How ATÖLYE Migrated 4 Years of Recruiting Data from Recruitee to Manatal

TL;DR

Customer: ATÖLYE (Strategic design and innovation studio, Dubai, UAE)

The Move: Recruitee to Manatal

The Scope: 3,812 total records: 1,714 candidates, 1,744 notes, 305 interview results, 36 recruiters, and 13 offers. Spanning ~4 years of recruiting history (2022 to 2026).

The Roadblock: Compliance-critical tags (e.g., "Red Listed," "Vetted Dropped") needed to carry over exactly. Interview evaluations had no native equivalent in Manatal. Manatal restricted tag creation through the API, requiring manual coordination.

The Outcome: Full candidate database migrated with resumes, job associations, and recruiter assignments intact. Compliance tags preserved. Interview evaluations converted to rich-HTML candidate notes.

By the Numbers

• Total records migrated: 3,812
• Candidates: 1,714
• Notes: 1,744
• Interview evaluations: 305
• Recruiters/users: 36
• Offers: 13
• Data span: ~4 years (2022 to 2026)

The Challenge: Every Tag Carries Weight

ATÖLYE is a strategic design and innovation studio based in Dubai that works with leaders across the Middle East and Europe. The studio designs experiences, built environments, and learning programs for organizations navigating complex transformation. With teams spanning multiple markets, their recruiting pipeline covers a diverse range of creative, strategic, and technical roles.

After several years on Recruitee, ATÖLYE decided to switch to Manatal. The candidate database was not large by volume, but it was operationally dense. Each candidate profile carried resumes, interview evaluations, threaded notes, and compliance-critical tags like "Red Listed" and "Vetted Dropped" that indicated vetting status. Losing any of that metadata would mean losing context that the recruiting team depended on for every hiring decision.

Three issues made the migration more involved than the record count suggested:

• Compliance tags. Tags like "Red Listed" and "Vetted Dropped" are not cosmetic labels. They carry vetting significance. If a candidate tagged "Red Listed" in Recruitee appears untagged in Manatal, the recruiting team loses a compliance signal.
• Interview evaluations. Recruitee stores structured interview evaluations as a distinct data type. Manatal has no native equivalent. These evaluations needed to be preserved in a readable, searchable format without losing their content.
• Manatal's tag creation restrictions. The Manatal API did not allow ClonePartner to create new tags programmatically. Existing tags could be applied, but new ones had to be handled differently.

The ClonePartner Solution: Dependency-Ordered ATS Migration with Format Conversion

ClonePartner pulled Recruitee's data in dependency order: recruiters first, then jobs and offers, then candidates with their CVs, applications, notes, interview evaluations, and tags.

• Candidate deduplication. Before creating new candidate records, ClonePartner matched candidates by email address to prevent duplicates. Existing matches in Manatal were updated rather than re-created.

• Resume migration. CVs and resumes were cached to cloud storage and uploaded to Manatal via presigned URLs, with a retry pass for any uploads that failed on the first attempt.

• Tag handling. ClonePartner migrated existing tags like "Red Listed" directly. When Manatal's API blocked the creation of the "Vetted Dropped" tag, the team flagged the issue to Andrew Royston, who manually cross-referenced the small number of affected candidates. The compliance data was preserved without forcing a workaround that might have introduced errors.

• Interview evaluations as rich-HTML notes. Since Manatal has no native data type for interview evaluations, ClonePartner converted them into structured, rich-HTML candidate notes. The evaluation content, scores, and interviewer context were preserved in a readable format attached to the correct candidate profile.

• Threaded notes. Recruitee's threaded note structure was flattened and rebuilt as nested HTML within Manatal's notes system, preserving the conversation flow without losing context.

• Pipeline stage workaround. Manatal's API ignores the pipeline stage field when creating applications. ClonePartner applied the correct stage in a follow-up update pass after each application was created, ensuring candidates appeared in the right pipeline position from day one.

The Results: A Clean ATS with Full Recruiting History

All 1,714 candidates landed in Manatal with their resumes, job associations, notes, and recruiter assignments intact. Interview evaluations that would have been lost in a standard export were preserved as searchable candidate notes. Compliance tags carried over, giving the recruiting team the same vetting context they had in Recruitee.

Andrew completed the migration checklist and returned it the same day it was shared. The candidate and job migration followed within two weeks, with tag and evaluation fixes applied iteratively as Andrew reviewed the data.

"No issues, there wasn't many so I've manually cross referenced and updated."

Andrew Royston, ATÖLYE, on the remaining tag updates

What Made This Migration Different

For recruiting teams planning an ATS switch, two details from this project are worth noting:

• Small databases can carry dense metadata. A 1,714-candidate database sounds simple until you account for compliance tags, interview evaluations, threaded notes, and resume attachments on every record. Volume is not the only measure of migration complexity.

• Not every field has a destination equivalent. Interview evaluations exist as a structured data type in Recruitee but have no counterpart in Manatal. Rather than dropping them, ClonePartner converted them to rich-HTML notes, preserving the content in a format the team could search and reference. Identifying these gaps during the sample phase prevents silent data loss on go-live.