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A Guide to ATS Recruiting

Apr 8, 2025

Applicant Tracking Systems, Recruiting Best Practices, Recruiting Software

Allie Blackham

Many organizations use an applicant tracking system, or ATS, to help their hiring processes. Why are these systems popular and what do they offer? Let’s find out more about ATS recruiting and its advantages.

What Is an Applicant Tracking System and Why Is It Important?

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is a recruiting software solution that can enhance an organization’s hiring process. An organization can funnel its entire recruitment process through its ATS, using it as a central hub for all job openings and applications. By tracking candidates from when they first apply to the hiring stage, an ATS enables hiring managers and recruiters to identify and engage the best available talent efficiently.

How ATS Recruiting Benefits Companies of Different Sizes

An automatic tracking system can make for an easier and more efficient hiring and recruiting process for any organization. From small not-for-profits to multinational corporations, an ATS can help find the best job candidate without expending too many resources.

Key Features to Look for in an ATS

A highly effective applicant tracking system offers features such as:

Analytics and Reporting

Analytics allow for deep dives into each candidate’s qualifications. Recruiters and hiring managers can use an ATS to track certain analytics, such as degrees, certifications, skills and work experience. But all this data can be overwhelming, especially for positions with many applicants.That’s why reporting is helpful. The best applicant tracking systems offer reports that help categorize candidates. They may also include easy-to-access dashboards with real-time insights and data visualizations.

Candidate Tracking

Innovative candidate data management is crucial to an effective ATS. You need to be able to see, track and sort the candidates for an available position. A system with advanced search, tags, candidate pools and other features enables recruiters to find the right potential candidate with a few clicks of a button.

Furthermore, how the ATS displays all the candidate information is key. A visually confusing dashboard won’t convey this data very well and might require too much time and effort to decipher the data. A comprehensive, easy-to-read and easy-to-use candidate tracking interface is highly beneficial.

Collaboration Tools

Most organizations have more than one person handling hiring and recruiting. Seeking new staff, reviewing their resumes and cover letters, and interviewing, hiring and onboarding them is often a team process. It’s collaborative work that requires sharing information and opinions. An ATS that offers tools and features to make hiring team collaboration and candidate communication easier can boost efficiency and reduce misunderstandings.

Customizability

xYou want to hire a candidate for your organization (or for your client’s organization if you work at a recruitment firm). Not for just any company, but one specific business or agency. Ultimately, every organization, position and candidate is unique, and a good ATS for recruiting should reflect this.

You want to be able to customize your system to meet the needs of your organization and find the right applicants. A flexible ATS can help you build processes that work perfectly for you and your team rather than trying to shoehorn your operations into a predetermined workflow. It’s better to create custom pipelines and save customized views enabling you to understand candidates’ details that matter most to you.

Integrability

Presumably, you do more at your work than just candidate sourcing. And these other tasks and responsibilities require you to use other software and solutions, right? Wouldn’t it be great if your ATS integrated with them easily?

One of the big barriers to adopting new technologies is the worry that they won’t work with the platforms you already use. There are few things more aggravating than fighting with two otherwise well-designed solutions that just refuse to cooperate. This is especially true of an ATS platform and various job boards, such as Indeed, LinkedIn, Monster and ZipRecruiter. ATS integration should enable you to quickly post available positions on a job board and source candidate details from them. And it’s a big bonus if it can integrate with the other apps and programs you use.

Interview Scheduling

A big part of hiring and collaboration is scheduling. If you’re hiring for a position that has 10 or more qualified and interesting candidates, you owe it to your company to interview them all. But that’s a lot of scheduling. It requires a great deal of work — often frustrating and repetitive work—trying to nail down when everyone is available. An ATS that makes scheduling interviews easy is a true time-saver.

Resume Parsing

For any job opening with even a modest level of candidate engagement, reading myriad resumes, CVs and cover letters can be quite time-consuming. Furthermore, just about any job posting is likely to receive applications from candidates who are underqualified or don’t really understand what the hiring manager or recruiter is looking for.

Reading resume after resume from applicants who aren’t suitable for interviewing, let alone hiring, is not an efficient usage of time. An effective ATS can provide a major efficiency boost by parsing resumes. Set the ATS to automatically look for certain qualifications or skills and then pull highlight resumes that meet the given criteria.

Screening Automation

Many benefits of a productive ATS platform come down to automation. You want your applicant tracking software to handle the more repetitive and menial tasks of the talent acquisition and hiring process.

ATS solutions that efficiently automate the initial screening process will filter out unqualified candidates and allow hiring managers and recruiters to focus on the top talent who have applied. One example of this is a “ knock-out question” — a query about an essential requirement that, if answered incorrectly, effectively ends the applicant’s process.

It may seem harsh, but why invest unnecessary time reading the application of a candidate who genuinely seems like an interesting person with the right attitude if they don’t have the basic skills or qualifications you need? Ultimately, humans make the best hiring decisions. But we can take too long to do it because we get caught up in information that doesn’t really matter. It’s in everyone’s best interest to sort through qualified and unqualified candidates quickly.

User-Friendliness

The best applicant tracking system doesn’t just have all these wonderful features, it also makes these features easy to use. Recruitment can be tough enough as it is; your ATS software should be straightforward and intuitive.

Furthermore, it’s important to consider the candidate experience. A poorly designed applicant tracking system might make the application process too complicated for job applicants and it might let a qualified candidate slip through the cracks. An ATS platform that considers how it interacts with each applicant is beneficial to all parties involved.

Applicant Tracking System FAQs

Here are some frequently asked questions about applicant tracking system technology.

How Does ATS Recruiting Improve the Candidate Experience?

A well-designed ATS doesn’t just help an organization with sourcing candidates, it also makes things easier for job seekers. It enables talent to upload their resumes and it can autofill application forms, reducing the effort and time required to submit a job application.

What Are Some Applicant Tracking System Security and Compliance Considerations?

An ATS solution worth your consideration must have built-in security and compliance features. Each dataset and candidate profile a hiring team shares must be secure and accessible by only appropriate stakeholders. This level of security matters to candidates and it’s important for compliance with various data regulations.

How Does an Applicant Tracking System Reduce Bias?

Hiring bias can affect every organization and recruiting team, usually subconsciously. From the wording of a job description to how we interpret a candidate’s resume, bias can creep into hiring operations in numerous ways.

An ATS should foster fairness and objectivity in hiring by standardizing application reviews. With predefined criteria, an ATS can minimize the potential for human bias, enabling diverse talent to succeed in a merit-based recruitment process.

Benefit From ATS Recruiting With ApplicantStack

ApplicantStack offers the applicant tracking system features mentioned in this blog. With ApplicantStack, you can:

• ​Post and amplify job openings.
• ​Improve collaboration and reduce time-to-hire.
• ​Increase candidate engagement.
• ​Get new employees up to speed quickly.

To learn more about how your organization can benefit from ApplicantStack’s ATS features, start your free trial today!

• ​Author
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