What is an Applicant Tracking System?

An Applicant Tracking System (commonly referred to as an ATS) is software used to manage the end-to-end recruitment process, including tracking candidates across roles and interview stages.

Most ATS’s support you in posting jobs to your careers page and other job boards, scheduling candidates, and storing candidate notes and feedback.

Recruiting at it’s core is operational — ATS’s provide structure to the chaos. But there are a few major issues:

1) Most Applicant Tracking Systems are hard to use.

The ATS is supposed to be the source of truth for hiring activities… but most companies don’t use them to their full potential. Many ATS’s require complex configuration at the start and in-depth knowledge of recruiting to operate. They require hours of manual overhead to ensure candidate and job data is up-to-date with each update in the hiring process. Team members outside of Talent Acquisition struggle to use their ATS, which exacerbates the issue.

We heard the same sentiment from hundreds of hiring teams — “My ATS sucks, but it is what it is.” Why settle when…

2) Most Applicant Tracking Systems are costly.

Applicant Tracking Systems can cost thousands per year.

Startups have always done what they can to defer buying an ATS altogether. They hack together tools like Notion, Google Sheets, Calendly, and Airtable to spin up a careers page, track candidates, schedule them, and store interview feedback. They’re okay with sacrificing time to get a process stood up, even if it takes some additional effort.

That’s nothing new. But in a time when hiring plans and recruitment budgets have been scaled back across the board, an expensive ATS expense is unjustified for most startups.