Lightweight Applicant Tracker: Know Where Every Candidate Stands
Hold candidates per open role, move them through your hiring stages with reason codes, audit every status change, and approve candidate-facing emails before they send — without paying for a real ATS.
A logged-in pipeline board where you add or import candidates onto the right open role, drag them through your hiring stages with reason codes, store resumes securely, get a warning when someone already applied to another role, approve any candidate-facing email before it sends, and export a clean pipeline CSV per requisition — with every status change audited.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- A Resend account (free)
- Your open-requisition list and a CSV or Google Sheet of current candidates
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
You're hiring for a handful of roles, and the "system" is a mess you hold together by force of will: resumes buried in an email folder, a status spreadsheet that's always one update behind, and a sinking feeling that you've lost track of someone good. Did the candidate for the ops role ever get a reply? Who's waiting on an interview? Did you already reject this person for a different job last month — and are you about to embarrass yourself by emailing them again?
Real applicant tracking systems exist, but they're expensive, bloated, and built for recruiting teams of fifty. For a founder, an office manager, or a one-person recruiting function, they're overkill. So you keep juggling — and candidates fall through the cracks, replies get forgotten, and the only record of why someone was rejected lives in your head. You do not need to be a developer to fix this. You can build exactly the tracker your hiring actually needs.
What you'll build
A simple internal pipeline board for your open roles. You add a candidate (or import a batch from a spreadsheet) onto the requisition they applied to, with their contact details, source, and resume file. Each candidate sits in a stage — applied, screen, interview, offer, hired, or rejected, or whatever your real stages are — and you move them along by dragging the card or clicking a button. Every move asks for a reason when it matters (especially rejected and hired), and every change is timestamped and logged so you always know where everyone stands and why.
When a stage move would trigger a candidate-facing email — a rejection note, an offer — the tool drafts it and holds it for your approval; nothing emails a candidate until you say so. If you try to add someone who's already in your pipeline for another open role, you get a clear "this person already applied" warning before you create a duplicate. And any time you need it, you can export a clean pipeline CSV per requisition to share with a hiring manager or drop into a report.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your hiring — your real stages and their order, your rejection and offer reason codes, where your candidates and resumes live today, the exact fields you track, your typical and peak candidate volumes, who's allowed to reject or extend an offer, and the messy edge cases (rehires, referrals, the same person applying to three roles). It reads a short spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then builds the board around your hiring process instead of a generic template. From there it walks the agent through the data model, the candidate intake and Google-Sheet import, the resume upload with access control, the stage board, the human approval gate for emails, the duplicate-applicant warning, and the per-requisition CSV export. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This isn't a toy spreadsheet replacement. The plan builds in the controls a careful hiring process needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so people only see their own organization's candidates, resumes stored in access-controlled file storage (not a public folder), a complete audit trail of every stage move and override (who, what, when, and why), a hard human-approval gate so no candidate-facing email sends until a person reviews and approves it, and duplicate guards so the same candidate can't be silently entered twice on the same role — plus a cross-role warning when someone's already in your pipeline elsewhere.
Who it's for
Small-company recruiters, office managers, and founders hiring without a real ATS — anyone currently running candidates out of email folders and a status spreadsheet. If you can describe your hiring stages and what makes you reject or advance someone, you can build this.
You've got this — open the plan, paste the first prompt, and you'll be moving your first real candidates across the board this weekend.