ATS platforms are bought to store applications, while the value sits somewhere else

Most decisions to buy an ATS in Vietnam are made from a feature list, with storage and organisation of applications at the centre. VCO Group proposes a different set of criteria, built around the ability to measure conversion at each step of the process, because that is what determines whether a company can actually improve its recruitment outcomes.

Why choosing from a feature list tends to produce the wrong decision

The process of buying a candidate management system usually starts by drawing up a list of requirements. That list is built from the difficulties the recruiting team currently faces: applications scattered across inboxes, no visibility of who is at which round, data entered several times over, and no way to find a previous candidate again.

All of these are genuine difficulties, and every system on the market solves them. The problem is that when the requirement list consists only of those difficulties, every option satisfies it, and the final decision comes down to price and to how the product demonstration felt.

What gets missed is the more important question: once the system is in place, what will the company know that it did not know before. If the answer is only that it will know where each application sits, then the system is an electronic filing cabinet. It saves time on manual work, but it does not improve the quality of hiring.

What changes recruitment outcomes is knowing which step in the process is losing candidates, and which group of candidates is being lost. That is a measurement capability, not a storage capability.

Seven criteria worth adding to the vendor evaluation sheet

The seven criteria below focus on measurement capability and compliance, the two groups most often left out of a standard evaluation sheet.

Seven questions to put to a vendor before deciding

The first four criteria determine the capacity to improve recruitment outcomes. The last three determine the level of risk the company is accepting. All seven should be asked before signing, because adding them after deployment is usually far more expensive.

Where the Vietnamese market currently stands

The recruitment management software market in Vietnam has developed considerably over the past few years, with several different product categories coexisting. There are products specialising in managing the full recruitment lifecycle, there are modules sitting inside a larger HR management system, and there are products tied to a job advertising platform.

These three categories serve three different needs and are strong in three different places. Products tied to an advertising platform are strong at reaching candidate sources. Modules inside an HR management system are strong at connecting through to employee data after hiring. Specialist products are usually strong at running multi-round processes.

For a Young Talent Program or Management Trainee scheme, the distinctive needs lie in running a multi-round process with assessments interleaved between rounds, in recording component-level scores, and in handling several thousand candidates within a short window. This is a different requirement set from routine hiring for individual positions.

A practical recommendation when evaluating: ask the vendor to demonstrate on your own programme scenario, with the real number of rounds and the real assessment types, rather than watching the standard demonstration. Most of the gap between expectation and reality surfaces immediately in a demonstration run on your own scenario.

One trend to factor in when choosing a system for the next three years

A decision to buy a candidate management system usually has a life of three to five years, so it needs to account for how recruitment work is likely to change over that period.

The 2026 corporate recruiters survey conducted by GMAC records that one third of global recruiters report having replaced at least part of entry-level work with artificial intelligence. For programmes hiring young candidates, this does not mean hiring demand is falling. It means the content of the work a new joiner takes on is changing, and with it the competency requirements that need to be assessed.

The implication for system selection: the ability to change the competency set being assessed and to change the weightings without vendor intervention is a criterion worth including. A system that only allows configuration changes through a support request will become a bottleneck when the company wants to adjust mid-season.

A second criterion worth factoring in is the ability to connect recruitment data with employee performance data once a candidate has joined. This is the precondition for a company to be able, after two seasons, to answer the most important question for itself: do the people who pass the selection process actually perform better.

Three things to do

1. Add four measurement criteria to the vendor evaluation sheet: step-by-step conversion measurement, raw data export with timestamps, component-level scoring records, and one login for the whole process.
2. Add three compliance criteria: purpose-based consent management, automatic deletion rules by retention period, and a log demonstrating that deletion took place.
3. Ask the vendor to demonstrate on your own programme scenario, with the real number of rounds and the real assessment types, rather than watching the standard demonstration.

Frequently asked questions

What criteria should be used to choose an ATS?

Beyond the storage and organisation features that every system offers, evaluate against four measurement criteria, namely step-by-step conversion measurement, raw data export, component-level scoring records and one login for the whole process, plus three compliance criteria, namely purpose-based consent management, automatic deletion by retention period and an audit log.

Why record component-level scores rather than a total score?

Because a total score cannot be analysed. Only by storing the score for each test section and each competency can a company review weightings and thresholds after each season, and see which group of candidates the current scoring rules are screening out.

What does a recruitment management system need to provide on personal data protection?

It needs to store each layer of consent separately by purpose, with the time and content recorded, process data according to those layers, apply automatic deletion rules by retention period, and hold a log demonstrating that deletion took place. At a scale of several thousand applications, handling these requirements manually is not feasible.

About VCO Group

VCO Group operates the assessment infrastructure behind Young Talent Programmes and Management Trainee schemes in Vietnam, covering application intake, aptitude testing, automated interviewing and Assessment Centres. VCO Group serves young talent and candidates with under three years of experience, working with large enterprises and multinationals in Vietnam. Its assessment and candidate management platform is called Testalents. Head office in Ho Chi Minh City.

If you would like to benchmark your own selection data against the market, or discuss the Young Talent Program Insight Report, contact Mr. Dung on 0334 889 068 or visit vcogroup.com.vn.