An applicant tracking system is a powerful piece of hiring infrastructure. Even a basic ATS can take tedious manual tasks off your plate with job posting, no-code career site, candidate pipeline management, and interview scheduling. Top-tier platforms can parse thousands of applications in minutes, sync smoothly with your HR tech stack, personalize your employer brand at scale, and give you clear visibility into what is actually working in your recruiting process.

We have tested dozens of ATS platforms over the years, from lightweight tools best suited for startups to robust enterprise platforms designed for global teams. Our latest evaluation showed that Greenhouse, Pinpoint, and Workableare among the strongest choices for most organizations.

If you’re looking for a free tool, on the other hand, be sure to check out our Free ATS guide as well. Depending on your team size, a free or low-priced tool can be all you need, and some of them can scale quite well with you.

• iCIMS: Ideal for large, multilingual organizations with high-volume recruiting needs
• SmartRecruiters: Great TA suite for enterprises, featuring collaboration and AI natively
• Spark Hire: For SMBs needing an ATS with outstanding video interviewing capabilities

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. Statistically, 94% of recruiters found ATS has positively impacted their hiring processes.

• 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.

Any business choosing an ATS should aim to get the maximum functionality for its price point (while ensuring key functions for its specific business are best-in-class), focus on potential long-term benefits rather than short-term costs, and understand the software vendor's product roadmap. Beyond key features and pricing, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI), scalability, and customization are also critical factors to look for in an applicant tracking system.

• ‍What do you want to achieve with the ATS?: Depending on your business, you can have one person or multiple teams across your company branches interacting with the ATS day-to-day. Each may have a different pain point they want the recruitment tool to tackle. Knowing the center goals of these stakeholders and the importance of each can help you create a list of features ranked from most to least desired.
• What can you afford?: An ATS that can schedule interviews, manage employee referrals, and parse resumes will lighten the load on your HR/TA team, leading to increased efficiency. That said, investing in a feature-rich ATS could mean more complexity, steeper learning curves, and higher costs to the system. So, besides the feature list, you’d need to note down your allowed budget and the human resources involved in onboarding and maintaining the ATS system.
• Focus on individual features during your vendor research: Evaluate precisely what you need. The feature list and resource note that you have prepared in the earlier steps will help you stay focused on options that truly matter.
• Think long-term: Trying to anticipate the future is critical given how hard these tools are to replace over time (migrating tons of candidate data, different workflows for different types of jobs, etc.). Beyond the platform's capacity to scale up as you grow, pay attention to how this growth will affect product pricing and, therefore, the ATS ROI.‍‍
• Understand the roadmap: A tool with no future plan for improvements may cause trouble for future software updates, but a vendor with an ambitious list of feature enhancements, yet a very humble track record of delivery, is not any better. Ask the sales rep specific questions relevant to your business needs, and review content published on the company's channels for more information.
• User Experience and Interface: When looking at well-known platforms like Greenhouse, BambooHR, and Pinpoint, it’s easy to see that a well-designed interface partly contributes to higher adoption rates and, consequently, the growing popularity of these platforms. A great UX/UI enhances user satisfaction, reduces training time, and improves recruitment processes. It also benefits job applicants, as a smooth and intuitive application process helps improve the candidate experience and increase the likelihood of successful hires.‍
• Customization and Scalability: An applicant tracking system that seems ideal for your 20-person team today may become inadequate if it cannot support your international hiring needs as your team scales globally. Be sure to assess how customizable the system is (e.g., branding options, workflow customization, automation tools) to meet both your current and long-term needs. Oftentimes, seeking advice from HR tech experts results in faster and more accurate ATS shortlists, as they provide candid insights that a vendor’s sales team might not disclose.