Higher Education Applicant Tracking System
Manage academic, professional services, hourly paid and contract recruitment in one configurable platform.
Oleeo helps universities and colleges reduce administration, strengthen recruitment governance and deliver a fair, consistent candidate experience at scale.
How Oleeo empowers higher education hiring teams
Your university applicant tracking system should bring recruitment together without forcing every faculty, department and vacancy through exactly the same process.
Oleeo Recruit provides a configurable foundation for higher education talent acquisition, helping central HR teams establish institution-wide control while supporting the different workflows required across academic, professional services, hourly paid, contract and high-volume recruitment.
Manage requisition approvals, vacancy advertising, applications, shortlisting, interview scheduling, offers and pre-employment stages through a connected recruitment platform.
Configurable workflows mean different departments, employment types and job families can follow the processes they require without fragmenting recruitment across disconnected systems.
For University of the Arts London, bringing recruitment activity together with Oleeo supported the management of more than 25,000 applications each year while helping the institution optimise complex recruitment processes.
Candidate updates, reminders, interview scheduling and routine workflow actions consume valuable time across HR teams and hiring panels.
Oleeo automates repeatable activity so recruiters and hiring managers can focus their attention where human involvement matters most.
Intelligent screening can also evaluate applications against defined criteria and provide evidence-backed recommendations. Oleeo AI assists the recruiter rather than replacing them: your people review the evidence and make the final decision.
Create more structured selection processes across faculties and departments.
Oleeo supports configurable anonymisation and blind-screening capabilities that can withhold bias-triggering information during initial review, while structured criteria and standardised scorecards help applicants be assessed more consistently against relevant requirements.
Combined with skills-based approaches to selection, this helps institutions move beyond rigid keyword matching and focus more attention on relevant capabilities and evidence.
A unified recruitment platform gives central teams clearer visibility across faculties, departments, vacancies and hiring stages.
Oleeo reporting and dashboards can help recruitment leaders understand application volumes, process bottlenecks, time to offer, source effectiveness, conversion and diversity outcomes without manually consolidating information from multiple spreadsheets.
That visibility can support stronger governance, internal accountability and continuous recruitment improvement.
Every interaction with an applicant contributes to their perception of your university.
Oleeo helps institutions create branded and accessible recruitment journeys with configurable application forms, timely communications and clearer candidate progression.
Forms and workflows can be adapted to collect the information required without introducing unnecessary friction, helping create a more consistent experience for candidates applying across different roles, locations and devices.
What People Are Saying
“Oleeo has been instrumental in our recruitment transformation, allowing us to streamline workflows, engage candidates more effectively, and manage the growing volume of applications with ease. This has enabled us to attract top talent more efficiently while staying agile in an ever-evolving recruitment landscape.”
Mark Kunaseelan
Head of Resourcing
The unique recruitment challenges facing higher education
University recruitment rarely follows one standard process. Institutions need to recruit everyone from academics and researchers to professional services teams, technicians, hourly paid lecturers and seasonal staff, often across highly autonomous faculties and departments.
The challenge is giving different teams the flexibility they need while maintaining the visibility, consistency and governance required across the institution.
Faculties, schools, institutes and professional services teams may have different requirements for approvals, advertising, shortlisting and interviews.
When those processes depend on separate systems, spreadsheets, inboxes and local workarounds, central HR teams can struggle to see what is happening across the institution.
Oleeo gives universities a central recruitment platform with configurable workflows, helping you establish consistent standards while accommodating legitimate differences between departments, job families and employment types.
Higher education recruitment combines specialist searches with high-volume hiring.
Professional services vacancies, hourly paid lecturer recruitment, research roles, technicians, estates, student support and seasonal positions can all place different demands on recruitment teams.
Oleeo automates repeatable tasks such as candidate communications, pre-screening, interview scheduling and workflow actions, reducing administration for HR teams, hiring managers and academic panel members without removing human judgement from selection.
Universities need recruitment processes that are consistent, transparent and defensible.
Oleeo supports structured assessment, configurable anonymisation, reporting and documented recruitment workflows to help institutions create more consistent selection processes and reduce opportunities for unconscious bias.
Where AI supports screening and selection, Oleeo follows a Human-in-the-Loop approach. Technology can evaluate evidence, score applications and provide recommendations, while recruiters and selection panels retain responsibility for the final decision.
Institutional reputation matters, but it cannot do all the work when universities are competing for researchers, technical specialists, digital professionals and senior leaders.
Candidates also judge an employer by the recruitment experience itself.
Oleeo helps institutions create branded, accessible application journeys, communicate with candidates more effectively and develop relationships with talent for current and future opportunities.
Key benefits of our higher education ATS
Centralise recruitment activity that might otherwise be spread across spreadsheets, inboxes and disconnected systems.
Automation helps reduce repetitive work for HR teams, recruitment administrators, panel members and hiring managers, supporting faster progression and fewer manual errors.
At University of the Arts London, Oleeo supports the management of more than 25,000 applications annually, with average time to offer reduced to 6.3 weeks.
Build anonymisation, structured evaluation criteria and consistent workflows into recruitment rather than relying on individual teams to recreate good practice for every vacancy.
University of the Arts London has anonymised more than 370,000 applications using Oleeo, demonstrating how fairness measures can be embedded into recruitment at significant scale.
AI-assisted screening follows the same principle of accountable decision-making: technology provides evidence and recommendations, while people remain responsible for selection decisions.
A connected recruitment platform gives universities a more dependable view of what is happening across recruitment.
Use that information to identify delays, candidate drop-off, channel performance and variations between recruitment processes, helping teams make better-informed decisions about where improvements are needed.
University of the Arts London has reported 90% of vacancies filled on the first attempt, while application conversion increased from 39% to 57%.
How we compare
Shift from “Requirements” to “Responsibilities and necessary capabilities”.
| Feature |  Oleeo Enterprise Higher Education ATS | Standard / Legacy Higher Education Software |
|---|---|---|
| Recruitment structure |  Centralise recruitment while configuring workflows around different faculties, departments, job families and employment types. |  Disconnected systems, spreadsheets and departmental processes can make institution-wide oversight difficult. |
| Administrative efficiency | Automated workflows, communications, scheduling and screening support reduce administration while keeping recruiters in control. | Manual application review, interview coordination, candidate updates and repeated data entry consume HR capacity. |
| Hiring manager collaboration | Guided tasks, reminders, permissions and structured evaluation help busy academic and professional services managers participate efficiently. | Email-led processes can lead to repeated chasing, delays and incomplete recruitment records. |
| Fairness and consistency | Anonymisation, structured scorecards and evidence-led recommendations support more consistent evaluation, with people retaining final decision-making responsibility. | Unstructured review and inconsistent processes can increase subjectivity and opportunities for unconscious bias. |
| Governance and reporting | Central reporting, audit trails and dashboards support recruitment governance, equal opportunities monitoring and continuous improvement. | Fragmented data can make auditability and institution-wide reporting time-consuming. |
| Candidate experience | Branded, accessible application journeys, configurable forms and timely communications create a more consistent candidate experience. | Lengthy applications, delayed updates and different departmental processes can create an inconsistent experience. |
| Ability to scale | Configurable enterprise workflows can adapt as recruitment structures, volumes and requirements evolve. | Rigid systems can struggle to accommodate different employment types, seasonal peaks and changing institutional requirements. |
Oleeo resources for public sector recruiting.
Here are the top resources and customer success stories that help shape public sector recruiting.
University of the Arts London (UAL)
Automation of tasks like pre-screening and interview scheduling significantly reduced the administrative burden, enabling us to handle high volumes of applications efficiently.
Battle for top graduate talent has never been fiercer
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Higher education applicant tracking system FAQs
Start with the complexity of your institution rather than a generic ATS feature checklist.
Universities should consider whether a platform can accommodate different faculties, departments, employment types, approval processes and assessment methods while still giving central HR teams appropriate governance and visibility.
Look for configurable workflows, anonymised application functionality, equal opportunities and recruitment reporting, hiring-manager usability, candidate accessibility, appropriate security and data-management standards, and the ability to automate high-volume administration without removing human oversight.
Integration requirements and the quality of implementation and ongoing supplier support should also form part of the assessment.
Ultimately, the right higher education ATS should provide central control without forcing every legitimate recruitment requirement into exactly the same workflow.
There is no single meaningful price for an enterprise higher education ATS.
Cost will typically depend on factors including the size of the institution, recruitment volumes, required modules, configuration, integrations, implementation complexity and ongoing support requirements.
Licence price should therefore be considered alongside total value. Universities should assess the administrative work a platform can remove, whether legacy tools and processes can be consolidated, the quality of implementation support, and improvements to candidate experience, reporting and recruitment governance.
Oleeo pricing is scoped around an institution’s recruitment structure and requirements, so a discovery conversation and tailored demonstration provide a more useful comparison than a one-size-fits-all figure.
An applicant tracking system manages active recruitment. It helps your team manage vacancies and candidates as they progress through application, assessment, interview, offer and other stages of a live hiring process.
A recruitment CRM is designed to build and nurture longer-term relationships with talent.
For example, your ATS might manage applicants for a lecturer, researcher or professional services vacancy. A recruitment CRM could help your team stay connected with previous applicants, specialist talent communities, alumni, silver medallists or passive candidates who may suit future opportunities.
Universities competing for scarce skills can benefit from using both approaches as part of a connected recruitment strategy.
Yes. Technology can support fairer, more consistent shortlisting without taking the final decision away from recruiters or selection panels.
Oleeo can support anonymisation, structured scoring and evidence-led application review, while AI can evaluate relevant information and recommend which applications recruiters should review first.
Oleeo follows a Human-in-the-Loop approach. Recruiters and selection panels review the evidence and retain responsibility for every final hiring decision.
This allows institutions to use intelligent automation to reduce administration and support more consistent assessment without handing recruitment decisions to an autonomous system.