Understanding Applicant Tracking Systems: Key FAQs Answered

Your hiring team manages thousands of applicants each year, so your enterprise-level company needs a robust applicant tracking system (ATS) in your HR tech stack to achieve your hiring goals while staying organized. In fact, 99% of Fortune 500 companies currently use an ATS to manage and track job applicants.

Using a leading ATS, recruiters can easily search resumes, centralize candidate information, and create comprehensive data reports. This decreases the time needed to manually source talent for open positions and ensures your team connects with the best people for each position.

While a traditional ATS is excellent for storing candidate details, the best applicant tracking systems today work in tandem with other talent acquisition technology. For example, candidate relationship management systems (CRMs) keep candidates engaged in the hiring process after the ATS has determined their potential fit, allowing you to build long-term relationships that transcend the talent cycle. 

With that in mind, let’s answer your most pressing questions in this guide.

What is an applicant tracking system?

An ATS helps companies organize candidates for hiring and recruitment purposes. These systems allow businesses of all sizes and industries to collect candidate information, organize prospects based on experience and skill set, and filter them to determine the best fits for each open role.

What features should enterprises look for in an ATS?

Not every ATS is created equally. Enterprises like yours need the most comprehensive technology available to handle the complexity and scope of your hiring efforts.

For example, a modern ATS simplifies the recruiting process for talent acquisition teams by using automation to efficiently identify, reach out to, interview, and advance qualified candidates. Since open positions can attract thousands of candidates regardless of whether they are qualified for the role, automation saves companies and recruiters time that would otherwise be spent manually weeding out these job applicants.

In addition to automation, look for an ATS that allows your company to:

• Post job openings on career sites and job boards
• Connect with candidates on social media platforms (such as LinkedIn)
• Assess employee referrals and internal talent moves
• Schedule interviews with potential candidates
• Rediscover top talent or silver medalists
• Analyze real-time updates and make data-driven decisions

How does a top ATS work?

Every ATS is different, but here’s a high-level workflow that the top applicant tracking systems can achieve:

1. Once the talent acquisition team has secured an adequate pool of applicants, they can tag and label candidates based on resume information.
2. From here, recruiters can sort through candidates by filtering based on skillsets and job descriptions to find strong-fit candidates for open roles. They can also mitigate implicit bias by using a bias blocker that removes any identifying information from the resume.
3. The ATS can then enable recruiters to communicate with candidates and schedule interviews.
4. Hiring team members submit feedback immediately following interviews with applicants and add notes about each candidate. These scores and notes allow hiring decision makers to evaluate prospects in a bias-free manner and advance ideal applicants quickly.

Note that the process will look very different between enterprises using a modern versus a legacy ATS. For instance, applicant tracking systems that use the latest technology, such as natural language processing, can scan resumes, provide recommended candidates for job openings, and locate passive talent already in the software. 

What are the benefits of an applicant tracking system?

By investing in an advanced ATS for your talent acquisition team, your business can improve crucial success metrics. Some other benefits your organization can experience with a top ATS include:

1. Reduced time to hire for critical roles

Over the course of the recruitment cycle, you’ll tackle many vital talent acquisition tasks. You can only streamline those activities and ensure you steadily improve your hiring speed with a leading ATS.

With Jobvite’s ATS, for instance, talent leaders and operations managers get a holistic view of their entire team’s pipeline progress in real time, allowing them to share insights with talent acquisition specialists. Meanwhile, each recruiter can see the data tied to their recruitment activities to easily discern where each candidate is in their funnel and determine the next steps to take with each active opportunity.

2. Improved visibility and collaboration for your hiring team

It’s not just your talent acquisition efforts that benefit from an ATS. Hiring managers can also use them to ensure they have full visibility into how many people have applied for their roles, how many proactively sourced candidates recruiters have found, and where each of these individuals resides in the hiring funnel.

As job seekers move from one interview stage to the next, hiring managers can easily compare candidates right in the ATS and extend offers to their preferred prospects.

3. Enhanced recruiting technology

Direct integrations between essential recruiting software and human resource information systems (HRIS) enable talent acquisition teams to sync data seamlessly across their tech stack. Integrations empower a transparent end-to-end recruiting process, providing stakeholders with a complete, real-time view of pipeline progress and ensuring critical candidate data is shared with other important tools for business growth.

Plus, these direct connections speed up tasks across the recruiting funnel — from writing inclusive job descriptions and sharing automated interview updates internally to hosting candidate assessments and conducting background checks.

4. Increased hiring fairness

Ensuring your hiring process is completely fair reduces the risk of breaking hiring regulations. Unintentional implicit biases can greatly impact your results and lead you to overlook qualified candidates. Look for solutions that have features like bias blocking (which removes identifying information from applications) so your candidates are judged fairly based on their qualifications. 

5. Streamlined candidate experience

An improved hiring experience contributes to your employer brand and reputation, and an ATS is instrumental in making that happen. An ATS can significantly improve the overall recruitment experience of both your hiring managers and candidates, as they can:

• Support speedy internal and external communication
• Provide channels for candidates to give feedback
• Automatically send notifications and updates based on custom workflows
• Offer a centralized portal for candidates to view hiring updates
• Enable personalized two-way communication at any stage of the hiring funnel

6. Compliance with regulations

A critical yet often-overlooked aspect of the hiring process is compliance with local and, for larger businesses, international hiring laws. An ATS can keep records and help your organization quickly correct any discrepancies. 

This is especially important for enterprise-sized organizations that hire hundreds, if not thousands, of employees per year. With that much recruitment data and international hiring regulations to keep track of, information can easily slip through the cracks. An ATS, working in tandem with data-driven analytics, keeps all the insights you need—and discards the information you don’t, such as duplicate records—to ensure reporting accuracy and avoid penalties.

7. Standardized hiring practices

When it comes to hiring globally, keeping only the most relevant and qualified candidates in your talent pool is essential to efficient and accurate hiring. That’s where having a standardized hiring practice can help. The right ATS can:

• Create custom workflow templates to enable consistent processes
• House data that’s used across the team, such as interview questions and follow-up timelines
• Assign team members to tasks and notify them automatically
• Integrate with onboarding systems to ensure applicants transition to new hires successfully

How to start using an applicant tracking system

Recruiting top talent is one of the most critical—and complex—challenges facing growing businesses today. With the right tools in place, you can turn a time-consuming, high-stakes process into a streamlined, strategic advantage. An ATS empowers your hiring teams to work smarter, stay organized, elevate your talent acquisition strategies, and deliver an outstanding candidate experience—all while helping your business scale more efficiently.

Now that you have a clearer understanding of what an ATS can do, it’s time to take the next step. Partner with your HR, recruiting, and tech leaders to evaluate your organization’s hiring needs, explore the ATS landscape, and identify a solution that aligns with your goals and ideal tech stack.