Small and medium-sized businesses face an uphill battle when competing for top talent. Lean HR teams often juggle disconnected tools for job postings, candidate screening, and employee records. Sifting through resumes manually and managing disjointed spreadsheets wastes valuable time and slows down hiring decisions. When applicant tracking remains separate from core HR and payroll systems, new hires face clunky onboarding handoffs, and growing organizations struggle to scale efficiently.
Folks solves this operational friction by delivering intuitive, all-in-one HR software designed specifically for the daily realities of growing companies. Led by CEO Jimmy Plante, the company also offers an applicant tracking system that automates job distribution across thousands of platforms and accelerates candidate evaluation. In this executive Q&A, Jimmy Plante discusses how Folks ATS fits into the platform, the common recruitment hurdles SMBs face, and how unified workforce technology simplifies hiring from initial outreach to payroll.
Q: Small and mid-sized businesses often struggle to compete with enterprise recruitment budgets. What specific hiring bottlenecks faced by growing companies led you to build out and redesign Folks ATS?
Jimmy Plante: Growing companies don’t have a recruiting team the way an enterprise does. Usually it’s one HR person, or the owner, doing it off the side of their desk. So we brought that capability in-house and rebuilt it as Folks ATS, so it’s fully connected to the rest of Folks instead of sitting off on its own. To the person using it, it feels like one experience, and the data flows straight through. The goal was never to own “an ATS” as a line item. It was to make sure a company’s recruiting data doesn’t live on an island, cut off from the employee record it eventually becomes.
Q: Bringing a dedicated applicant tracking system into Folks expands your product capabilities. How does integrating an ATS directly into your core platform improve the transition from candidate to new hire?
Jimmy Plante: The handoff from “candidate” to “employee” is usually where things fall apart. Someone gets hired, and then an HR person has to manually retype everything, their contact info, their start date, sometimes their whole resume, into a completely separate HR system. That’s where mistakes creep in, and it’s where new hires get a clunky first impression before they’ve even started. Folks ATS and our HR and payroll tools are built to feel like one experience, so a candidate’s file converts into an employee file in a few clicks instead of a fresh data entry project. Their documents, their offer letter, their information, it’s all already there. It sounds like a small thing, but for a lean team, it’s the difference between onboarding taking an afternoon versus a week.
Q: Folks ATS allows companies to post across more than 2,000 job boards and tap into automated candidate matching. How do these tools help lean HR departments identify qualified applicants without added overhead?
Jimmy Plante: Most small HR teams don’t have the bandwidth to manually post a job to ten different boards and then babysit all ten inboxes. So the first win is just time: you post once, and it goes out everywhere it needs to be. The second win is signal. When you’re getting a flood of applications, especially for a role that attracts a lot of generic resumes, it’s easy to miss a strong candidate because nobody has time to read everything closely. The matching tools help surface the applicants who are actually a fit, so a one-person HR team can spend their limited hours talking to real candidates instead of sorting through a pile.
Q: Transferring applicant records into active employee files frequently leads to manual data entry errors. How does combining applicant tracking with your existing HR database and payroll simplify administrative workloads?
Jimmy Plante: This is one I feel strongly about, because manual data entry is where a lot of HR headaches start. Someone’s name gets spelled differently in the ATS than in payroll, a start date doesn’t match, and three months later someone’s untangling why a paycheck was wrong. When recruiting, HR, and payroll are three separate systems, you’re really asking people to be human APIs, copying information from one tool to another by hand. We built Folks so that doesn’t have to happen. Once someone’s hired, their information carries forward instead of being re-keyed, straight into payroll setup too. For a growing company, that’s hours given back every month, and fewer painful conversations about a paycheck that didn’t look right.
Q: The platform provides over 20 real-time recruitment metrics. Which key performance indicators should growing businesses focus on to accurately assess their hiring efficiency?
Jimmy Plante: If I had to point a growing business to three or four numbers, I’d say: time to hire, because it tells you where candidates are getting stuck in your process, not just how fast you’re moving overall. Source of hire, so you know which channels are actually producing candidates who get hired, not just applications. Drop-off rate by stage, because strong candidates disappearing between application and interview is usually a process problem you can fix once you can see it. And offer acceptance rate, which is an honest signal of whether your offer and your hiring experience are competitive. The value of having this in real time, instead of pulling it together manually once a quarter, is that a lean team can adjust their process while a role is still open, not after it’s already gone sideways.
Q: As workplace expectations shift and recruitment technology advances, what is your long-term roadmap for expanding the Folks software ecosystem?
Jimmy Plante: The direction we’re headed is more connection, not more modules. We’d rather deepen what Folks already does than bolt on disconnected features. That means building out the intelligence layer further, better candidate matching, smarter alerts so HR teams know what needs their attention instead of having to go looking for it, and more automation around the repetitive parts of HR: scheduling, document collection, compliance reminders. We also want to keep closing the gaps between recruiting, HR, and payroll, because that’s really the core of what Folks is for. As workplace expectations keep shifting, growing companies need tools that keep up without needing a bigger team to run them.
The discussion with Jimmy Plante demonstrates that effective talent acquisition does not require bloated budgets or complex enterprise software. By folding an applicant tracking system directly into an intuitive HR platform, Folks removes the administrative barriers that hold small businesses back. Automating job syndication and candidate tracking allows hiring teams to spend less time on manual data entry and more time building strong workplace relationships.
As hiring markets grow more competitive, companies that centralize their workforce operations will maintain a distinct advantage. Bridging the gap between talent acquisition, employee records, and payroll ensures operational clarity and a smoother employee experience. Through deliberate product expansion and practical automation, Jimmy Plante and Folks continue to equip growing organizations with the tools they need to recruit and retain great teams.
To learn more visit https://folksrh.com/en/
