People & HR

How to track open roles as Small HR Teams

People & HRFor Small HR Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You have open roles scattered across Greenhouse, a LinkedIn spreadsheet someone built in 2023, and a Slack thread where the hiring manager posted three updates and then went quiet. As a 2-person HR team, you're not just tracking whether a role is open — you're tracking whether the JD is approved, whether the hiring manager has done phone screens, whether the offer is stuck in DocuSign, and whether the CFO knows that the two engineering roles from Q1 are still open and burning into the headcount plan. None of your tools talk to each other. Greenhouse knows the pipeline. Paylocity knows the approved headcount. Notion has the job descriptions if anyone updated them. You're the glue, and 'glue' is not what you were hired to do.

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People & HRFor Small HR Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live open-roles tracker that pulls headcount status from Greenhouse and your HRIS into one view, with pipeline stage, hiring manager, and target close date — no more emailing six people to build a weekly update

A dashboard the CFO can actually read: approved headcount vs. filled vs. open, burn rate on unfilled seats, and a plain-language summary you don't have to write by hand

Automated hiring manager nudges — when a candidate has been in a stage more than 5 business days and there's been no activity, Slack goes out without you touching it

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Project Management Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch connects to Greenhouse from its integration catalog — the agent queries it live when the tracker runs. Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule (employees, org units, approved headcount) so the tracker can compare approved seats against filled positions without a manual export. Starch also connects to Slack from the integration catalog to push weekly summaries and hiring-manager nudges. For any job board or vendor portal that lacks an API, Starch can automate it through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me an open roles tracker with columns for role title, department, hiring manager, headcount approval status (approved / pending / on hold), current pipeline stage, days since last activity, and target start date. Pull open roles from Greenhouse via the integration catalog and approved headcount from Paylocity via scheduled sync. Flag any role where days since last activity is over 5.

Create a knowledge base section for recruiting playbooks — one page per role family (engineering, sales, ops) — with a template for interview scorecards, offer approval steps, and the comp band for each level. Surface the right playbook automatically when a new role is opened.

Every Monday at 8am, generate a hiring summary: how many roles are open, which have been open more than 30 days, which hiring managers have candidates sitting in their queue without a decision, and what our approved headcount utilization looks like. Send it to me and the CFO on Slack.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Greenhouse from Starch's integration catalog — the agent will query open roles, pipeline stages, and candidate activity live whenever the tracker refreshes.

2 Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule — employees, org units, and pay data — so you can compare approved headcount slots against currently filled positions in real time.

3 Connect Slack from the integration catalog so Starch can push automated nudges to hiring managers and send you the Monday morning hiring digest.

4 Tell Starch: 'Build me an open roles tracker with role title, department, hiring manager, headcount approval status, pipeline stage, days since last candidate activity, and target start date. Flag anything over 5 days with no movement.' Starch builds the app from that description.

5 Add a headcount reconciliation view: 'Add a section that shows approved headcount by department from Paylocity vs. current filled headcount, and highlights open seats with their estimated monthly salary burn based on the comp band in the role record.'

6 Set up the hiring manager nudge automation: 'Every weekday morning, check all open roles. For any role where the most recent candidate has been in the same stage for more than 5 business days and no interview has been scheduled, send a Slack message to the hiring manager with the candidate's name, current stage, and a link to the Greenhouse record.'

7 Use the Knowledge Management app to build out role-specific playbooks — paste in your existing JD templates, interview scorecard formats, and comp bands. Tell Starch: 'Auto-link the relevant playbook to any new role that opens based on the role family tag.'

8 Build the CFO-facing dashboard: 'Create a dashboard showing total open roles by department, average days to fill by role family, offer acceptance rate this quarter, and headcount utilization as a percentage of approved budget. Pull from Greenhouse and Paylocity.'

9 Set the Monday digest: 'Every Monday at 8am, generate a hiring status summary — open roles count, roles open more than 30 days, hiring managers with stale queues, and approved headcount utilization. Send to #hr-ops and the CFO's Slack DM.'

10 For any job board that doesn't have an API — niche boards, government portals, university recruiting sites — tell Starch to check your posting status through your browser and flag anything that has gone inactive without a note in the tracker.

11 Review the open roles tracker weekly and use the built-in project management views to run your hiring review meeting: sort by days open, filter by department, and export a one-page summary for the leadership sync without rebuilding it in a spreadsheet.

See this running on Starch

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Worked example

Q2 2026 Headcount Review — 7 Open Roles, 3 Stalled

Sample numbers from a real run

Senior Engineer (Backend) — Engineering	47
Account Executive — Sales	31
Customer Success Manager — CS	22
Data Analyst — Ops	12
Recruiter (Contract) — HR	8
Marketing Manager — Marketing	61
SDR — Sales	5

Going into the Q2 leadership sync, you have 7 open roles. The tracker shows that Senior Engineer (Backend) has been open 47 days — the hiring manager has two candidates in final round but hasn't submitted scorecards in 11 days. The nudge automation already fired twice with no response, so you escalate directly. Marketing Manager is at 61 days: the JD was revised three weeks ago and the approved headcount shows a $105k band, but the two candidates who made it to offer stage both declined at comp. Starch surfaced that the comp band in the playbook hadn't been updated after the most recent compensation review — you fix it in the Knowledge Management app and the new JD version is live in 10 minutes. Account Executive at 31 days looks healthy: 4 candidates in pipeline, interviews scheduled this week. The CFO dashboard shows 7 open seats representing approximately $68k/month in unfilled salary budget against the headcount plan. You walk into the leadership sync with that number, a slide you didn't have to build, and a clear ask: two hiring managers need to unblock their processes this week or the Q2 plan slips.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days to fill by role family (engineering, sales, ops) — this is the number that tells you whether your process is the bottleneck or the hiring manager is

Headcount utilization: approved seats vs. filled seats as a percentage, broken down by department — what the CFO is actually asking about when they ask about hiring

Pipeline velocity: average days a candidate spends in each stage — hiring manager phone screen, technical screen, final round — so you can see where things stall

Offer acceptance rate this quarter by role family — if it's dropping, it's usually comp or process, and you need to know which

Stale roles (open more than 30 days with no stage movement) as an absolute count — your weekly target is zero stale roles without an active reason documented

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Greenhouse alone

Greenhouse tracks pipeline well but has no view into approved headcount from your HRIS, can't push Slack nudges to hiring managers on its own, and can't generate the cross-system summary your CFO needs without a manual export and rebuild.

Rippling or BambooHR HRIS

Your HRIS knows who's employed and what headcount is approved but has no ATS pipeline data — you still have to reconcile the two manually to know whether an approved role is actually being filled.

Google Sheets headcount tracker

A shared Sheet is free and everyone knows how to use it, but it goes stale the moment someone forgets to update it, has no automated nudges, and requires you to manually pull numbers from Greenhouse and Paylocity every week for the CFO update.

Notion hiring wiki

Notion is fine for storing JDs and playbooks but it's not a live tracker — you can't query Greenhouse data into a Notion table and keep it current without a paid third-party sync tool and someone to maintain it.

Ashby or Lever (full ATS replacement)

A more powerful ATS might solve some of this, but if you already have Greenhouse in place and the problem is cross-system visibility and automation, swapping your ATS is six months of implementation to fix what is fundamentally a 'nothing talks to each other' problem — not an ATS problem.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — project management, knowledge management all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We already use Greenhouse as our ATS. Does Starch replace it?

No. Starch connects to Greenhouse from its integration catalog — the agent queries it live — and builds the surfaces on top that Greenhouse doesn't give you: cross-system headcount views, automated hiring manager nudges, and CFO dashboards that pull from both your ATS and your HRIS in the same place. Your Greenhouse data and workflows stay exactly where they are.

We're on Rippling for HRIS, not Paylocity or ADP. Does that work?

Rippling is available through Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your apps run. The scheduled sync with automatic data refresh is available for Paylocity and ADP specifically. For Rippling users, live queries cover most open roles and headcount tracking use cases; it's worth noting that for workflows that depend on historical snapshots of headcount data over time, a live query gives you the current state rather than a stored archive.

Can Starch post job listings to LinkedIn or Indeed on our behalf?

Starch can automate browser-based tasks on any website you can log into — including job boards — without needing a formal API. So checking whether a posting is live, refreshing a listing, or pulling application counts from a board that doesn't have an API are all things Starch can do through browser automation. Direct ATS-to-board integrations (like the native Greenhouse-to-LinkedIn connection) are separate from Starch and you'd keep using those as-is.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We process employee data here.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth naming honestly: if your company requires SOC 2 Type II certification for any tool that touches employee or candidate data, Starch is not there yet. It's on the roadmap. In the meantime, many small HR teams in the 100–200 employee range use Starch for workflow automation and dashboarding while keeping the underlying HRIS and ATS as the system of record for sensitive employee data.

The hiring manager for our open engineering role never checks their Slack. Can Starch try a different channel?

The nudge automation you build can be customized — if a hiring manager is more responsive to email than Slack, you can tell Starch to send the nudge via Gmail instead (Starch syncs Gmail on a schedule with read and send access). You can also build escalation logic: if there's no response after two Slack nudges in 3 days, escalate to the hiring manager's manager via email. You describe the rules, Starch builds the automation.

How current is the data in the open roles tracker? Is it updated in real time?

Data from Greenhouse and Rippling is queried live when your app or automation runs — meaning it reflects the current state at the time of the query. Paylocity data syncs on a schedule, so headcount and org data refreshes automatically at the sync interval. This is a live data surface, not a data warehouse — if you need long-term historical archives of every headcount state over time, that's a use case better suited to a dedicated analytics tool.