How Does an Applicant Tracking System Work?

If you've hired more than a couple of people, you know the moment the process outgrows an inbox. Applications arrive in different places, often whoever's email they happened to be sent to, and the resumes end up wherever they were downloaded. The hiring manager might throw a spreadsheet together, but it doesn't cover everything. In 2025, 48% of applicants got no response from an employer at all. The usual reason for the silence is that the employer has no structured place to keep track of hiring.

An applicant tracking system is hiring software that gives you one central place where job applications are submitted, then tracks each candidate through the stages of your hiring process, from inbox to hired. Each candidate gets one record with their resume, the messages you've exchanged, your team's interview feedback, other files and notes, and a log of every stage they've moved through.

In this article, we'll show you how an applicant tracking system works, how much of the screening is automatic, how it assists in candidate communication, what these systems don't do, and how to tell whether your company needs one.

What does ATS stand for?

ATS stands for applicant tracking system. The name comes from the need to track where each candidate is in the hiring process. The system records which stage every applicant is in, who moved them there and when, and the reason anyone was turned down, so anyone on the team can see where a candidate stands.

In practice the term now covers the whole hiring system. Publishing jobs and providing the application forms are now core functionality. It also provides a central record of everything that occurs during the hiring process, including resumes and application answers, interview reviews, candidate messaging, and who was hired. It's the system of record for hiring.

How an applicant tracking system works, step by step

An ATS follows a candidate from the day you post the job to the day you make the hire, and everything that happens in between goes on that candidate's record.

As a running example, say you have a new role to fill, a customer support manager, and a candidate who applies for it. The candidate's side comes first, then yours.

The candidate experience

The candidate finds the listing on a job board and clicks through to a page with your logo, your description of the role, and an application form. As far as the candidate can tell, the page is part of your website. Filling in the form, uploading a resume, and answering the application questions takes a few minutes, and a confirmation email arrives a minute later.

Every later message, from the interview invitation to the final decision, arrives as a normal email and gets a normal reply.

Here's what's happening on your side.

Posting the job

Setting up a job has two sides. The candidate-facing side is the job post itself, everything an applicant sees and fills in. The team-facing side is the hiring process behind it, the stages, the automations, and the hiring team, none of which the candidate sees.

The job post starts with a title, a category, and the description, and you can publish with just that. The full setup also covers the location, whether the role is on site, hybrid, or remote and any residency requirement that goes with it, the employment type, and the salary or salary range.

The application form is the other half of what the candidate sees. You choose which standard fields are required, optional, or hidden, and add custom questions, whether short answer, multiple choice, or a file upload. In some systems you can also mark a question as visible only to administrators, for salary expectations and the like.

When you publish, the job appears on your careers page, which the ATS either hosts for you or feeds through an integration. Most systems can also distribute the listing to job sites, though you usually have to set that up first, by connecting each job site in the system's integration settings. Once a job site is connected, the posting appears there without a separate account. Search engines index the job page itself, provided it includes structured job data describing the role, which the ATS adds.

Setting up the hiring process

This is the team-facing side, and you can set it up before you publish or after. You set up the hiring stages the job will use. They can be as custom as you like, such as "Interview with John" or "Rejected after technical assessment," or you can use the default set the system provides. You can also set up message templates, and hiring stage automations that send those templates when a candidate enters a stage. Most systems come with a few basic templates to start from, and you can replace the generic confirmation email the ATS sends with one written for your company.

You invite your team members to the job, and that group is the hiring team. Anyone who isn't an administrator can't see the job at all until they're invited, and once they're on the hiring team they usually have full access to it. Some systems let you attach a process document to the job, which tells everyone on the hiring team what the expected steps are, and set up scorecards for a structured interview so that interviewers have a fixed set of criteria to score against later.

Receiving applications

Every job has its own pipeline, made up of the hiring stages you set for it. A new application goes into the first stage, usually called Inbox, and the candidate appears in that stage's list. From there, the team moves candidates forward stage by stage, so at any moment the pipeline shows who is at each step of the process. Source makes no difference, so an applicant who came through a job board and one who came through your careers page are in the same Inbox.

Each application creates a candidate record with the contact details, the resume, the application answers, and a timestamp. If that person later applies to a second job with you, the second application goes into that job's Inbox, and both applications are attached to the same record.

Where the system can tell, it also records the source, meaning the job board, search engine, or link the applicant came through. Six months from now, that's how you find out which job boards send you people you actually hire.

Initial screening

Screening is the review of a candidate's submitted materials, the resume and the application answers, to decide whether they have the qualifications to do the job. There are usually two rounds. The initial screening is a review of the materials alone, and the second round is a screening call, covered in the next section.

The initial screening can be partly automatic. Some requirements simply have to be true for the job, such as being located in the right place, and a system with knockout questions can disqualify candidates who don't meet them without anyone reading the application. The automation section below covers how that works and what it doesn't do.

The next round is the screening call.

The screening call

A recruiter or someone else on the team gets on the phone with the candidate with a short list of questions in front of them. The questions are basic, meant to get a sense of the candidate's personality, confirm a few requirements, and cover practical points such as salary expectations and start date.

The ATS gives the caller a scorecard or a template for the call, a place on the candidate's record to save their notes, and a way to record a recommendation on whether the candidate should move forward.

Moving candidates through hiring stages

When you move a candidate to the next stage, the move goes on the candidate's timeline with your name and the time, and if that stage has a message automation, the candidate gets that message. A stage automation is a template tied to a stage, set to fire once or every time a candidate enters it, and the system tells you before you confirm a move whether one will run. Moves also work in bulk, and any automation on the destination stage runs for each candidate. Our guide to hiring stage message automations covers the setup.

When you archive a candidate, you pick a reason from a list you define, such as "not qualified," "position filled," or "withdrew," and the system saves it with the move. The archive reasons and the stage history together are your record of how you decided each hire, and in the United States, federal regulations require you to keep that record for at least a year.

Collaborating with your team

Everything the hiring team does with a candidate goes on that candidate's overview feed, a central timeline that every team member on the job can read. Comments, reviews, review requests, stage moves, and messages all appear there in order. Comments are the running conversation, and some systems let you tag a teammate in one to pull them in. Reviews are structured feedback. After an interview, each interviewer writes up their assessment with a score against criteria you set, usually from a review template so every interviewer covers the same ground, and submits it to the feed. Our guide to interview feedback examples covers what to write in them.

A review request sends the candidate's resume and a review form to someone outside the hiring team, such as an engineer who'd work with the support manager daily, and they can submit a review without seeing anything else about the job. In most systems the reviews, the message feed, or a field like salary expectations can also be restricted to administrators, so an interviewer sees only their own review until the decision is made.

Scheduling, offers, and hiring

You send the candidate a scheduling link, they pick a time, and the interview goes on everyone's calendar. Most systems give the interviewer a review kit or interview kit, a single page with the candidate's contact details, links, resume, and any hiring document for the job, for use during the interview or when writing up notes afterward.

Most applicant tracking systems have no part in the offer itself, which is usually handled in an HRIS. Some integrate with one, or have added a document signing integration to assist with the offer.

Once the offer is accepted, you move the candidate to Hired.

Rejecting candidates

Rejections go one of two ways. For candidates you've interviewed, you usually write a customized rejection and send it from the candidate's messaging feed. For everyone else, you use a template. Some teams create a rejection template for every stage of the process, but most have a single one. One way the ATS helps here is that you can bulk-move candidates to an archived or rejection stage and trigger the same rejection email to all of them at once, sometimes hundreds of candidates. Our guide to job rejection emails covers how to write one.

How much of the screening is automatic?

You decide how much of the screening is automatic, and every automatic action shows on the candidate's record, where a person can see it. The usual automations are:

• Hiring stage message automations, which send a message template to every candidate who enters a stage.
• Knockout questions, application questions with one correct answer, such as whether the candidate is located where the job requires. A candidate who selects the wrong answer is moved automatically to an archived or rejected stage, with that question recorded as the reason.
• Scheduling links, sent by the system, usually through a stage automation, that let the candidate book their own interview slot. In more complex systems this becomes integrated interview scheduling.

AI automations can be set up as well. We'll discuss those more later.

How do you communicate with candidates?

You write to a candidate from the messaging feed on their record, and the system emails it to the address they applied with. The reply comes back into the same feed, so the hiring team has visibility into every message sent and received.

A message template has placeholders for the candidate's name, the job title, and the sender. When you pick one from the list, the software fills them in for that candidate and job, and you can edit the result before sending.

The software sends a bulk message as a separate email to each candidate, so nobody sees a cc line with forty names on it.

What an ATS is not

Is an ATS the same as a CRM?

No, an ATS is not a CRM. In hiring, ATS vs CRM comes down to who's in the database. A recruiting CRM manages people who haven't applied, in talent pools it contacts through outreach sequences over months. An ATS manages the people who applied to a specific job. Some vendors sell both in one product, and our comparison of seven applicant tracking systems notes which ones do.

Does an ATS find candidates for you?

An ATS doesn't find candidates for you. Distribution puts your job in front of more people. Going looking for people who haven't applied is sourcing, and sourcing databases are usually separate products or paid add-ons, even when the same company sells them.

Does an ATS handle employee onboarding?

It doesn't. The ATS's job ends at the hire, and the employee record, onboarding paperwork, PTO, and payroll belong to a human resources information system, or HRIS. Some ATS products bundle an onboarding module or hand the new hire's details to your HR software through an integration. Our guide to employee onboarding picks up from there.

Does an ATS decide who gets hired?

No, an ATS doesn't decide who you hire. It organizes applications, scores them if you ask it to, and shows you what it found. People hire, and the record shows who made every stage move and rejection.

Do you need an applicant tracking system?

Honestly, you probably do. Some teams don't need one, but they're very small and they don't hire frequently, usually only one role at a time.

The great benefit of an applicant tracking system is that it serves as your system of record. It keeps you organized during the hiring process, with an accurate record of the process as it happened. It reduces repetitive work in the future, because job descriptions, templates, and hiring stages are there to reuse. It stores prior candidates, should you ever want to revisit them. And it keeps you compliant, since employers are often required to account for their application and hiring processes.

Frequently asked questions