What Is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)? A Complete Guide

An applicant tracking system (ATS) helps companies organize applicants and keep recruiting workflows going. The right ATS makes it easier for hiring teams to collaborate. It also gives candidates a consistent experience. In this guide, we’ll break down what an ATS is, how it works, what it does, the benefits for your hiring team, and what to look for when evaluating options.

What Is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)?

An applicant tracking system is a user-friendly software solution used to track top candidates—those who apply for job openings, as well as passive prospects recruiters proactively engage for open roles—through the entire recruiting process.

Companies reach for an ATS once hiring is too complex to manage with disconnected tools. It gives recruiters one place to keep candidates moving and keeps everyone involved in hiring on the same page.

99% of Fortune 500 companies use a best-in-class ATS as the foundation of their hiring tech stack. What you won’t find in their tech stacks, though, are legacy applicant tracking systems that deter efficient recruiting and hiring, preventing talent acquisition (TA) specialists from being highly productive and collaborative. As our ATS buyer’s guide states:

“Old-school ATS help recruiters review applications and resumes and move job seekers through the interview process. They also enable recruiters and other hiring stakeholders to hire for key roles. Once this process is over, though, all that data disappears into a black hole (i.e., becomes inaccessible and unusable for talent teams).”

A leading ATS is an indispensable recruitment and hiring platform that every organization—regardless of industry, size, or business model—needs to fill key positions across their companies.

Access the ATS Buyer’s Guide here

How Does an ATS Work?

An ATS gives hiring teams one place to manage the hiring process from the moment a role opens through the final offer. While every platform works a little differently, most follow the same general flow.

Create and Approve the Requisition

The process starts when a team identifies an open role. What is ATS in recruiting? Recruiters and hiring managers use the ATS to create the requisition, define what they’re hiring for, and route it to the right people for approval.

Publish the Job

Once the role is approved, recruiters publish the job to their careers site and other recruiting channels from the ATS. That keeps job details consistent and gives the team a place to manage the opening.

Collect and Organize Applications

As candidates apply, their information flows into the ATS. Recruiters can see who applied, review candidate profiles, and keep track of where each person stands in the process.

Screen and Advance Candidates

Recruiters review applicants and move qualified candidates into the next stage of the hiring process. The ATS keeps that progress visible so the team quickly sees what needs to happen next.

Schedule Interviews and Collect Feedback

As candidates move forward, the ATS helps coordinate interviews and gives interviewers a place to record feedback. Recruiters don’t have to chase down notes or piece together decisions from separate conversations.

Manage Approvals and Offers

When the team is ready to hire, the ATS system helps manage the final approval process and move the selected candidate toward an offer. Candidate information and previous feedback stay connected to the same record.

Report on the Hiring Process

Because the hiring process is managed in one system, teams also use that data to understand how recruiting is performing. ATS reporting allows talent leaders to see where candidates are coming from, how quickly roles are moving, and where the hiring process gets stuck.

Who Uses an Applicant Tracking System?

An ATS system gives everyone involved in hiring a shared place to manage their part of the process and keep candidates moving.

Benefits of an Applicant Tracking System

For hiring teams

1. Unifies candidate data

The best ATS centralizes all data points and information related to prospective hires. This helps recruiters determine which prospects are worth engaging for certain roles. It also gives the wider hiring team one place to find application history, interview feedback, and other details tied to each candidate.

2. Streamlines and automates tasks

Not every recruiting activity can be put on “autopilot” through automation. However, you may be surprised by just how many of your team’s daily tasks can be automated, eliminating the tedious manual labor involved. For instance, an ATS system can automatically send communications, eliminate duplicate data, and schedule interviews based on candidate availability.

A great ATS provides a happy medium between overly automated and overly manual, ensuring you don’t waste valuable time or jeopardize your human touch. Leading ATS providers like Lever help recruiters implement rules and ATS workflows that, in turn, streamline their requisition, job posting, and offer approvals.

3. Creates consistent hiring workflows

When different recruiters or hiring managers follow different processes, it’s easier for steps to get missed. An ATS gives teams a shared workflow for moving candidates from one stage to the next, making the process consistent from application through offer.

4. Improves communication and collaboration

Poor communication between recruiters and hiring managers can lead to missed goals and frustration for team members up to the C-suite. Applicant tracking systems ensure talent specialists can liaise closely with other hiring stakeholders to stay on the same page about everything, from which roles are top priority at a given moment to where candidates of interest are in their hiring funnel. Because feedback, candidate details, and hiring activity live in the same system, stakeholders always have the context they need.

5. Improves hiring visibility and reporting

An ATS also gives talent teams a clearer picture of how hiring is performing. Reporting shows where candidates are coming from, how they move through the funnel, how long roles take to fill, and where the process slows down. That gives TA leaders better information to work with.

6. Keeps candidate communication consistent

When recruiters are juggling multiple roles and candidates, tasks get dropped. An ATS keeps communication moving with interview details, status updates, and next steps. Teams stay responsive in the process.

For candidates

1. Makes it easier to apply

A tough application process can lose candidates before they ever speak with a recruiter. An ATS makes it easy to find an open role, submit an application, and provide the information the hiring team needs.

2. Improves scheduling

Coordinating an interview shouldn’t start an endless back-and-forth email chain. ATS scheduling tools allow candidates to choose a time that works for them. They also keep recruiters and interviewers coordinated.

3. Reduces dropped handoffs

Candidates interact with recruiters, hiring managers, and interviewers in the hiring process. When information or next steps get lost, candidates are the first to notice. An ATS keeps candidate information and activity connected. That makes it less likely that someone gets left waiting.

What Features Should an Ideal ATS Have?

While applicant tracking systems are considered essential solutions for recruiters and hiring managers to use in their joint efforts to convert premier prospects into new hires, not all ATS systems are the same.

If you’re looking into choosing a leading ATS—ideally, one that also offers robust candidate relationship management capabilities (CRM)—to replace your existing recruitment platform, you’d be wise to invest in one that offers the following ATS features:

Job Requisition and Posting Management

Your ATS should give recruiters a central place to create and manage requisitions, route them for approval, and get approved roles in front of candidates.

Many applicant tracking systems connect with popular job boards like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed, as well as niche job communities like AngelList and GitHub. As an extra bonus, look for systems that allow you to update postings across all job boards simultaneously.

Application and Candidate Database Management

Candidate information shouldn’t disappear when a role closes. Look for an ATS that keeps applications, resumes, notes, activity, and other candidate details in one searchable database. That gives recruiters a view of each candidate and empowers them to identify good prospects when another role opens.

Resume and Application Review and Screening

As a hiring professional, many of your daily activities revolve around reviewing resumes and matching candidates with the ideal role fit. Your ATS should make the resume review process as straightforward and effortless as possible, helping you advance candidates faster while not compromising hiring quality.

Hiring Workflows and Pipeline Stages

Your ATS should allow you to see where every candidate stands in the hiring process. Look for customizable stages and workflows that match the way your team hires, so recruiters can move candidates forward and know when someone has been sitting in one stage for too long.

Interview Scheduling

Managing the interview schedules for candidates and interview panelists used to be a nightmare for everyone. That’s no longer the case, as long as you have a top-rated ATS. For instance, Lever enables prospects to pick days and times for interviews that align with openings in interviewers’ schedules, thanks to direct sync between their digital calendars.

Interview Feedback

Scheduling the interview is only part of the process. An ATS should also give interviewers a place to submit notes, scorecards, and feedback. That way, recruiters and hiring managers have the information they need to make decisions.

Candidate Communication

Well-timed, bespoke communications with candidates have proven to be a competitive differentiator for talent acquisition teams. But it’s only a significant differentiator with an ATS that has built-in nurture functionality and pre-set templates you can edit and reuse for multiple roles and teams. This allows you to scale outreach without compromising on personalization.

Reporting and Analytics

Recruitment dashboards don’t have to be overly granular and conceptual. Dashboards powered by the top applicant tracking systems monitor real-time progress for numerous facets of the process, such as pipeline growth, job listings, open requisitions, operations, interviews scheduled, and offers extended and accepted.

Offer Management

The ATS should continue supporting recruiters after the final interview. Look for offer management features that help teams handle approvals, create and send offers, and track their status in one place.

Integrations

The best applicant tracking systems integrate with top recruiting tools that help you conduct background checks, collect e-signatures from new hires, liaise with interviewers, record video interviews, and execute other vital recruiting tasks. For instance, Lever integrates with many of the top recruiting tools on the market so teams can keep using the tools they rely on.

Permissions and Security

Candidate records contain sensitive information, and not everyone involved in hiring needs access to everything. The best ATS options will have role-based permissions and security controls that let you determine who can view, edit, or manage different types of information.

ATS vs. Recruiting CRM

An ATS and a recruiting CRM support different parts of the recruiting process. An ATS manages applicants for active roles. A recruiting CRM comes into play earlier. It allows recruiters to build relationships with prospective candidates, including people who may be a fit for the company but aren’t ready to apply yet.

Some recruiting platforms, including Lever, combine ATS and recruiting CRM capabilities in one system. That gives teams a way to manage active hiring and build a pipeline of prospective candidates for future roles.

How to Choose an Applicant Tracking System

Now that you understand why having a top-tier ATS is important, you might be wondering how to get started. Follow these steps to find the best fit for your organization’s hiring needs.

1. Identify Your Requirements

You might be tempted to choose the ATS with the most features, but investing in more features than you need can present challenges to your hiring team. To keep your costs low and workflow optimized, you need a solution that closely adheres to your needs. Before you make any big buying decisions, sit down with your team and decide:

• Your budget
• The time you have available for ATS implementation
• How many seats you need
• What features are the most important based on hiring priorities
• How user-friendly the solution must be

Nailing down your non-negotiables from the outset allows you to stay focused and find the right solution efficiently. Consult all important parties during the planning process, so you get well-rounded perspectives on what you should prioritize.

2. Consider Integration Capabilities

Your ATS will become a major component of your daily operations, so it should fit in seamlessly with the structure and tools that work best for your hiring teams. That’s where software integrations come into play.

To find information about integration potential, go straight to the source on the provider’s website. For example, here’s how you can find out if Lever integrates with your tools:

• Navigate to the Partners page. This is the main search page for all of our integration partners.
• Use the collections and categories tabs. These tabs allow you to sift through the complete database, filtering to the tools you need.
• Research the integration. Before you make any decisions, thoroughly review each tool’s integration process, licensing terms, and capabilities.
• Read activation instructions. Once you decide on a recruiting tool, click the “Learn More” button in each integration’s listing to review detailed activation instructions.

3. Request Demos

Nobody knows your team’s preferences and strengths better than you, which makes trying the system via demos one of the most important parts of the decision-making process. Ask these questions about any applicant tracking system you demo:

• Are the reporting dashboards straightforward and useful?
• Are workflows customizable to funnel position?
• Can you easily search and filter through candidate records?
• Can you communicate efficiently with team members?
• Are candidate-facing elements responsive?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you should have a good idea of whether the ATS is functional on both your end and your candidates’ end. If SmartRecruiters is on your shortlist, our list of the best SmartRecruiters alternatives shows what else is worth a look.

4. Read Reviews and Recommendations

While company-provided resources and demos are extremely important, they might not speak to your organization’s unique situation. Turn to your peers to get honest, holistic reviews about the solution. You can also ask your connections in your industry for their recommendations or use a software review site like Capterra.

If you want to see how specific platforms stack up, start with our roundups of the best enterprise applicant tracking systems and the best recruiting software. Teams replacing an existing system can also compare the best iCIMS alternatives and the best Workday Recruiting alternatives.

5. Consider Security, Scalability, and Support

These features deserve their own section because of how important they are to your long-term success. Before signing any contracts, ensure your solution can grow with your business, protect important information, and provide support resources so you can easily train new team members. If you are weighing Lever against other platforms, our honest comparison of the best Lever alternatives lays out the differences.

Conclusion

A good ATS improves hiring as a whole. Recruiters should be able to see what’s happening with each role, keep candidate information organized, and move the process forward with ease.

Lever takes that a step further by bringing ATS and recruiting CRM capabilities into the same platform. That means teams manage active applicants and build relationships with people they may want to hire later.

If you’re comparing platforms, download our complete ATS Buyer’s Guide for a closer look at what to consider before choosing one.

Applicant Tracking System (ATS) FAQs

Which organizations can benefit from using an ATS?

All organizations, from small businesses to multinational corporations, can benefit from using an ATS. You just need to find the solution that best complements your budget, needs, hiring style, and technological prowess.

Can an ATS automatically reject candidates?

Some can, but it depends on how the system is configured. For example, an employer may set a rule that automatically rejects applicants who don’t meet a specific requirement. That’s different from an ATS independently deciding who should or shouldn’t be considered for a role.

What’s the difference between an ATS and an HRIS?

An ATS helps teams manage things like job openings, applications, interviews, and offers. An HRIS manages employee information and HR processes like payroll, benefits, time off, and employee records.

What should you look for when choosing an ATS?

Start with how well the system supports the way you work. It should be easy for recruiters and hiring managers to use, fit your hiring workflows, connect with the rest of your HR tech stack, and give you useful visibility into recruiting performance.

Will an AI-powered ATS dictate which candidates companies engage?

While AI-powered ATS can screen and rank candidates based on their qualifications, the hiring team will still see all options, meaning they have the final say and can reach out to anyone they deem suitable.

Is an ATS only useful for recruiters?

No. Candidates have a lot to gain from using an ATS too. Applicant tracking systems allow candidates to proactively check on their application status and communicate with the hiring team efficiently.