Agencies do not stay on an ATS they dislike because it is good. They stay because a decade of candidates, clients and history lives inside it and moving that feels like a quarter of lost billing. Here is how the move actually runs.
Including the one most vendors dodge, because the honest answer is “we cannot know yet.”
It depends entirely on the source, and anyone who quotes you a number before seeing your data is guessing. A clean export from a modern ATS is a different job from eleven years of spreadsheets. We look at what you have first, then scope it with you — and the scope is agreed in writing before any work starts.
We do the extract, mapping and load. You do the part only you can do: deciding what is worth bringing, who owns which records, and which fields your team actually uses. That division is the whole reason migrations fail — firms get handed a CSV template and told to sort it out themselves.
They stay where they are. Leaving a decade of dead candidates behind is usually the right call, and we would rather argue for a smaller migration that lands than a complete one that takes a quarter. Nothing is deleted from your current system by us.
Yes, and most firms should. Keep the incumbent read-only while your recruiters work Poach, so nothing is riding on a single cutover weekend. We plan the overlap window with you rather than forcing a hard switch.
The work splits cleanly. We take everything that is mechanical; you keep the judgement calls only your desk can make.
Your data goes in and the counts that matter — people, companies, jobs, placements — get checked against the source before anyone works from it.
Your team works Poach while the incumbent stays available read-only. Nobody is stranded if something is missing on day three.
You cancel the incumbent when your recruiters have stopped opening it — not on a date we picked to make a case study.
If your desk depends on something Poach does not do, or your data is in a shape where the honest migration estimate is larger than the problem you are trying to solve, we would rather say so on the first call than six weeks into an implementation.
Tell us what your team relies on today. If it is a bad fit, that is a five-minute conversation and you have lost nothing.
