The Definitive Guide to Migrating to Crelate

Crelate is a Talent Relationship Management platform paired with an Applicant Tracking System, positioned as a combined ATS + CRM for the recruiting and staffing market ¹. The product ships in two editions — Crelate Recruit for staffing agencies and Crelate Hire for in-house corporate recruiting teams — both sitting on the same underlying data model of Contacts, Companies, Jobs, Activities and Placements ¹⁰.

The typical Crelate customer is a small-to-mid recruiting agency or in-house talent team — 5 to 150 recruiters — that wants a single system covering candidate search, client management, job-pipeline workflow and outreach without standing up a Bullhorn-scale admin function. Compared with Bullhorn, Crelate positions on lower setup cost and a faster time-to-productive; compared with Greenhouse or Lever, it positions on staffing-agency depth — Tearsheets, Client Portal, configurable Workflow stages and an ATS+CRM combined model ¹².

The shapes of migration that actually land on Crelate fall into four patterns. First, homegrown-database replacements — agencies moving off Access, Airtable or a bespoke SQL Server tool that grew beyond its limits. Second, legacy-ATS swaps, where the source is PCRecruiter, Avionté, JobAdder or a 1990s-vintage product whose data model and UI no longer fit modern recruiting ⁹.

Third, Bullhorn or Greenhouse exits, where total cost of ownership or product fit drives the move and the source schema is rich but the entity model needs reshaping into Crelate's Contact-on-a-Job pattern ⁷. Fourth, M&A consolidation, where an acquired agency runs on a different ATS and the parent standardises on Crelate. Each shape has a different difficulty profile: a homegrown-database migration is mostly data cleanup; a Bullhorn migration is mostly entity-shape translation.

What makes migrating *to* Crelate easier than the category average is Import Data+, the native UI wizard that accepts XLSX and CSV, supports saved Field Maps for re-runs, and exposes a Preview / Invalid / Error Summary review step before any row commits ²⁹. The platform also offers a managed migration service operated by Crelate's own Professional Services team, with the explicit claim of having performed thousands of ATS migrations from 40+ source platforms ¹⁰.

What makes it harder than the average is the External Primary Key model — Crelate's upsert key is a customer-set field that has to be populated on every source row before the first import, or every re-run inserts duplicates ². The picklist-internal-value distinction, Workflow Stage definitions, and ownership-versus-source-tracking field semantics all need explicit decisions before any row lands.

Custom reports, saved Searches, Workflow notification rules and email templates do not import — they are rebuilt from documentation. Teams that scope for that rebuild work up front finish on time; teams that assume parity do not.

Teams that scope for the rebuild work up front finish on time; teams that assume parity do not.

Crelate's ATS + CRM is built around a small set of recruiting-specific records, each with default and custom fields, and associations that connect them.

Before you can map a field on the source side, you need to know which destination record type the row belongs on, what fields it requires, and which value will serve as its upsert key. The table below summarises the core records you will touch.

Crelate's upsert key is the External Primary Key — a customer-set text field on Contact, Company and Job that you populate from the source platform's primary key (or a UUID), then nominate as the *identifier* in the Import Data+ wizard so the import behaves as upsert rather than insert ²⁶². Without an External Primary Key, the importer falls back to a name + email heuristic that creates duplicates on re-run.

Plan for External Primary Key on day one: stamp the source primary key into every row before export, and use it on every subsequent re-run, reconciliation query and Activity association so updates are deterministic.

Custom fields in Crelate are configured under Settings → Custom Fields per record type. The catalogue below covers what you can model and the limits that apply ⁷².

Relationships in Crelate are modelled as lookups between records (Contact↔Company employment, Job↔Company, Job↔primary Recruiter) and as Workflow Stage memberships that place a Contact on a Job at a particular pipeline position ¹³². Lookups round-trip as three-field objects with Id, FirstName and LastName; preserving all three on import is what keeps display strings correct in the Crelate UI ³⁰.

There is no native cascade-delete: deleting a parent Contact, Company or Job does not delete child Activities, Notes or Placements automatically. If your source platform relied on cascade behaviour, reproduce it via scripted cleanup.

The single best predictor of a clean Crelate migration is how much work you do on the source side before the first Import Data+ button is pressed. Crelate's own guidance on ATS migrations explicitly calls out data quality, mapping clarity and customer responsiveness as the three variables that determine whether a project lands in two weeks or six ¹³⁵¹³⁸.

The single best predictor of a clean migration is how much work you do before the first Import Data+ button is pressed.

Treat the source export as raw material that needs shaping to Crelate's expected formats — email lowercased, phone normalised, picklist values rewritten to destination Custom Picklist values, dates in MM/DD/YYYY or ISO-8601, owners resolved to Crelate usernames, and the External Primary Key stamped onto every row.

Source-side prep

• Audit and dedup the source candidate database before export — email-case-only duplicates, role-based addresses and obviously stale records (last-touched 5+ years ago, never placed) should be pruned now, not after they land in Crelate⁶⁶.
• Stamp the External Primary Key on every Contact, Company and Job row in the source export. Use the source platform's primary key or a UUID and keep it stable across re-runs — this single value is what makes Import Data+ behave as upsert rather than insert ²⁶².
• Normalise picklist values for Contact Type, Company Type, Job Status, Workflow Stage and every custom picklist — Crelate's Import Data+ matches on the value defined in Settings → Custom Picklists, and rows targeting undefined values are flagged in the Invalid Imports report rather than silently dropped ⁶²⁷⁴.
• Decide resume-file scope. Each candidate has zero, one or many resumes. Decide latest-only, all-versions, or none — the resume leg is its own pipeline that runs *after* Contact rows land, capped at 250 resumes per batch ³⁶¹³⁹.
• Convert source rich-text Notes to plain text ahead of time — Crelate Activity bodies do not preserve embedded images, charts or pasted Outlook HTML formatting reliably, so flatten or convert to Markdown before the load.

Destination-side prep

• Stand up the Crelate account with the right edition — Crelate Recruit for agency workflows, Crelate Hire for in-house corporate recruiting. The two share the data model but differ on Job Portal, Client Portal and Placement workflows ¹³⁶.
• Provision users first under Settings → User Roles, set the default recruiter role and create any custom roles before importing — owner assignment falls back to the import-running user when a referenced owner does not exist ⁶⁹¹⁰⁴.
• Pre-create every custom field in Settings → Custom Fields on the right record type with the right field type — Numeric, Date, Picklist and Long Answer have different downstream search behaviours and you cannot freely change type after the field has rows on it ⁷².
• Pre-create every Custom Picklist in Settings → Custom Picklists — every drop-down value that a source row targets must exist in the destination first, or the row appears in the Invalid Imports tab during preview ⁶²⁷⁴.
• Pre-build every Workflow in Settings → Workflows with the full stage list (capped at 20 stages per Workflow) before loading any Jobs or candidate-on-job records — Workflow Stage names are the field rows match against ¹³².

People prep

Cutover only works if humans cooperate. Lock down a source-system freeze window — typically 24 to 72 hours for teams whose recruiters live in the system. Train recruiters on Contact search, Workflow Stage transitions and the Activity tab before go-live. A typical small-agency Crelate migration runs two to four weeks of elapsed time ¹³⁵¹³⁸; data depth, custom-picklist count and resume volume drive the upper end. Crelate's own onboarding emphasises customer responsiveness as the largest single driver of project length ¹³⁷.

Crelate exposes load paths that depend on dataset size and record-type mix. Import Data+ is the native UI wizard for spreadsheet loads. The dedicated Importing Resumes flow handles bulk resume parsing.

Import Data+

The native Import Data+ wizard lives at Menu → Import → Import Data from Excel ³². It accepts XLS, XLSX and CSV files — colour fills, merged cells and pivoted layouts must be removed before upload ³³. The flow: pick the target record type, upload the file, accept or override the auto-mapping, nominate the External Primary Key column as identifier, save the Field Map for re-use, and step through Preview, Invalid Imports and Error Summary tabs before committing ⁶².

The platform documentation states Import Data+ handles up to 50,000 records per spreadsheet import ¹⁰¹. For datasets above that ceiling, split into multiple files. The Preview, Invalid Imports and Error Summary tabs are the single most-important quality gate in the wizard — a row that lands in *Invalid Imports* has failed validation, which is usually a custom-picklist value the destination does not recognise ⁶².

Importing Resumes

Resume bulk import lives at Menu → Import → Import new Contacts ³⁶¹³⁹. The wizard accepts up to 250 resume files at a time, parses each through Crelate's resume parser, and creates Contact records pre-populated with parsed name, email, phone, employment history and skill tags. You can apply tags, assign a Source, set the Owner and attach to a Job in the same step ¹³⁹.

The parser is the strength and the trap: on a clean account it dramatically reduces typing, but on a migration where you already have Contact rows in Crelate, parser-driven re-population can overwrite values you carefully migrated from the source. The pattern most teams use is: load Contacts via Import Data+ first with the External Primary Key, then attach resumes as binary attachments (no parser) keyed off the same External Primary Key.

Mapping is where every ATS migration earns its scars. The schema decisions in your mapping spreadsheet determine whether recruiters find candidates on day two, whether placement reports work on day five, and whether the team trusts the data by day thirty.

Work record-type by record-type in strict import order: Companies first (so Contacts and Jobs can lookup against them), then Contacts (so Jobs can name a primary recruiter and Activities can attach), then Jobs (so candidate-on-Job rows can attach), then Workflow Stage assignments, then Placements, then Activities and Notes, and resumes and file attachments last.

Candidates — Contacts and the candidate database

The candidate database in Crelate is the Contact entity filtered by Contact Type. There is no separate Candidate object as in Bullhorn — the same record can be a candidate today and a hiring-manager client tomorrow, with Contact Type and Smart Tags driving the recruiter's view ¹³⁶¹⁴⁰. The implication for mapping: source candidate and source contact tables both land on Contact, with Contact Type as the disambiguator.

Companies and the client-side records

Jobs, Workflow Stages and the candidate pipeline — the ATS deep dive

The job-requisition pipeline in Crelate is built around Jobs with Workflow Stages that hold candidate position in the pipeline ¹³². A Job is the open requisition (e.g. *Senior RN, Boston*), and candidates move through pre-defined stages such as *New Lead, Submitted, Phone Screen, Interview, Offer, Placed, Rejected*. Crelate's Workflow stage cap is 20 stages per Workflow ¹³².

Recreate every Workflow Stage in Settings → Workflows *before* loading any Job records. Rows that target an undefined Workflow Stage end up in Invalid Imports during the Preview step ⁶². If your source pipeline has more than 20 stages, collapse adjacent low-volume stages into a single Crelate stage during transform — typical compressions merge *Internal Review* and *Internal Submission* into one bucket, or *First Interview* and *Second Interview* into a generic *Interviewing* stage.

Application stage transition history is one of the most-asked-about pieces of an ATS migration and one of the least-supported on import. Crelate stamps stage-change history through repeated update events — there is no path to load a pre-built stage-history table directly. To preserve the timeline, capture each transition as (contact_id, job_id, stage, timestamp, user) and replay in date order, accepting that the *modifying user* will be the importing user, not the original recruiter.

Alternatively, store the legacy stage history verbatim in a Long Answer custom field on the Job-Contact join (or as a structured Activity Note) so the timeline stays searchable, and let live stage history accrue forward from cutover.

Interview feedback and Scorecards

Crelate Hire ships an Interview Loops & Templates feature where each interview step carries an assigned Scorecard with categorised questions and rating fields ¹³³¹³⁴. Source scorecard data from Greenhouse, Lever or similar platforms does not map natively — the practical pattern is to land structured scorecard responses into a Long Answer custom field on the candidate-on-Job join (preserving the question / rating / interviewer triples as text), and to use Crelate's native Interview Forms going forward from cutover ¹³⁴.

If interview feedback is critical to search and reporting, pre-create the destination Question Categories under Interview Form Questions before the load so scorecard ratings can be replayed against the right category groupings ¹³⁴.

Candidate sources, EEOC and Smart Tags

Candidate source tracking in Crelate lives on the Contact's *Source* field plus an optional *Source Type* picklist, and feeds the Advanced Search Past Activity filter which is the primary reporting surface for source effectiveness ⁹⁴. Pre-create every source value (Indeed, LinkedIn Recruiter, employee referral, agency partner) in Settings → Custom Picklists, then resolve source labels to Crelate Source values via a lookup table during transform. Mismatched source labels appear as invalid rows during Preview ⁶².

EEOC data (ethnicity, gender, veteran, disability status) lives on dedicated custom fields you create under Settings → Custom Fields on Contact. Treat EEOC fields as sensitive personal data: confirm the source export is permitted under your retention policy, that lawful basis exists under GDPR if any EU candidates are involved, and that the destination's privacy posture matches ¹⁴⁶¹⁴⁷.

Smart Tags are Crelate's tagging system — Skills, Specialties, Industries, Certifications, Geographic specialties. They attach to Contact, Company and Job. Pre-create the Smart Tag categories and the parent values in Settings → Custom Picklists, then resolve source tag labels to Crelate tag values via a lookup table during transform. Smart Tag mismatches drop silently on import — verify against Custom Picklists, not against the Contact-record UI ⁷⁴.

Resumes and file attachments

Resume and attachment migration is its own pipeline that runs *after* Contact rows land. The Import Data+ wizard does not handle files; the supported paths are: (a) the Importing Resumes wizard, capped at 250 files per batch and parser-driven ³⁶¹³⁹; (b) attaching each binary directly to a Contact with the External Primary Key as the key and parser re-population suppressed; and (c) the Crelate Chrome Extension and email-forwarding paths for self-service backfill ¹⁰¹.

For large resume estates (tens of thousands of files), the pattern most agencies adopt is: keep originals in S3 or Azure Blob, load only the latest resume into Crelate with parser disabled, and store the archive deep link in a Long Answer URL custom field on the Contact. Confirm per-attachment file-type and size caps against the destination account configuration before the bulk run.

Notes, Tasks, Appointments and historical activity

Crelate supports Activities — Notes, Calls, Emails, SMS, Tasks and Appointments — with original timestamps preserved by setting the *Activity Date* field explicitly on creation. The Import Data+ wizard targets Contact, Company and Job rows; Activities must go through the Activity-aware variant of the import flow ¹⁰¹. Each Activity row carries an Activity Type, body, Activity Date, owner, and one or more associations to parent records via External Primary Key ¹⁰².

Activity bodies do not preserve rich-text formatting reliably — pasted Outlook HTML, embedded images and charts may render inconsistently. Convert source rich-text bodies to plain text or a Markdown-style structured format during transform, and keep the original rich-text body archived in S3 with a deep link in the Activity body if downstream search depends on it.

Custom-field mapping strategy

Resist the urge to map every source custom field one-to-one. Migrate only the custom fields used by an active recruiter workflow, Advanced Search or report in the last 12 months ⁶⁶. Excess fields weaken Custom Picklist governance, slow Advanced Search indexing, and make Crelate Reporting harder to wire.

For picklist fields whose source values do not match the destination, either: (1) extend the destination Custom Picklist with the missing values, (2) collapse adjacent values during transform, or (3) introduce a parallel Long Answer custom field holding the legacy value verbatim. Calculated / formula fields do not import — Crelate has no formula type, so source formulas must be replicated on each write or pre-computed before export ⁷².

Audit trail, ownership and original timestamps

Crelate maintains an audit trail on the Activity tab of each Contact, Company and Job record, with the modifying user recorded as the user that initiated the change ¹⁰². *Activity Date* on Notes, Calls, Emails, SMS, Tasks and Appointments can be set explicitly on creation — backdated Activities show up correctly on the timeline and the Advanced Search Past Activity filter ⁹⁴.

System-managed created-at and modified-at on Contact, Company and Job records cannot be overwritten on standard imports — they are stamped to import day. If you need to preserve the original audit trail, the pattern is to create *Legacy Created Date* and *Legacy Modified Date* custom Date fields on every record type and populate them from the source export. All historical-period reports should be wired against the legacy fields.

Owner assignment during import works only if the username exists at the moment of import; rows whose owner cannot be resolved are imported with the import-running user as owner, silently breaking per-recruiter Past Activity reporting ¹⁰⁴. Pre-provision every Crelate user account before the Contact, Company, Job and Activity loads.

Validation is the bridge between Import Data+ finishing and recruiters being allowed in. A three-stage validation works best: a 10 percent pilot load with recruiter spot-checks, the full load with real-time row-count monitoring, and a 30-day audit driven by Advanced Search and Reporting¹²⁵. The most reliable signal is recruiters verifying their own desks — they know what right looks like better than any reconciliation script.

Build a reconciliation queries spreadsheet that compares source and destination on each of these counts. Anything outside a 0.5 percent variance gets investigated before users get login access.

• Total Contacts imported vs source — minus deliberately excluded rows (stale, opt-out, duplicate emails).
• Total Companies imported vs source — checking that name-based collapse did not over-merge separate client records.
• Total Jobs per status vs source, plus **sum of *Salary* per Job Status** — a non-trivial dollar variance signals a status-mapping error or a currency-precision drop.
• Candidate counts per Workflow Stage per Job vs source — confirms the pipeline shape per requisition matches after stage compression.
• Total Placements per Placement Type (Contract, Contract-to-Hire, Perm) and **sum of *Pay Rate* per period** — drives billing-side reporting from day one.
• Activities per type (Notes, Calls, Emails, SMS, Tasks, Appointments) imported vs source — and a date-bucketed comparison to confirm *Activity Date* round-tripped.
• Owner distribution per record type — group by Owner.username and confirm no record landed unowned that should not have ¹⁰⁴.
• External Primary Key integrity — count distinct External Primary Keys per record type; any nulls or duplicates indicate the upsert key was not consistently set ².

On top of reconciliation, run a manual spot-check protocol: pick 30 random Contacts across Contact Types and verify each field against the source UI. Pick five high-value Jobs and trace the full association graph — Company, Owner, candidates at each Workflow Stage, recent Activities, Placement. If discrepancies show up in three or more of the 30, halt the load, fix the root cause, and re-run by External Primary Key upsert.

Crelate does not ship a native bulk-undo. The recovery path runs through Bulk Operations — multi-select on the Contact, Company or Job grid lets you mass-delete, mass-reassign, or mass-update by selection ¹⁰². The practical rollback strategy: stamp every imported row with an *Import Batch ID* Long Answer custom field, and if catastrophe strikes, filter by that batch ID in the grid and bulk-delete the affected rows before re-running the load cleanly.

The other guardrails: export everything from Crelate to a backup file before the import starts (Crelate has no rollback button, so a self-managed backup is the only safety net), keep the source system live for at least 30 days post-cutover, and stage the Decommission of the source for 30 to 90 days out, never the same day.

Cutover sequencing: (1) source ATS goes read-only and the desk is notified; (2) a final delta export captures everything changed during the test window; (3) delta is loaded via Import Data+ against the External Primary Key; (4) reconciliation runs; (5) recruiters get login access and a 48-hour hyper-care window with the migration lead on call; (6) source decommission is scheduled 30 to 90 days out, never same-day.

Crelate's in-house Professional Services team operates migrations end-to-end from over 40 source platforms, with the explicit claim of thousands of completed ATS data migrations ¹⁵²¹³⁷. The team handles export-side coordination, mapping, parser configuration and validation, and typically runs two to six weeks of elapsed time depending on dataset depth and customer responsiveness ¹³⁵¹³⁸.

Crelate's published migration approach follows a Discovery → Development → Test pattern: a consultative scoping call, mapping development against the source export, and an iterative test cycle before the final cutover ¹³⁷. For agencies that want a hands-off migration with a single accountable team, Crelate Professional Services is the default path and is bundled into most subscription tiers as an onboarding-services line item ¹⁵²¹⁵³.

On the ETL and iPaaS side, Fivetran, Airbyte, Workato and Integrate.io all have catalogues that include recruiting and CRM-adjacent connectors. None ship a first-class Crelate connector at the time of writing, so their role in a Crelate migration is the staging layer — landing source data into a warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery), running SQL transformations to normalise picklist values and resolve owner usernames, then pushing into Crelate.

Workato and Integrate.io are the common picks where the migration is bundled with workflow automation rebuilds; Fivetran and Airbyte are the common picks for warehouse-first teams that want to reverse-ETL into Crelate.

Managed-migration cost ranges vary widely. A clean homegrown-database-to-Crelate load of under 25,000 Contacts with no resume backfill and standard fields only typically lands in the $2,000–$8,000 range as a Professional Services line item on top of the Crelate license, which starts at $119 per user per month ¹⁵³¹⁵⁴. A Bullhorn-to-Crelate or Greenhouse-to-Crelate project with stage-history replay, custom fields, resume backfill at scale and Activity history typically runs $10,000–$40,000, driven by record count, Workflow stage compression depth and resume-file volume.

For teams that want to outsource the migration end-to-end, FlitStack specialises in ATS migrations into Crelate and handles the field mapping, External Primary Key design, Workflow Stage compression, resume-file pipeline, stage-history replay and validation work described in Sections 5 and 7. Pricing is fixed-fee, based on record count and source platform, with separate line items for stage-history replay and resume-file depth so the scope is transparent before signature.

This is one of several legitimate paths — the right choice for any given team depends on whether they want Crelate's own Professional Services bundled with onboarding, an iPaaS-first approach with Fivetran or Workato as the long-term sync layer, or a specialist migration vendor with platform-independent accountability. Explore FlitStack →