An ATS switch is usually planned as a software project: configure the new system, train the recruiters, cut over. The candidate history is the part nobody owns, and it is the part that cannot be recovered once the old contract ends. This checklist is the set of questions a health system should be able to answer before the cut-over date is fixed, grouped by when they come up. Print it, assign a name to each line, and the migration becomes a project with owners instead of an afterthought.
Before the contract decisions are final
| # | Question | Usual owner |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Does the current ATS contract allow a full data extract before termination, and until what date? | Procurement, legal |
| 2 | What is the records retention requirement for applications and candidate data, and does a load into the new ATS satisfy it, or must an archive be kept as well? | Compliance, HR |
| 3 | If an archive is kept, who can read it, for how long, and what does keeping it cost per year? | IT, finance |
| 4 | Is the new system's go-live date fixed, and does it leave time for a count, a pilot and a full run before the old system goes dark? | Program lead |
Question 1 is the one most often missed. Export tooling needs a running tenant; a system that extracts after the contract ends is negotiating from a weak position with a vendor it has just left.
Inventory: what is actually there
| # | Question | Usual owner |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | How many candidate records, applications and requisitions does the current system hold, and over what date range? | HRIS, ATS admin |
| 6 | How many attachments, and what is their total size? | ATS admin |
| 7 | Which stages, statuses and disposition reasons are in use, and how many of each? Are there retired values still attached to old records? | Talent acquisition |
| 8 | Which custom fields matter (license type, specialty, facility, internal flag, do-not-hire), and where does each live? | Talent acquisition, HRIS |
| 9 | Are there two systems to consolidate (after a merger, or a legacy instance kept for one division), and which one is the system of record when they disagree? | Program lead |
Counts come first because they are the only way to know later whether anything was lost. A migration that starts without a counted population cannot be reconciled; it can only be eyeballed.
Decisions that shape the data
| # | Question | Usual owner |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | Scope. Everything, or a window by date, facility, requisition status or candidate status? Written down as a rule the reconciliation can test. | Talent acquisition |
| 11 | Mapping. What does each old stage, status and disposition reason become in the new system? Mapped from codes, not display names; closed stays closed. | Talent acquisition, HRIS |
| 12 | Exclusions. Which fields do not move at all (EEO responses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, compensation history are the usual ones)? Agreed in writing before the first record moves. | Privacy, compliance |
| 13 | Identity. What makes two records the same person (email, phone, name plus date of birth, in what order of trust), and which record wins when they disagree? | Talent acquisition |
| 14 | Contact data. Are stale emails and phone numbers refreshed on the way across, and from what source? | Talent acquisition |
| 15 | Flags. Do internal, former-employee, withdrawn and do-not-hire markers carry over, and to which field in the new system? | Talent acquisition, HR |
The run
| # | Question | Usual owner |
|---|---|---|
| 16 | Has a count-only pass confirmed the population against the inventory before extraction starts? | Migration team |
| 17 | Has a pilot of a few thousand records gone end to end, through the mapping and into the new system, and been reviewed by a recruiter who knows the history? | Talent acquisition |
| 18 | Are requisitions loaded before the applications that reference them? | Migration team |
| 19 | Is access to the old system read-only for the duration, with nothing written to it and nothing deleted? | IT |
Reconciliation and cut-over
| # | Question | Usual owner |
|---|---|---|
| 20 | Does the reconciliation report account for every source record as loaded, skipped by rule or failed with a reason, and do the totals match the counted population? | Migration team, HRIS |
| 21 | Is the loss rate (skipped plus failed, excluding records skipped by an agreed rule) within the limit you set before the run? | Program lead |
| 22 | Has the report been accepted before the old system is switched off, not after? | Program lead |
| 23 | Is the old system's access removed when the project closes, and the extract disposed of or retained per policy? | IT, compliance |
| 24 | Is the migrated history searchable on day one, so recruiters can re-engage past applicants rather than starting over? | Talent acquisition |
How the list was built
These are the questions Betterleap settles with a health system before and during a migration, in the order they come up. The scale they have to hold up at is real: the largest history Betterleap has moved to date, for a leading US academic health system, was 1.17 million candidate records and 5.3 million applications covering 9.5 years, read in full from a retired Taleo archive and reconciled at a 0.001% loss rate, with a count-only pass and an 8,000-record pilot before the full run. Questions 16, 17, 20 and 22 are the ones that made that number possible.
If you would rather not run the list yourselves, Betterleap runs ATS migrations for health systems, through the old system's integration, a file export or a direct read of a retired archive, into the new system's supported load routes, with the reconciliation report built in, alongside its 25+ ATS integrations. The scoping form is on the ATS data migration page, and the Taleo-to-Workday specifics are in Migrating from Taleo to Workday.
Sources
- Betterleap, ATS data migration for health systems; migration figures from Betterleap's own run records, October 2026.
Frequently asked questions
What should be migrated when a hospital switches ATS?
Candidate profiles, applications with their stages, statuses and disposition reasons, requisitions, attachments, and the flags recruiters set (internal, former employee, withdrawn, do-not-hire). Configuration such as stage vocabularies does not migrate; it is what the mapping translates. Fields like EEO responses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and compensation history are usually excluded on purpose.
Who needs to sign off an ATS migration in a health system?
Talent acquisition owns scope, mapping and identity rules; HRIS or the ATS administrator owns the inventory and the load; privacy and compliance own the exclusion list and retention; procurement or legal confirms the extract rights in the outgoing contract; and a program lead accepts the reconciliation report before the old system is switched off.
What should an ATS migration reconciliation report show?
Every source record accounted for as loaded, skipped by an agreed rule, or failed with a reason; totals compared against the population counted before extraction; the loss rate against the limit set in advance; and the excluded fields listed. It should be in the health system's hands before the old system is switched off.
Can candidate history be migrated after the old ATS contract has ended?
Only if a copy of the data still exists. Export tooling needs a running tenant, so extract before termination. If the system has already been retired and a read-only archive of the database was kept, the history can be read directly from the archive without the vendor.