The primary benefit of an applicant tracking system is that it increases the efficiency of your talent acquisition team through streamlined, automated workflows. These tools can also be quite impactful: 94% of recruiters believe using applicant tracking software has positively impacted their company's hiring processes.

Additionally, applicant tracking systems are essential for growing companies because they streamline recruitment, enhance employer branding, provide detailed analytics, and facilitate smooth engagement of managers and employees beyond HR and talent acquisition teams.

• Customized workflows: An ATS system that can customize and automate tasks like application processing, screening, and collecting feedback can dramatically improve hiring efficiency. This benefit is especially significant to organizations hiring from very different candidate pools. If, for example, your team is hiring both truck drivers and software engineers, you can bet these workflows won’t be interchangeable.
• ‍Improved employer branding: Candidate tracking systems will help your organization create and manage a custom career site, helping your company stand out. Showcasing your best features will make it easier to attract top talent. With integrations to networks like LinkedIn, reaching a wide audience is easy.‍
• Better quality talent pools: The best ATS software can save time and money by maintaining already-sourced candidates. If you maintain occasional contact with a pool of qualified candidates, your recruiting process doesn’t start from zero each time you open a new role.‍
• Wider internal engagement: Rather than relying exclusively on your HR or TA teams for recruiting, the best ATS software will also involve your hiring managers and employees as part of the process. Employee referrals, feedback on job candidates, and social media can all be leveraged to fill open positions.‍
• Streamlined hiring and onboarding: An ATS can do more than streamline recruiting; it can work wonders for onboarding. A good first impression sets the stage for employee engagement and, ultimately, retention, so it’s critical to make the onboarding process employee-focused, timely, and effective.‍‍
• More effective recruitment strategies: An effective hiring process is data-driven. Any good ATS software dashboard will put recruiter productivity, cost per hire, cost of job boards, cost of paid media, time to hire, and other key data at your fingertips.

The primary benefit of an applicant tracking system is that it increases the efficiency of your talent acquisition team through streamlined, automated workflows. These tools can also be quite impactful: 94% of recruiters believe using applicant tracking software has positively impacted their company's hiring processes.

Additionally, applicant tracking systems are essential for growing companies because they streamline recruitment, enhance employer branding, provide detailed analytics, and facilitate smooth engagement of managers and employees beyond HR and talent acquisition teams.

• Customized workflows: An ATS system that can customize and automate tasks like application processing, screening, and collecting feedback can dramatically improve hiring efficiency. This benefit is especially significant to organizations hiring from very different candidate pools. If, for example, your team is hiring both truck drivers and software engineers, you can bet these workflows won’t be interchangeable.
• ‍Improved employer branding: Candidate tracking systems will help your organization create and manage a custom career site, helping your company stand out. Showcasing your best features will make it easier to attract top talent. With integrations to networks like LinkedIn, reaching a wide audience is easy.‍
• Better quality talent pools: The best ATS software can save time and money by maintaining already-sourced candidates. If you maintain occasional contact with a pool of qualified candidates, your recruiting process doesn’t start from zero each time you open a new role.‍
• Wider internal engagement: Rather than relying exclusively on your HR or TA teams for recruiting, the best ATS software will also involve your hiring managers and employees as part of the process. Employee referrals, feedback on job candidates, and social media can all be leveraged to fill open positions.‍
• Streamlined hiring and onboarding: An ATS can do more than streamline recruiting; it can work wonders for onboarding. A good first impression sets the stage for employee engagement and, ultimately, retention, so it’s critical to make the onboarding process employee-focused, timely, and effective.‍‍
• More effective recruitment strategies: An effective hiring process is data-driven. Any good ATS software dashboard will put recruiter productivity, cost per hire, cost of job boards, cost of paid media, time to hire, and other key data at your fingertips.

The best ATS features include automated resume parsing, reliable data security, and great analytics.

• Third-party integrations: Almost without exception, the top ATSs are built with robust integration capabilities and a substantial network within their partner ecosystem. You should aim for seamless ATS integrations, meaning the ATS should be ready to interface (connect to, plug in to, work well with) whatever software you use for hiring.
• ‍Talent sourcing: The best applicant tracking systems include dynamic features, such as Google Chrome extensions, that allow you to source candidates directly from the web. You’ll also find databases of job seekers that you can query for specific skills and outreach tools that will enable you to build sequences that engage candidates through email and texting.‍
• AI recruiting assistant: It’s hard to find an applicant tracking system that doesn’t offer at least one form of AI-powered recruiting feature nowadays. So the more valuable question now is whether an ATS has a legally and ethically helpful AI feature. For example, many offer job description generators, but few allow for tone adjustments the way Workable does. Similarly, when a candidate deletes their data, Pinpoint is one of the few that also automatically deletes their email history to prevent compliance issues for customers.
• Candidate relationship management (CRM): A recruiting CRM nurtures your relationship with your entire job seeker ecosystem, whether active or passive. It helps your TA keep leads warm by setting reminders to ping individual candidates (“silver medalists”) or to check in periodically with larger candidate pools. Structured communications and automated workflows help maintain good relationships and free up your TA team’s time.
• Blind screening: This is an effective method for controlling hiring bias, a foundational element of all diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives. ATSs with a blind screening feature obscure the candidates' names, photos, addresses, and other demographic identifiers to prevent assessments based on non-relevant characteristics.
• ‍Employer branding and career site: Modern applicant tracking systems are built with the candidate experience in mind. Making a good first impression is critical, so top ATSs include no-code features that recruiters and hiring managers can use to build and maintain a professional, bespoke career site without needing to involve marketers and developers.

• Data and analytics: Any ATS worth its salt has a basic analytics dashboard. The best (and often the most expensive) ATS also incorporates a powerful analytics engine to make light work of your heaviest statistical loads.
• Interview scheduling: ATS software that is focused on recruitment process automation will include scheduling for everything from phone screens to final-round interviews. Some enterprise options, such as SparkHire and VidCruiter, even have a video interview tool built in so you don’t have to rely on a third-party app for such use.
• Offer letters: Automated distribution of offer letters is a standard ATS feature. Most platforms offer templates that can be easily customized for each offer presented to a new hire.‍
• Onboarding: A smooth onboarding process helps ensure that the transition from candidate to colleague is as smooth as possible. It’s not surprising to see that most applicant tracking platforms now offer some form of this capability, either natively or via integrations with third-party employee onboarding tools.

The above features are highly specific and designed to help buyers and decision-makers make quick, informed decisions. However, some critical aspects of ATS performance and functionality can’t be summed up so easily.

Our guest expert, Zach Larson, suggests buyers consider the following three basic elements:

• First, consider how well the product will respond to market challenges.
• Second, estimate the quality of candidates based on the ATS's sourcing methods.
• Last but not least, involve your TA team in the process. Your internal stakeholders must be on board with your choice.

An applicant tracking system typically costs $250-$12,000 per year for small businesses and can exceed $125,000 annually for large enterprises, depending on vendor pricing models and company size.

Most ATS vendors use one of four pricing structures:

• Flat rate: This pricing model offers a fixed monthly or annual fee for unlimited use of the ATS, making it ideal for large enterprises that prefer long-term contracts. Breezy HR, for example, is one of the applicant tracking systems that employ this model. The ATS includes unlimited users, candidates, positions, and candidate pools across its three paid plans: Startup, Growth, and Business.
• Pay-per-user: This model is best suited for small teams with limited recruiter usage. It charges a monthly fee for each active user of the ATS. You can easily come across this pricing structure at ATS systems for small businesses, such as Manatal and Recruit CRM.
• Pay-per-vacancy: Designed for small businesses with low hiring volumes, pay-per-vacancy charges a fee for each job you post using the ATS, although it’s more common now for the vendor to limit the number of job slots per plan instead Zoho Recruit, for instance, allows one active job in its free plan, while that is 100, 250, and 750 active jobs in Standard, Professional, and Enterprise, respectively.
• Pay-per-module: This model is suitable for companies with an existing HR platform that want to add an ATS to their tech stack as an add-on. It allows companies to pay for only the ATS module they need, rather than the entire platform. Workable and VidCruiter are some of the brands that use this pricing model.

Here’s what most companies can expect to pay annually for an ATS:

• Small business (<100 employees): $250 up to $12,000 USD per year.
• Medium-sized business (100-500 employees): $3,000 to $25,000 per year.
• Large business (501-5,000 employees): $15,000 to $50,000+ annually.‍‍
• Enterprise (5,000+ employees): From $125,000 per year.
• Keep in mind that these ranges are broad because features, integrations, and support levels vary widely. That being said, nonprofits, startups, and companies signing multi-year deals often get reduced rates. Also, some ATS providers, especially those with custom pricing, are often open to negotiation.

For a more detailed look, refer to our applicant tracking system pricing guide.