Recruitment tracker in Excel vs an applicant tracking system: when to move hiring off spreadsheets and WhatsApp

How hiring usually runs in a growing Indian SMB

A store manager in Thrissur needs two sales associates. They post on a job portal, ask staff for referrals, and put a notice on the shop's Instagram. CVs arrive by email, as PDFs on WhatsApp, as photos of printed resumes, and as walk-ins with a phone number written on a slip. Someone in head office keeps a spreadsheet; the manager keeps their own list in their phone.

For a company hiring a handful of people a year, that is fine. For a clinic chain replacing nurses every month, a logistics firm hiring drivers each quarter, or a BPO running batch hiring, it falls apart in predictable ways.

Where the Excel tracker breaks

• Several copies of the truth. The head-office sheet, the manager's phone and the interviewer's notebook disagree, and nobody knows which candidate is at which stage.
• Candidates left in silence. People who were interviewed and rejected never hear back. In a small city, that reputation travels.
• Duplicates. The same person applies through a portal and a referral, and two managers call them on the same day.
• No idea what works. You cannot tell whether referrals, a portal or an agency produce better hires, because the source column is half empty.
• Lost feedback. Interview notes are on WhatsApp, so when the hiring manager changes, the reasoning goes with them.
• Retyping at joining. The selected candidate's details are typed again into the employee sheet, then again into payroll.
• Personal data everywhere. CVs and ID copies sit on personal phones and in forwarded chats you cannot recall.

That last point matters more now. Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, an employer is responsible for personal data it collects, including candidates' CVs, and is expected to keep it secure and not hold it longer than needed. That is hard to do when it lives in a dozen phones.

If you are staying on Excel for now: the columns you need

If you hire only occasionally, a well-kept sheet can do the job. Use one row per application, not per person, and keep these columns:

Use data validation for Stage and Source so people cannot invent new values, and keep CVs in one shared folder with restricted access rather than in chats.

What an applicant tracking system adds

An ATS is a recruitment tracker that enforces the discipline a spreadsheet only asks for. For an SMB the useful parts are:

• A careers page on your own site. Candidates apply directly and land in the right pipeline with their CV attached. HR-VEND gives you a careers page and the snippet to embed it, plus a job feed that aggregators can read.
• One pipeline per role. Every application, however it arrived, sits in one list with a stage. See Applications.
• Sources that are always filled in. Referrals, agencies, portals and internal applicants are tagged on arrival, so cost per hire and time to fill by channel are real numbers. The list of sources is yours to edit; see Sources.
• Interviews with written feedback. Scheduled with the panel, and the feedback moves the application forward. See Interviews.
• Follow-up calls logged. Who was chased, when, and what came of it, under Follow up calls.
• Closing out properly. Close a backlog of applications in one go with a job-related reason and a letter that actually goes.
• Offers that become employees. An offer starts from the application, and the candidate's details follow them into their employee record, leave balance and first payslip.
• Access by role. A person's role decides which hiring screens they can reach, and the server enforces it rather than just hiding menu items. See Roles.

What about WhatsApp?

Candidates in India answer WhatsApp faster than email, and you should keep using it to talk to them. The problem is using it as the record. Treat WhatsApp as the conversation and the ATS as the file: the CV, the stage, the feedback and the decision go into the system, and the chat is just how you reach people. If you send interview reminders on WhatsApp, record in the system that the reminder went.

Switching in a week

1. Day 1: set your stages and sources. Keep the stages short. HR-VEND starts with Request, Short listed, Interview, Selected, On boarding and Employee, and you can edit the list under Status.
2. Day 2: create your open jobs. One per role and location. See Jobs.
3. Day 3: import live candidates only. Bring across people still in process. Archive the rest of the sheet instead of migrating years of old rows.
4. Day 4: put the careers page live and point portal listings and your Instagram bio to it.
5. Day 5: invite hiring managers with their own logins, and agree the rule that a candidate not in the system does not exist.
6. Day 6 and 7: close the old sheet to edits, and tell any rejected candidates still waiting.

Once hiring runs through one system, onboarding becomes the next easy win: see our onboarding checklist for India.

So, Excel or ATS?

Stay on a spreadsheet if you hire a few people a year, in one place, with one person screening. Move to an ATS when you have several roles open at once, more than one location or interviewer, or when you catch yourself asking "did anyone call this person back?" For more on choosing software overall, read HR software for a small business in India.

Frequently asked questions

This article is general information for Indian employers, not legal or tax advice. Labour and tax rules differ by State and change over time, so confirm anything you act on with your CA or labour law consultant.