Remote’s HR team ditched external vendors and is building their own HR systems with AI

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At a team off-site in January, Remote’s founder Job van der Voort challenged his CPO Barbara Matthews to build an ATS tool in house with AI. It was a bit of a dare, and, she said, she was confident it would be incredibly challenging and time-consuming.

“That’s just very complex to build, and it takes a really long time, and blah blah,” Matthews recounted. So van der Voort took another shot at the challenge: CV screener.

The two competed to develop an internal résumé screener, to satisfy his curiosity and get a sense of how tall a task it might be. After the exercise, van der Voort (maybe unsurprisingly, given that he is a tech CEO) found a way to code the app.

His success evolved into a much bigger experiment to rebuild its internal tech stack, one homegrown tool at a time.

“We really are pushing the cultural message of ‘we are all builders.’ It’s not just this team, and it’s not just that team,” Matthews said.

The global payroll and employer of record (EOR) startup helps companies hire workers all around the world. The platform handles the legal paperwork, local taxes, payroll, and benefits for companies hiring internationally.

Later that year in March, Remote pivoted its product and sales strategy, abandoning earlier efforts to build out a broader HRIS, Matthews told HR Brew. Instead, Remote refocused on its roots in global payroll and EOR. Its product and engineering teams abandoned efforts to develop other HR tools, focusing only on global payroll and employment services.

If Remote was really going to build internal tools for the HR stack, Matthews’s people team would need to get in the driver’s seat themselves. Before January, Remote leveraged several external vendors including an ATS, other recruiting tools, and engagement software, according to Matthews.

Matthews told the team, “We’re actually going to not renew with all of these third-party products, so you basically have the rest of this year to figure out how to build your own products.”

Claude and Claude Code helped team members without engineering backgrounds work on applications that could replace vendors, according to Matthews.

The HR team’s flagship project was a bespoke applicant-tracking system. Though the entire team kept delivering for their day jobs, each worked on additional sections of the AST ecosystem to build the components by dividing and conquering. Someone tackled résumé screening, another was “connecting job codes to job descriptions in an app,” and others worked on different components.

So who built the ATS? Three recruiters, a sourcer, Matthew’s executive assistant, and what she referred to as the “tech person” on her people team who helps lead people transformation projects.

“I was just like, build, build, build. Do whatever you want. I’m not going to have any guardrails. I’m not going to hold you all back. I just want you to start to do stuff. It was definitely duplication,” Matthews said. “We’re now at a point actually where we’re putting guardrails and starting to close the aperture, but we had to [go] big just to get them excited.”

Matthews told HR Brew her team meets weekly to brainstorm and gather feedback to highlight and share the work, wins and loses. These “crit labs” give employees a place to demonstrate unfinished projects, share roadblocks, and ask for help. When employees began moving questions into private channels out of embarrassment, Matthews said she encouraged them to bring the work back into public view so others could learn from the problems.

A-T-YES. The Remote internal ATS launched last month. It’s already ingested and handled more than 24,000 applications and candidates, via migration and new applications.

“We migrated a lot of our applications from our old ATS, [had] 7,000 new applications in one week,” she said. “We made six hires, and we also have an ATS feedback channel, and so people submit feedback.”

The ATS is live and launched, but not exactly done. The team uses its built-in feedback channel to make improvements or fixes to their hand made app, to continue to improve its functionality. Matthews wants users to help make the tool more “custom.”

“People submit feedback: ‘Oh, we could have made this,’ or ‘I noticed a bug here,’ and so the team [is] actively fixing the bugs and making improvements and add-ons on a daily basis,” she said.

The whole stack? In Q1, 2026, her HR team could tackle summarizing with the help of ChatGPT, she admitted. By October when the ATS went live, several Remote internal apps had already launched or were in the works as well.

“It’s very energizing for my team to have had the experience that they’ve had and be able to then speak confidently to the business about what’s possible,” she said.

Remote finished an internal learning management system (LMS) in June. Matthews said It’s working on a compensation tool and has developed a 360-degree feedback tool and coded engagement surveying.

“They are so proud, and I am so proud of them,” she said. “There was loads of hurdles that they hit, but they just kept going. Honestly, they just kept going, and they were all in it together, and they are just so energized and happy.”