From 27% to 80%: how Klohn Crippen Berger transformed ATS adoption with Teamtailor

From a recruitment team working around its ATS to one that actually works in it.

Klohn Crippen Berger (KCB) is a multidisciplinary engineering, geoscience, and environmental consulting firm headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. With approximately 1,000 employees across 9 countries, KCB recruits highly specialized engineering talent in a competitive market where finding the right people is only half the challenge.

The other half? Having a recruitment process that makes it easy for recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates to engage.

For Brad McMorris, a recruiter with 20+ years of experience, KCB's previous ATS was getting in the way. When Brad analyzed the team's hiring data, the scale of the problem became clear: just 27% of offers had been captured in their previous system.

Talent Acquisition Manager @ Klohn Crippen Berger

Meet Brad McMorris

Brad McMorris leads talent acquisition at Klohn Crippen Berger, hiring specialized engineering, geoscience and environmental talent across nine countries. With more than 20 years in recruitment, he led the evaluation and rollout that moved KCB onto Teamtailor.

The challenge: the cost of low adoption

KCB previously used a HRIS with an embedded ATS solution. While having everything in one system seemed logical, low adoption meant the ATS wasn't doing its job.

Recruiters increasingly worked outside the platform, which created problems that compounded over time:

• Recruitment activity and candidate information happened outside the ATS, in inboxes, spreadsheets, and individual recruiters' heads, rather than in one shared system.
• Visibility suffered, leaving hiring managers and leadership without a reliable view of pipeline activity.
• The candidate experience took a hit too, with mandatory application fields that weren't relevant to KCB's hiring process adding friction before a candidate even reached a recruiter.
• And perhaps most costly of all, candidate history was lost. In a specialized talent market where the same people resurface for multiple roles over the years, that history is often the difference between a warm conversation and starting from scratch.

KCB needed an ATS that recruiters would actually use, not one they had to work around.

The switch: choosing Teamtailor

Brad shortlisted three providers, evaluating them against five priorities: candidate experience, usability, global functionality, flexibility, and implementation and support.

Teamtailor stood out on several fronts. The application process was simpler and more candidate-friendly, without the unnecessary mandatory fields that had frustrated applicants under KCB's old system. The platform's flexibility meant KCB could customize workflows around how its team actually recruits, rather than forcing its process to fit the software, and with operations spanning more than 11 countries, global functionality and multi-language support were essential rather than nice-to-have.

Implementation sealed the decision. After a 14-week rollout of their previous solution, KCB was up and running on Teamtailor in approximately five weeks, with Brad noting that internal discussions, not Teamtailor, were the main factor affecting even that timeline.

The transformation: from 27% to 80%

The biggest change wasn't simply switching technology. It was adoption.

With Teamtailor, KCB's recruiters began keeping their recruitment process within the platform, keeping phone screen notes, hiring manager feedback, candidate communication, and candidate profiles all in one place. The shift in usage has been dramatic: 80% of KCB's hires so far this year are captured in Teamtailor, up from 27% under the previous system.

That jump in adoption unlocked benefits that go well beyond cleaner data:

• More complete candidate profiles, with a full record of communication and feedback attached to every candidate rather than scattered across inboxes.
• Hiring manager engagement, with hiring managers actively using the system alongside recruiters, something Brad hadn't seen before in 20+ years of recruiting.
• Candidate continuity, so when a specialized candidate resurfaces for a new role months or years later, the team can pick up the relationship where it left off instead of starting cold.
• Searchable talent pools, turning past applicants into a resource the team can draw on for future roles.
• Nurture campaigns, allowing KCB to stay in touch with candidates long after their initial application, so the relationship doesn't end when a role closes.

“Because Teamtailor is so easy to use, we are capturing a lot more in the system, and it will be a continued benefit as we use the tool.”

From ATS adoption to talent pipeline

With more of its recruitment activity captured in Teamtailor, KCB has been able to put its existing candidate data to work.

The team uses nurture campaigns to stay connected with previous applicants and prospects. Its most recent campaign reached 9,000 candidates and generated follow-up activity from across the talent pool, proof that the value of an ATS compounds once people actually use it.

That reach has already translated into results. In one example, a candidate who had previously declined an offer from KCB received a notification after the salary band changed on a relevant role. They re-engaged with the company and are now due to start.

It's also a source of savings that would otherwise go to external recruiters: nurturing talent in-house through Teamtailor represents a potential $30,000–$50,000 in avoided agency fees per hire.

For Brad, this all comes down to timing.

“Recruitment is like sales. It comes down to timing. Every person will come to look for a job at some point. You just want them to remember your brand when the timing is right.”

Candidate experience

Higher adoption hasn't just changed what the recruitment team can see internally, it's changed what candidates experience too. KCB moved away from an application process weighed down by unnecessary mandatory fields and built a more modern, streamlined careers experience through Teamtailor, making it easier for candidates to apply and stay engaged with KCB's brand over time.

The impact

• 27% → 80% — More recruitment activity captured in the ATS
• 9,000 — Candidates reached through KCB's latest nurture campaign
• $30K–$50K — Typical agency fee for a single hire, a potential savings when KCB nurtures talent in-house through Teamtailor

For KCB, the value of Teamtailor isn't about a single efficiency metric. It's about a recruitment system the team actually uses. One where candidate information is captured instead of lost, relationships are maintained instead of restarted, and a growing talent pool becomes a pipeline the business can draw on for years, not just a single hiring cycle.

“I've been recruiting for 20+ years, and Teamtailor is by far the best ATS user experience I've had. It's extremely user-friendly, intuitive, bright and easy.”

Brad McMorris, Klohn Crippen Berger