What actually happens when you sign a two-year ATS contract
The pitch always sounds like a discount. For a team hiring one or two roles a year, it's usually a bet against your own hiring plans.
Annual contracts are the default in this category, not the exception. Several widely used platforms sell their cheapest tier as an annual prepay only, with no monthly option at all. The pitch is a lower effective monthly rate. The tradeoff is that you're committing to a hiring tool before you know if your hiring plans will still look the same in six months.
For a company running a steady, high-volume hiring motion, that tradeoff can make sense — the discount is real, and the usage is predictable enough to plan around. For a small team filling one or two roles this year, it's a different bet entirely.
The scenario that actually happens
You sign a year upfront because the sales rep quotes a better rate. Three months in, the role you hired for gets filled, hiring slows down, and the tool sits mostly unused. You're paying the same amount either way, because the contract doesn't know your hiring volume changed.
The opposite scenario is worse: hiring picks up faster than expected, and the tier you locked in a year ago doesn't have the seats or the job slots you need now. Upgrading mid-contract is rarely the discounted rate you started with.
What to actually ask before signing anything
- Is there a monthly option at all, or is the entry tier annual-only?
- What happens to unused months if your hiring volume drops?
- What's the actual cost to upgrade or downgrade mid-contract?
None of this is an argument against paying for good hiring software — it's an argument for matching the commitment to how predictable your hiring actually is. That's the whole reason YoHe bills monthly by default: a small team's hiring volume this quarter is not a great predictor of next quarter's, and the tool shouldn't ask you to bet on it.