Where to Start with HR Tech: The ATS
Any recruiting operation with more than a couple of open roles needs an ATS, or an Applicant Tracking System. This is a database system that will post on all the big job boards, collect applications, and make it easy to review, sort, and automate outreach to candidates. This is important because one of the biggest challenges in recruiting today is the sheer volume of candidates. The proliferation of AI tools that will apply on a candidate’s behalf means that some applicants apply to everything. I’ve seen posted jobs get 1,000+ applicants in under a week. If those applications are all landing in your inbox, you may find it difficult to get any other work done that week! A good ATS will do a few things:
Manage the flow of candidates separate from your regular inbox. You can still turn on notifications so you know when applications come in, but the ATS will store application materials and any emails you exchange with a candidate, making it easy for someone else to step in and pick up the conversation, schedule interviews on your behalf, take a look at candidates and provide feedback, etc.
Post on job boards. Most ATS solutions will have an API set up with the big job boards, and will post your jobs for free. This means you don’t have to go to four or five different job boards and post them separately. Most ATS options also have a marketplace where you can choose to pay to post your job on a specialty job board, if that’s needed as well.
Get other people involved. An ATS means that you can easily share a shortlist of candidate profiles to a hiring manager or interviewer, and they’ll usually be able to provide feedback or comments in the system.
Connect notes or application materials to the right candidate. It’s manageable to keep notes and comments for one or two people in your regular organizational process, but when you’re six months down the line and 10 hires (and hundreds of interviews) later, you’ll wish you had all of your materials about a given person in one place.
Send emails and schedule interviews with minimal back-and-forth. An ATS will let you create a standard template for the common messages you’ll need to send (such as “we’re not moving forward with your application,“ “we’d like to schedule an interview,” “here’s an overview of our benefits package,” and others), and you’ll be able to easily drop in the candidate name or role title. This allows you to send emails to a number of candidates at once, while still maintaining a positive and warm candidate experience. Even better: more and more ATS systems are including scheduling functionality or integrations with tools like Calendly to allow candidates to schedule interviews with hiring managers without the need for a lot of back and forth.
Like most things in the world of HR tech, there are a LOT of options for ATS systems, but most of them will fall into three buckets:
Add-ons to existing tools. If you implemented BambooHR or another HRIS tool to manage your employee data, then you may already have an ATS, you just need to set it up! In some cases, this may involve an add-on cost, but a number of HRIS platforms include ATS functionality for free. This approach may not come with all the bells and whistles, but you can be confident it will integrate well with your current tool set, and it may be more than enough for most job postings.
Free ATS solutions. Everybody loves free, right? There are a few free ATS options out there, especially if you only have one or two roles open at a time. This article shares a number of options that are current as of 2025, but I do want to caveat: many free ATS solutions are looking to convert free users to paid, be that by restricting some functions, completing beta testing and then converting the whole platform to a paid approach, or significantly limiting the support that is available. It can be a good short-term approach, but you can expect to hit the limits of this solution relatively quickly if you continue to grow and expand your recruiting operations.
Paid standalone solutions. There are a number of standalone ATS options to consider as well! These range from tools designed for small teams (Breezy HR and JazzHR are the front-runners there) to bigger platforms designed to support external recruiting teams that might have roles for multiple clients. This article from Zapier gives a good overview of what’s out there, although as always, there are other solutions if you go looking for them! You might want to consider one of these if you’re expecting to have a large number of hires in the near future or if the majority of your roles will be particularly difficult to source - sometimes these solutions are better suited to high volume recruiting or passive candidate outreach.
If you’ve ever worked with a database like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics before, you may find yourself thinking “isn’t an ATS just a database? Why pay for something I could build in Microsoft Access?” And the truth is, you’re right, an ATS is just a relational database, optimized for recruiting. You certainly could build this yourself if you’re technically inclined and have a lot of time on your hands, but personally, I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s a lot of competition in the ATS marketplace, and that means that prices for these tools are relatively low, and almost certainly cheaper than the time investment that would be required to get a homegrown solution up and running.