Applicant Tracking System for FLYER HR

1Summary

FLYER has 59 people on payroll, 35 of them full-time, spread over eight team groups. Hiring today runs on email, Zalo, Discord and personal memory. A candidate can be interviewed by two people who never compared notes, and nobody can say how many days a position has been open. That is fine at two hires a quarter. It stops being fine at the pace the HR plan on hr.flyer.vn describes, from 27 to 48 full-time staff.

The recommendation is in two parts:

1. Part A, this month. One Google Sheet as the single pipeline, one Google Form as the only way to apply, five email templates, one Discord channel for hiring updates. No development. HR can start on Monday.
2. Part B, when Part A hurts. A small ATS, bought or built, that keeps the same stages and the same data but adds a career page, a candidate record with history, interview scheduling on Google Calendar, structured scorecards, offer approval, and weekly reports. The trigger to start Part B is written down in section 14 so the decision is not taken on feeling.

2Who FLYER hires, and how often

The team groups below are taken from the HR dashboard. The hiring profile column is an estimate by the author and should be corrected by HR; it matters because the pipeline for a part-time academic collaborator and the pipeline for a senior engineer are not the same length.

Three consequences for the ATS:

• Two pipelines, not one. A short pipeline for part-time collaborators (apply, test, decide) and a full pipeline for full-time roles (screen, interview, second interview, offer). The system must let HR pick the pipeline when opening a position.
• Hiring managers are the bottleneck, not HR. With three people in HR-Admin, most interviews are run by team leads. The system must work for someone who opens it twice a week from a phone, not only for a recruiter who lives in it.
• Volume is low enough to start in a spreadsheet. Even the 27 to 48 full-time plan is roughly one to two hires a month. Part A is not a compromise; it is the right tool for this year.

3Part A: run it this month, no development

Everything in this section can be set up by HR in one afternoon on the existing Google Workspace. It uses the same stages and the same fields as Part B, so nothing has to be re-entered if a system is adopted later.

3.1 The four pieces

3.2 Weekly routine

3.3 Application form fields

Keep the form short. A long form loses good candidates and gives HR data nobody reads.

• Full name, email, phone, city
• Position applied for (dropdown), earliest start date, expected salary (optional, range)
• CV upload (PDF), portfolio or GitHub link (optional)
• How did you hear about this position? (dropdown: TopCV, VietnamWorks, LinkedIn, Facebook, referral by a FLYER employee, other)
• Referrer name, if referral
• Consent checkbox: "I agree that FLYER stores my application for up to 12 months to consider me for this and similar positions." Required. See section 9 on personal data.

3.4 Pipeline sheet columns

ID | Position | Pipeline (Short / Full) | Full name | Email | Phone | City
Source | Referrer | CV link | Applied on | Stage | Stage date | Days in stage (formula)
Owner (HR) | Hiring manager | Interviewer 1 | Interview 1 date | Calendar link
Score: role skills (1–4) | Score: communication (1–4) | Score: fit with FLYER (1–4)
Recommendation (Strong yes / Yes / No / Strong no) | Interviewer notes
Offer amount | Offer sent on | Offer decision | Start date
Rejection reason (dropdown) | Rejection sent on | Consent until (Applied on + 12 months)

The scorecard is deliberately four columns. Interviewers fill four cells and a recommendation, not a document. Part B keeps the same four dimensions.

3.5 Templates

3.6 What Part A does not do

• No public career page. Positions are posted on job boards and the flyer.vn Facebook page with the form link.
• No automatic reminders. HR checks "Days in stage" on Monday and chases by hand.
• No candidate history across positions. A candidate who applies twice is two rows; HR searches by email.
• No permissions inside the sheet. Anyone with access sees every candidate, including salary expectations. Keep the share list to HR-Admin and current hiring managers, and remove a manager when their position closes.

When these four gaps cost more than an hour a week, or when the sheet passes about 300 rows, Part B starts. Section 14 states the trigger precisely.

4Part B: goals and success measures

Part B is the system specification. It is written so a vendor product can be checked against it line by line, or an in-house build can be scoped from it. The stages, fields and templates are the same as Part A.

4.1 Goals

1. Every candidate for every position is in one place, with a stage, a date, and a named owner.
2. Every candidate hears back within the response times in section 7, without HR remembering to write.
3. Every interview produces a scorecard on the same four dimensions, visible to the next interviewer before they meet the candidate.
4. HR can answer "how long does it take us to fill a sales role" and "where do our good hires come from" from a report, not from memory.
5. Candidate personal data is stored and deleted according to a written rule, and the company can show who looked at it.

4.2 Success measures

The baseline column is intentionally empty. Part A's monthly tab produces it. A system bought before the baseline exists cannot be judged.

5Users and roles

Login is Google Workspace only, restricted to @flyer.us and @flyer.vn, following the pattern already used by hr.flyer.vn and the roadmap board. There are no passwords to manage.

6Scope

7Pipeline stages and response times

Two pipelines. The Short pipeline is for part-time collaborators (mainly Academic and Marketing). The Full pipeline is for full-time roles. Both use the same stage names so reports can combine them.

A candidate in any non-terminal stage longer than the stated time turns amber in the list and appears in the Monday digest. Rejection at any stage sends the matching template unless HR marks "do not email" with a reason.

8Functional requirements

Priority: Must for the MVP, Should for Phase 2, Later for Phase 3 or not at all. Each line is testable on its own.

8.1 Positions

8.2 Career page and applying

8.3 Candidate records

8.4 Pipeline and stages

8.5 Interviews and scheduling

8.6 Scorecards

8.7 Offers

8.8 Communication

8.9 Talent pool

8.10 Administration

9Non-functional requirements

10Integrations

11Data model

Enough to check a vendor's export or to start a schema. Field lists are the minimum; identifiers, timestamps and created-by are implied on every entity.

12Reports

Six reports, each answering one question HR is actually asked. All filterable by date range, team group and pipeline; all exportable.

Charts are optional. A sortable table with the numbers is the requirement; a bar chart next to it is a courtesy.

13Buy or build

Three realistic options once Part A is outgrown. Prices are not quoted here because vendor pricing changes and needs a current quote; HR should fill the cost column before the decision.

14Phases and MVP acceptance

14.1 Trigger for starting Part B

Part B starts when any two of the following are true for two consecutive months, as recorded in the Part A monthly tab:

• More than 5 positions open at the same time
• More than 80 new applications in a month
• More than 2 people besides HR editing the pipeline sheet
• Any candidate went 10 or more working days without a reply
• HR spends more than 3 hours a week on scheduling and chasing scorecards

14.2 Phases

14.3 MVP acceptance list

Run on two real positions, one Short pipeline and one Full pipeline, with real candidates and real interviewers. All must pass.

1. A candidate applies from a phone through the career page; the record appears with source recorded from the link; E1 arrives within 5 minutes.
2. HR moves the candidate to Interview 1; a calendar event with Meet link appears on the interviewer's calendar; E2 arrives with the same details.
3. The interviewer receives the reminder, opens the scorecard from the link on a phone, submits in under two minutes, and cannot see a second interviewer's scorecard until they have submitted.
4. HR tries to move the candidate to Interview 2 with no scorecard and is blocked; with a scorecard, it works.
5. A hiring manager logs in and sees only their position, with no salary expectation field.
6. An offer request above the salary range shows a flag; the approver approves from email; HR sends E5; acceptance produces the export file.
7. A rejected candidate receives E4 with the edited sentence; the rejection reason appears in the funnel report.
8. A candidate emails asking for deletion; HR deletes the record; the audit log shows who deleted it and the candidate no longer appears in search or export.
9. The Part A sheet imports with all rows matched to positions and stages, and duplicates by email merged.
10. A full CSV export plus CV files can be downloaded by HR admin and opened without the vendor.

15Risks and open questions

15.1 Risks

15.2 Open questions for HR

1. Which mailbox sends candidate emails today, and who reads replies?
2. How many positions were opened in the last 12 months, and how many applications did each receive? This decides whether the Part B trigger is months or years away.
3. Is the Short pipeline right for Academic collaborators, or is there a trial-task stage the author missed?
4. Who approves offers today: the CEO for everything, or team leads within a range?
5. Does FLYER have a written retention rule for candidate data, and has legal counsel reviewed obligations under the 2026 Personal Data Protection Law?
6. Should the career page live on flyer.vn, about.flyer.vn or a new subdomain?
7. Is there a budget line for job boards, so the source-quality report can compute cost per hire?

16Decisions to ratify

The document assumes the following. Each needs a yes or a correction from HR and the BOD before Part A starts.

Related: hr.flyer.vn (headcount and HR plan) · Company rules · Product team in the AI era · PRD list