How to track open roles on Starch
Tracking open roles means keeping a live picture of every approved headcount slot — what's open, who owns the search, where each candidate stands, and which reqs are blocked waiting on a hiring manager or budget sign-off. For most operators, this ends up spread across a recruiting ATS, a spreadsheet the People lead owns, a few Slack threads, and someone's memory. The result is the same whether you're running a 15-person product team, a distributed service business, or a company that just closed a round and hired fast: nobody has a single, current answer to 'what are we actually hiring for right now?'
What this looks like in practice varies. A founder-led company might just need a clean list of open reqs with status and owner. A team with a dedicated recruiter needs pipeline counts and time-to-fill visibility. A company managing headcount against a budget needs reqs tied to department and cost.
On Starch, you end up with a tracker that's always current — open roles listed by department, owner, status, and days open, visible in one place without chasing down spreadsheets or asking the recruiter for a weekly update. If something changes in your ATS or your project tool, the tracker reflects it. You can also get a weekly digest pushed to Slack that surfaces stalled reqs before they quietly sit open for 90 days.
Why it matters
An inaccurate or out-of-date headcount picture creates real problems: you commit to a start date before the offer is approved, you duplicate interviews because two people thought the other was running point, or you hit a board meeting without knowing which reqs are actually open versus on hold. Done well, a clean open-roles tracker keeps hiring on schedule, makes budget conversations specific, and means no approved role quietly disappears into the backlog.
Common pitfalls
The most common mistakes: (1) Treating 'approved to hire' and 'actively sourcing' as the same status — reqs that are approved but stalled look like progress when they aren't. (2) Owning the tracker in a spreadsheet that only one person updates, so it's accurate for about 48 hours after each sync. (3) Tracking candidate stage in the ATS but role status somewhere else, so you never have both in one view. (4) No aging column — a req that's been open 60 days needs different attention than one opened last week, and most trackers don't surface that difference automatically.
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