The Makings of a Great Business Plan for a New ATS

So, how do you actually build a business case that gets to yes?

Recently, we sat down with Kate Michael from Holganix, and she imparted some excellent wisdom on how she created a successful business case for a new ATS (ours, actually!).

When she built her business case, she focused on three types of leverage that better hiring software would create: 

• First, her time would shift from scheduling and chasing feedback to actually connecting with great candidates — reducing reliance on expensive external recruiters. 
• Second, the company could control its own employer story instead of outsourcing it to agencies that don’t live the culture daily. 
• Third, revenue teams could return to revenue-generating work. Sales leaders would focus on customers, not candidate coordination. 

“We can make more money, we can change circumstances, but we can’t make more time. We need to be really effective in the time we have.” – Kate Michael, Holganix

Together, these three things aren’t just time savings; they are bottom-line business impact. 

How can you do something similar?

Here’s what we see working today. 

Start With What’s Actually Breaking (Not What You Want)

Most budget requests go wrong because they lead with the solution instead of the problem. 

You walk into your CFO’s office talking about ATS features, integration capabilities, and implementation timelines before anyone has agreed there’s actually a problem worth solving.

Reverse that order. 

Before you pitch solutions, get crystal clear on the pain points leadership already feels. Not the ones that make your day harder (though those matter too), but the ones that are actively costing the business money, momentum, or competitive edge.

Find The (Many) Hiring Fissures That Are Hurting the Business

Ask yourself, where are our hiring bottlenecks creating real business pain? 

And we’re not talking about HR department inconveniences here. We’re talking about the kind of problems that show up in revenue reports, customer satisfaction scores, and executive team meetings.

Look for the red flags your leadership is already seeing, even if they haven’t connected them to hiring yet:

• Hiring managers are constantly pulled away from their core work to coordinate interviews. Your top sales director spent four hours last week playing email tag to schedule a single candidate interview. That’s four hours she wasn’t spending with prospects or closing deals. Multiply that across every open role and every hiring manager, and you’ve got a serious hiring collaboration problem.
• Your best candidates are accepting other offers while your team is still deliberating. You found the perfect fit. Everyone loved her. But it took twelve days to collect feedback and align on next steps, and by then? She’d already said yes to a competitor who moved faster. Map your time-to-offer and the number of great candidates you lost because of it.
• Key roles are staying open for months, leaving departments chronically understaffed. That open customer success position has been on your board for sixteen weeks. In the meantime, your existing CS team is drowning, response times are slipping, and customer satisfaction scores are trending down. 
• Revenue-generating employees are spending hours on hiring logistics instead of customers. Your operations director spent his Tuesday morning tracking down interview feedback from six different people via text, Slack, and email. He pieced together conflicting opinions, tried to remember who said what, and still couldn’t get a clear read on whether the team was aligned. That’s not operations work. That’s administrative chaos masquerading as hiring.

When you map these bottlenecks, you’re building the foundation of your business case. But identifying problems isn’t enough.

Identify Your Most Compelling Problem

Now here’s the strategic part: you probably have a list of ten things that are broken. Resist the urge to throw all of them at leadership. 

Instead, identify your most compelling problem — the one with the clearest, most direct line to something executives care deeply about.

Find the issue that connects most directly to revenue, growth, or competitive positioning.

• Maybe it’s that your hiring managers are making gut decisions without standardized evaluation criteria, leading to costly bad hires that don’t make it past 90 days — and every failed hire sets you back three months and costs you 1.5x that salary to replace them.
• Maybe it’s that your executive team has zero visibility into the hiring pipeline or progress, forcing them to schedule weekly check-in meetings just to understand where things stand—meetings that pull your CEO, COO, and department heads away from strategic work.
• Maybe it’s that your inability to move quickly on talent is directly impacting your ability to take on new client work or enter new markets—you’ve had to turn down opportunities or delay launches simply because you don’t have the team capacity, and your hiring process can’t scale fast enough to support growth.

Once you’ve identified that problem — the one that makes leadership lean forward in their chairs—that’s your lead. Build your pitch around it. Let everything else be supporting evidence, not the main argument.

When you do this well, budget approval stops being about whether the company can afford a new ATS. It becomes about whether the company can afford not to fix what’s broken.

Connect the Dots to Business Impact

Don’t just identify problems — show how they ripple through the organization. Every hiring bottleneck has a cascade effect, and your job is to make that cascade visible to decision-makers.

Let’s take one common example: slow feedback collection.

On the surface, it seems like a minor annoyance. So what if it takes a few extra days to hear back from everyone? But look deeper. 

Slow feedback collection means your sales team loses two to three hours per week chasing down interview notes from colleagues who are juggling five other priorities. That’s time they’re not spending with customers or working deals. Multiply those hours across a quarter, and you’re looking at significant lost productivity.

This is the reframe that matters: hiring problems aren’t just HR problems. They’re business problems. When you can show leadership how a clunky hiring process is directly impacting revenue, customer experience, and competitive positioning, you’re no longer asking for budget to make your life easier. You’re offering to solve problems they’re already losing sleep over.

Kate said this perfectly when talking to leadership about giving time back to their sales team: “The sales team can focus on meeting with growers and telling the story and doing soil testing and mapping and all of the things that are important to commercialization and revenue versus trying to figure out where we’re at with a candidate.”

Map Your Solution to Your Leadership’s Growth Goals

If you want to go for the “K.O.,” you not only need to show how your current hiring process is causing problems today but also how it’s actively blocking the future goals your leadership has already committed to building.

Is your company planning to scale from 50 to 100 employees this year? Then your CEO has already said yes to doubling headcount. If your current process can’t support that goal, that already puts you behind the sticks. And if you’re a public company that could negatively impact shareholder value.

Are you expanding into new markets that require rapid team building? Then hiring velocity needs to be top of mind. Every week you lose to coordination chaos is a week your competitors are establishing themselves in markets you’re trying to enter.

Did your executive team just announce aggressive growth targets at the last all-hands? Then they’ve already made the business case for you.

Your job is simply to connect the dots: “You’ve committed to 40% revenue growth this year. That requires adding 25 people across sales, customer success, and operations. Our current hiring process takes an average of 12 weeks per role. We can’t hit your growth targets without upgrading the infrastructure that gets people in the door.”

Frame the ATS as foundational infrastructure that enables the growth leadership has already green-lit. When you position it this way, you’re not asking for something new—you’re asking for the tools to deliver on commitments that have already been made.

Show The Short and Long-Term Impact of Making The Switch

Address the ROI question before leadership asks it. The switch to better hiring software delivers wins fast—and those wins compound over time.

Start with the immediate impact (30-90 days post-implementation). Centralized feedback replaces scattered email chains. Interview scheduling stops eating hours of your week. Hiring managers can finally see candidate status without hunting you down. Decision-making accelerates because everyone has the information they need in one place.

Then, move onto your long-term projections (6-12 months): You’ll move from 12 days between final interview and offer to 2 days. Offer acceptance rates climb as candidates experience a professional, responsive process. Quality of hire improves when decisions are based on standardized feedback instead of whoever spoke loudest in the hallway. Your team syncs transform from endless deliberations into rapid decisions.

It’s also important to make measuring success and KPIs simple. Choose software with built-in reporting so tracking success doesn’t become another manual task. 

And commit to quarterly check-ins with leadership showing clear metrics: time-to-hire trends, offer acceptance rates, hiring manager satisfaction scores. 

When you build measurement into your plan from the start, proving ROI becomes straightforward instead of stressful.

Choose The Right Partner

Implementation support matters more than feature lists. The difference between a smooth transition and a chaotic one usually comes down to who’s guiding you through it.

Look for vendors who offer dedicated implementation specialists — not just generic customer support tickets. You want someone who’ll proactively guide you through setup, suggest workflows based on what’s worked for similar organizations, and check in regularly as you get up and running.

Look for partners who treat onboarding as a collaborative process, not a checkbox activity. Templates, best practices, and proactive guidance transform implementation from overwhelming to manageable. When your vendor feels like an extension of your team rather than a distant software company, everything gets easier.

Make It an Easy “Yes”

Getting budget for a new ATS isn’t about having the perfect pitch — it’s about making the business case obvious. When you show how hiring inefficiencies are costing the business today and blocking the growth leadership has already committed to, the investment becomes clear.

Ready to see how Spark Hire’s complete hiring platform can streamline your process and make your case even easier? Schedule a demo to explore what’s possible.