What is an ATS and what is it for?
An ATS (Applicant Tracking System) — also called ATS software or applicant tracking software — is recruitment software whose main job is to unify candidate responses from different sources in one place – from job boards, LinkedIn, career sites, referral programs, social media campaigns, and sourcing. Only when the data is in one place can the system manage and measure hiring. The ATS then guides the candidate through the whole selection process, lets recruiters and hiring managers collaborate on evaluations and interviews, and finally provides analytics and reporting you can use to improve hiring.
1. Unify candidate responses in one place
This is the primary and most important function of any ATS. Candidates come to you from many directions, and without an ATS each ends up somewhere different:
- job boards – in each board's admin panel separately,
- career site – in the company email inbox,
- LinkedIn – in a specific recruiter's messages,
- referral program – in an email from a colleague,
- social media and campaigns – in comments and messages,
- sourcing – in the personal spreadsheet of whoever was searching.
The ATS brings these streams together and turns them into a single database that's actually worked with. Without this step there's no point in dealing with anything else – all the other functions rest on it.
Related features: Multiposting · Job boards · Career site · LinkedIn plugin · Duplicate detection
As long as your responses are in five different places, you have nothing to manage – and nothing to measure.
2. Guide the candidate through the process and collaborate with colleagues
The second layer of an ATS is the selection process itself. The candidate moves through defined hiring stages, and the system holds together everything happening around them: interview notes, dates, evaluations from individual people, and the communication history.
The key word is collaboration. It's never just the recruiter involved in hiring – hiring managers, teammates, and sometimes external partners take part too. The ATS gives them a shared place where they see the same thing: who the candidate is, what stage they're in, what others said about them, and what's expected of them. This eliminates hiring's most common bad habit – forwarding resumes over email and deciding in one private conversation.
Related features: Kanban · Custom process stages · Notes · Scorecard · Interview scheduling · Manager views
3. Measure hiring and improve it
The third layer is the reason an ATS pays off even when the first two feel manageable by hand. Because the data sits in one place and the process has defined stages, the system can calculate what no one otherwise knows: where the best candidates come from, where the selection process stalls, how long it takes to fill a role, and how many candidates are lost at each stage.
Typical metrics are time to hire (from the candidate's response to accepting the offer), time to fill (from opening a role to closing it), the conversion funnel between stages, and candidate source. Without them you don't manage hiring, you just process it.
Related features: Response source overview · Time to hire · Time to fill · Conversion funnel · NPS measurement
What process an ATS covers
An ATS is a system for managing the hiring process. Its goal is to capture the whole process from the moment a request arises to the candidate's start date:
- A manager's request to open a role, its approval, and opening the role.
- Publishing the posting in various places – to job boards and the career site.
- Collecting candidates in one place, including those found through sourcing, i.e. active searching.
- Your own hiring process that you set up: pre-screening, interview scheduling, interview notes, and several further rounds depending on how you've built the process.
- Ending a candidate at any stage and communicating with them – information about progress and about the outcome of the selection.
- Cooperation with the hiring manager: the person who requested the role comments on the candidate's relevance, in some processes approves them, and continues the process alongside the recruiter.
- An offer to the candidate (a hiring proposal), where you tell them on what terms and when you're offering them the start.
Once the candidate accepts the offer, the process formally ends in the ATS. Some ATS platforms let you continue with pre-boarding, but that usually belongs to specialized onboarding tools or to HRIS systems.
Related features: Multiposting · Custom process stages · Scorecard · Job offer generation
Where an ATS sits among other systems
The terms are often confused. Here's how an ATS differs from the three systems it's most often mistaken for.
ATS and HRIS
An HRIS (HR information system) covers the whole HR process, including attendance and payroll. Some HRIS platforms allow a simplified hiring process too – but because they don't specialize in it, hiring in them is often just a plain list of candidates that you also usually have to enter manually.
That's exactly why ATS platforms have been gaining popularity: they specialize in the hiring process and automate even the parts an HRIS doesn't treat as essential.
ATS and CRM
An ATS is sometimes called a "CRM for HR". The analogy makes sense: a CRM is used in sales and works with leads and opportunities. In an ATS, the leads are candidates and the opportunity is the effort to hire a candidate for a role – the equivalent of closing a deal.
Even so, it's not right to call an ATS that. A CRM is purely for sales. By analogy it may handle very similar things, but it isn't tailored the way an ATS is.
ATS and Excel
Excel is the evolutionary predecessor of the ATS – a spreadsheet in which some companies easily and clearly shared, and still share, candidates. But you have to approach it knowing that it automates nothing and all data has to be typed into it. For professional management of the hiring process it's not an ideal approach.
| System | What it handles | Relationship to an ATS |
|---|---|---|
| ATS | Managing the hiring process from a request to open a role to accepting the offer. | — |
| HRIS | The whole HR process including attendance and payroll. | Hiring in it is just a list of candidates you have to enter manually. |
| CRM | Sales: leads and opportunities. | An analogy of the ATS ("CRM for HR"), but not tailored to hiring. |
| Excel | A spreadsheet for sharing candidates. | The evolutionary predecessor of the ATS. Automates nothing, data is re-typed. |
When does a company actually need an ATS?
As a rule of thumb, an ATS starts to make sense once a company advertises at least fifteen roles a year. But the number of postings only decides part of it. You need to look at it through three lenses.
1. How many roles you advertise a year
Fifteen open roles a year is a reasonable threshold above which an ATS pays off practically always. But it's not a requirement.
2. How many candidates go through your pipeline
What matters is the volume of candidates, not the number of postings. For a high-volume role – typically call-center hiring – a single open role can be enough for an ATS to make sense. Hundreds of candidates pass through it, and without a system you can't manage them.
3. What you want to gain or change by adopting an ATS
This is the lens most often forgotten. Even a very small company with very little internal hiring may need an ATS – for example when it wants to be candidate-focused and come across that way externally throughout the selection process. There it can make sense to get an ATS even at five postings a year.
The reason may also be that you want a platform where you share candidates sourced from LinkedIn. You might be hiring for just three or four roles continuously, where you've had a long-term shortage of people, while wanting to build a unified candidate pool inside your ATS.
This guide is published by Recruitis.io, an ATS. How we cover the three layers described above:
- Unifying data: multiposting and automated collection of responses from 35+ job boards, the career site, and via the plugin from LinkedIn too.
- Process and collaboration: a kanban pipeline with custom hiring stages, evaluations and notes shared with hiring managers, and interview scheduling.
- Measurement: reports and BI dashboards over hiring, SLA tracking and candidate NPS measurement.
- We run the system in the EU with privacy in mind; users are included in the price with no limit on their number.
Where Recruitis won't help: we're an ATS, not an HRIS. Our role ends when the offer is accepted – we don't handle attendance, payroll, or employee records. For that you need an HR system and a connection to it.
Frequently asked questions
When does a company need an ATS?
As a rule of thumb, an ATS starts to make sense once a company advertises at least fifteen roles a year. But the number of postings only decides part of it, and you should look at it through three lenses. The first is the number of advertised roles. The second is the volume of candidates going through the pipeline: for a high-volume role, such as call-center hiring, a single open role can be enough, because hundreds of candidates pass through it. The third is what you want to gain or change by adopting an ATS. Even a very small company with little internal hiring may need an ATS if it wants to be candidate-focused, or if it wants a platform where it shares candidates sourced from LinkedIn and builds a unified candidate pool. Then an ATS makes sense even at five postings a year.
Is an ATS the same as a CRM?
An ATS is sometimes called a "CRM for HR". The analogy makes sense: a CRM is used in sales and works with leads and opportunities. In an ATS, the leads are candidates and the opportunity is the effort to hire a candidate for a role — the equivalent of closing a deal. Even so, it's not right to call an ATS that. A CRM is purely for sales; by analogy it may handle very similar things, but it isn't tailored the way an ATS is. Excel, meanwhile, is the evolutionary predecessor of the ATS: a spreadsheet in which companies used to share, and still share, candidates, but it automates nothing and all data has to be typed into it.