Smartmates helps New Zealand recruitment teams prepare candidate and recruitment data before moving it into Zoho Recruit. A Zoho Recruit consultant should review more than the CSV import. Candidate records, clients, contacts, job openings, interviews, notes, activities and attachments all have relationships that need to remain useful after migration, while obsolete and duplicate information should not automatically follow.

Migrating Every Record Can Make the New ATS Messy From Day One

An established recruitment database often contains years of information collected under different processes. Candidate statuses may no longer mean the same thing, clients may exist more than once, job records may be obsolete and important notes may sit in inconsistent fields. Importing all of that information exactly as it exists can make the new ATS difficult to trust immediately. Before migration, the recruitment team should decide what information still has operational value and how historical relationships should appear in the new structure.

Read more: Zoho Recruit vs CRM NZ

What Should Be Reviewed Before Migration

• Active and inactive candidates
• Duplicate candidate records
• Candidate email addresses
• Candidate status values
• CVs and attachments
• Candidate ownership
• Client organisations
• Duplicate clients
• Client contacts
• Open and closed job openings
• Candidate-to-job relationships
• Interviews
• Interview outcomes
• Tasks and activities
• Notes
• Historical submissions
• User accounts
• Custom fields
• Picklist values
• Date formats
• Records that can be archived instead
• Privacy and retention requirements

The New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner states that employers need to comply with the Privacy Act during recruitment, including being transparent about collection and use, protecting candidate data and collecting only information that is necessary. Its recruitment privacy guidance also notes that unsuccessful applicant information should be securely destroyed unless there is a valid reason and appropriate consent to retain it.

Lift-and-Shift Versus Prepared Migration

Area	Lift-and-Shift Migration	Prepared Migration
Candidates	Every record imported	Relevant records are reviewed
Duplicates	Carried into new ATS	Identified before or during migration
Fields	Existing columns recreated	Fields are mapped to useful structure
Status values	Old terminology retained	Current recruitment stages are agreed
Relationships	Rebuilt after import	Import sequence considers dependencies
Historical data	Everything moved	Retention value is considered

Protect the Relationships Between Recruitment Records

Zoho Recruit supports migration of modules including Users, Candidates, Clients, Contacts, Job Openings, Interviews, Notes, Activities and Attachments. The order of migration matters because those records are related.

Smartmates can help prepare those relationships before data is imported.

During a Planning Session, the Senior Team can review the existing ATS or spreadsheet environment, current recruitment workflow, required fields, candidate stages and historical data.

This is also the right time to remove fields that existed only because of limitations in the previous system. A migration should not automatically rebuild every workaround.

The Project Plan Estimate can define data preparation, module structure, field mapping, migration sequence, attachment handling, duplicate management, testing and user training.

After migration, Quality Assurance should sample records across Candidates, Clients and Job Openings to confirm relationships, notes, attachments and activities remain usable.

The objective is not simply to prove that the record count matches. Recruiters need to open a candidate after go-live and trust the information they see.

See also: Zoho Workerly for Staffing NZ

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Zoho Recruit migrate data from another ATS?

Yes. Zoho Recruit supports data migration from other ATS platforms using supported files and module mapping.

Should every historical candidate be migrated?

Not necessarily. The business should consider operational value, data quality, retention requirements and privacy obligations before deciding what to keep.

Can notes and attachments be migrated?

Zoho Recruit supports migration of Notes and Attachments when the source data and relationships are prepared correctly.

Clean the Recruitment Database Before the Move

If your NZ recruitment team is considering Zoho Recruit, Smartmates can help assess what should be cleaned, mapped, retained and migrated before the new ATS goes live.

Book a free Planning Session to plan the migration around usable recruitment data rather than record volume alone.