.

What It Really Takes

A powerful ATS isn’t just a digital filing cabinet for CVs. It has to:

✅ Automate hiring workflows to eliminate repetitive admin
✅ Seamlessly integrate with job boards like Indeed and LinkedIn (which, by the way, can take months to do properly)
✅ Leverage AI for screening and candidate matching to improve decision-making
✅ Deliver an exceptional candidate experience—because if applicants drop off, hiring suffers
✅ Be customisable and scalable—hiring processes differ wildly between companies, and a one-size-fits-all system won’t cut it

Even something as seemingly simple as an Indeed integration isn’t just a plug-and-play job. A proper integration takes months because customers don’t just want to post jobs—they want tracking, automation, and deep data insights.

And that’s just one piece of the puzzle.

The Smarter Path

This is why we built Candidly White Label—to give HRIS and HRM providers a powerful, AI-driven ATS in just eight weeks, instead of spending years (and millions) trying to build one from scratch.

Rather than getting stuck in an endless development cycle, providers can go to market quickly with an ATS that’s already proven, scalable, and designed for real-world hiring challenges.

Final Thoughts

If you truly believe you can build a world-class ATS in six months, we won’t stop you. But when six months turns into three years—and the costs keep piling up—you’ll see why so many companies choose to partner instead of reinventing the wheel.

We’ve been through it. We’ve learned the hard way. And now, we’re helping others avoid the same mistakes.

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