An Airtable ATS

First published February 2024. Restored in full in October 2026.

Two years ago, I ditched off-the-shelf recruitment CRM/ATS software and decided to create my own on Airtable.

Airtable liked the story so much that they featured our project in their blog.

I think Airtable is an ideal operating system for a lean recruitment business. However, it wouldn’t scale up for a team of hundreds of consultants.

For brevity, I’m going to refer to CRM/ATS built for recruitment agencies as R/ATS for the rest of the article. This article focuses on the ATS elements only. I’ll write another about its use as a CRM for sales soon.

What is Airtable?

I often describe Airtable as an online spreadsheet on steroids. They describe themselves as a cloud-based platform for creating and sharing relational databases. Basically, you can build business apps for whatever you need.

At their core, R/ATS are simply databases, with custom overlays and functionality built for recruitment. Airtable allows you to build your own R/ATS.

Why change?

After trying four different R/ATS over five years, I was frustrated at a few things:

• Cost: an average of £75-100 per head for a basic account, often with a 24-month contract.
• Additional costs: set-up costs, and costs to export your own data.
• Speed: servers are frequently located in different parts of the world, so you get a noticeable lag on a cloud-based system. On my last R/ATS, it could take 20-30 seconds to switch screens at times of peak demand.
• Flexibility: as a small business, you get what you’re given. They’ll tell you that you can change some things, but it’s always less than you think. They’re trying to build a product to satisfy thousands of customers, all with different needs, so it will be cookie-cutter and never built around what you need.
• Lack of capability: the R/ATS I used didn’t let you mail shot with any depth or auto-follow up. This is fundamental to some processes. I was importing and exporting data, and copy-pasting to work around the gaps. It highlights a wider point, though. You need to build what works for your business and processes.
• Customer service: as a small business, you’re at the back of the line for service SLAs. You typically get shunted to the knowledge base and left to fend for yourself.
• Product bloat: the final straw for me was the launch of an R/ATS app for the Apple Watch. Who in their right mind wants to access their R/ATS like this? No one. I wanted them to invest in areas that mattered, like improving email reply rates, not pointless widgets.
• Lack of integrations: when I did want to add functionality, I couldn’t, as they didn’t have an open API. Even if they did, I’d need to hire developers to build something, another expense, rather than doing it myself.

Flexibility

With Airtable, you build what you need.

You set the full structure of your database and tables. They can be completely customised to your market and processes.

You set out your tables to house your data. In an ATS, we have a candidate table, a job table and a pipeline. You can also have reference tables for all of your tagging, depending on the size of the tag list.

You can use Airtable within the core tables, or you can build custom interfaces to interact with the data. You can extend the same idea to create interfaces for clients in minutes, using filtered views.

All of this data can be used in integrations with other software. It can be published elsewhere if you want.

You don’t have to fit in with the prescribed hierarchy or tagging of an R/ATS. You create your own. This does need some thought and planning at the beginning, but the speed at which you can iterate and change is phenomenal. That’s because you have control.

Control

I think there was a time when most recruitment businesses saw their database as their prime asset. They’d cite their database size as an achievement.

I believe this has waned, with audience and attention becoming more important as social media has grown, particularly LinkedIn.

Even so, your database is still a key asset in a recruitment business.

What I felt and found with R/ATS is that my business data wasn’t my own.

You start losing control of it when you shoehorn your datasets into their tagging structure. Then, once you’re locked in, you have to pay to access your own data.

This is crazy.

With Airtable, you can import or export your data at will, at zero cost. You have full control over fields and the relationships between them, so by migrating to Airtable you end up with a foundation for making your data more useful.

Pricing

Airtable pricing is $24/month on a month-to-month basis. It’s $20/month billed annually.

This gives you 50,000 records per base and 25,000 automation runs, which should be plenty.

Over a 24-month contract, you’re saving around 75% per user, or $1,500 in total, which is not to be sniffed at.

2026 note: these were Airtable’s prices and limits in early 2024. Check their current pricing page before you plan around them.

There is also no cost to import or export.

There are zero set-up costs if you do it yourself. You can shortcut this by using a template or one of the many Airtable experts.

One thing to consider is that if you integrate with other tools, the cost of your tech stack will go up. Currently I only integrate with Woodpecker, which starts at $29/month. In the past, I’ve used Parseur for auto-parsing data into the database at scale. I used it for one month at $99/month. You can turn most tools on and off as you need them.

Speed

I mentioned that I had suffered with lag moving between screens on cloud-based R/ATS. It was often worse at certain times of day.

I’ve never had any lag with Airtable so far. Maybe when I’m making thousands of edits at a time, but that’s rare.

It’s easy to underestimate how much of a productivity drain this is. Think how much screen switching a consultant does in a day, moving between client and candidate records. Those 10-20 second delays add up and kill flow.

Expandability

Migrating to Airtable was just the beginning. I now use it across a wide range of projects.

The record limits on the Team plan are enough for a lean recruitment business (50,000 records, 25,000 automations). Even if you start to hit them, it forces you to tidy your data, which you should be doing anyway.

Airtable really comes into its own when we start to look at integrations.

Integrations

Airtable plugs into almost any tool going, as it has an open API.

Not only that, but you can connect it yourself using visual builders, because tools like Make or Zapier integrate well with Airtable. People refer to tools like this as no-code.

Some R/ATS do integrate with Zapier or Make, but get under the hood (like I have) and the functionality is very limited. Check the triggers and actions rather than take the integration claim at face value.

This means you’re not wedded to most of the tools the recruitment industry uses. You don’t have to use the prescribed tools in your R/ATS ecosystem, and you’re not stuck with their functionality or their pricing. They’re often not the best in class for the job at hand. Some are even inspired by better tools you can now buy on the open market.

Let’s look at email marketing as an example.

My R/ATS had a 100-email cap to candidates and didn’t allow any auto-follow up. You also had to use your core domain. The only other option was sending a contact to Mailchimp using Zapier.

This just doesn’t cut it for what a modern, lean recruitment business needs. Deliverability, open rates and reply rates are fundamental to your success.

You can email directly from Airtable, but it’s best to integrate with a tool that specialises in getting email replies. I’ve set up an integration that syncs with Woodpecker. Woodpecker specialises in cold email. We can use multiple domains to protect our sender reputation, our emails get delivered, there are no sending caps and we can send follow-ups.

These are our typical email open and response rates:

This wouldn’t be possible on a standard R/ATS.

I’m sure some R/ATS on the market now offer email follow-up and have no send limits. My point is more that you have the ability and control to integrate with whatever tool you need. And none of the R/ATS will deliver functionality as good as a tool dedicated to the job.

Once your core data lives in Airtable, you can plug in whatever the job needs.

Automation

Airtable has a native automation builder.

You can use it to move records and automate data entry. You can trigger emails based on pipeline movements. Basically, any systematic process can be automated.

Interestingly, you can also build automations for individual clients. So, you could trigger notifications based on pipeline movements: auto-sending profiles, interview arrangements and offers.

Each one is set up for that client, and you turn things on and off when you need them.

When you consider how you can string together automations within Airtable and tools outside of it, you start to realise how much of a recruitment business you can automate.

Client management

I’ve explored this in some depth, but I know there is further I can go.

Airtable can be used to create custom interfaces. I’ve used these when I’ve hired VAs for data research to tidy up datasets. I’ve also used them to create interfaces for clients.

This works particularly well with RPO clients. You bring a custom software build with you, at no cost to them and built entirely around them.

Now, Airtable doesn’t look the prettiest, but it is functional.

Taking this a step further, you can build custom apps with third-party tools like Softr or Glide. Airtable syncs well with both.

I’ve built out a full app on Softr for an RPO solution, and it looks great:

We also use Glide for our candidate and client apps for Boltjobs.com:

Both of these are powered by Airtable.

Multi-users

I’ve talked plenty about using Airtable in a lean recruitment business. But with Airtable you can also build custom interfaces for consultants and get very granular on permissions.

As an admin, you can control access by inviting users at different permission levels: Owner, Creator, Editor, Commenter and Read-only.

The Owner level is reserved for admin. Creator allows creation but not deletion, Editors can create and edit, Commenters can only comment, and Read-only is strictly for viewing.

Read-only and Commenter are great for client apps. Creator is excellent for people sourcing and doing data entry. Consultants are typically at Editor level.

You can manage security by auditing permissions regularly, so only the access that’s needed is granted. You can enforce record-level permissions for detailed control. You can also prevent data theft by limiting export, print and copy in shared view links.

Limitations

Using Airtable as an ATS is ideal for lean, small or startup recruitment agencies. It’s also ace for talent acquisition teams.

I think you would run into limitations with lots of consultants working on a 360 basis. However, if you build a task-based recruitment agency, I think Airtable is ideally suited.

Record limits may come into play if your total base goes over 50,000 records. In an ATS this is cumulative across candidates, jobs and applications. Moving to an enterprise plan beyond this is pricier.

Finally, keep an eye on creeping costs if you integrate with plenty of other tools. I’ve been known to buy tools and then not use them, so you must be ruthless.

Using Airtable day to day

Airtable supports my whole business. I’ve been able to build it into exactly what I need to be as productive as possible.

The beauty is that it’s constantly evolving, and I’ve developed the skills to change it myself. I could leave it running forever in its current form, but I enjoy iterating.

Migration

First, I created a website CMS and then replaced our CRM elements. This largely powered our marketing and sales activity.

It was more daunting to shift all of our candidate data and processes across, particularly when I couldn’t find any templates out there. What did exist catered for talent acquisition, not recruitment agencies.

Spoiler alert: I’ve built a template for you with a complete guide on how to implement it. Check it out here.

It’s so easy to import your data and organise it on Airtable. It was more of a struggle, and a cost, to get my data out of Vincere. Did I mention they charged me for an export of my data? Lol.

What next?

I love sharing best practice, so if you’re a recruitment business operating on Airtable, reach out.

I’ve since written about where AI fits on top of a recruitment database like this in Claude for recruitment firms.

If you’d rather have your candidate, job and pipeline tables built around how your desk actually works, with email follow-up wired in, book a 30-minute call.