Top Free Applicant Tracking Systems

What are Applicant Tracking Systems?

What are the Common Features of Applicant Tracking Systems?

What are the Benefits of Applicant Tracking Systems?

Who Uses Applicant Tracking Systems?

Depending on the company’s size—small business, mid-sized company, or enterprise—the following roles may play an essential part: hiring manager, internal recruiter, recruitment agency, interview team, recruiting coordinator, external recruiter or talent sourcer, and other employees.

Hiring managers: The hiring manager is the employee who identifies the need, and requests staffing, for a new position. They then collaborate closely with the HR department throughout the entire hiring process. The hiring manager is likely to be involved in writing the job description that will be posted using the ATS, interviewing candidates, and providing feedback on candidates’ performance. The ATS manages each of these steps and enables the hiring manager to collaborate with other members of the recruiting team.

Internal recruiters: Internal recruiters are the main point of contact during the talent acquisition process, from creating new job listings to onboarding, all while aiming to provide a positive candidate experience. They often collaborate with the hiring managers to coordinate job posts and interviews. Recruiters attract and source new candidates via recruitment marketing, hiring external recruiters, or outsourcing recruitment efforts to recruitment agencies. They may also handle employee referrals for open positions and manage background checks, which are often integrated with ATS solutions.

External recruiters: Staffing firms, recruitment agencies, and talent sourcing firms manage the process of finding qualified candidates for open positions at companies that either don’t have their own internal recruiting staff or need additional support in finding the right people for their open roles. An agent from a recruitment agency submits resumes and application profiles of candidates that they think might be a fit for an open role in a company’s ATS. Staffing firms also use sourcing, screening, and management functionality in an ATS to organize the pipeline of candidates who might be a good fit for open roles at the firm’s client companies.  

Interview team: The size, role, and structure of the interview team varies depending on the size and type of company, size of the department, type of job, and company culture. The interview team might be composed of recruitment coordinators, hiring managers, supervisors or team leaders, stakeholders, and even peer interviewers.

Recruitment coordinators: Recruitment coordinators work closely with candidates, external recruiters, headhunters, HR personnel, hiring managers, and anyone else involved in the hiring process. They often manage the hiring process from recruitment through onboarding. They might manage any testing and preliminary screening via ATS, as well as interviews. If companies advertise open positions at job fairs and recruiting events, recruitment coordinators use branded career portals and marketing features in the ATS to engage with candidates and manage potential applicants.

Employees: Employees are often encouraged to share job listings and referrals on their personal social media accounts. ATS solutions simplify this process by providing access to a database of all current job openings, enabling employees to set up accounts that automate job listings throughout their social accounts. Most companies provide some kind of monetary incentive or reward for employees when their referrals become new employees. Employees might also be involved in providing feedback on candidate interviews via an ATS. 

What are the Alternatives to Applicant Tracking Systems?

Alternatives to an ATS can replace this type of software, either partially or completely:

Recruitment marketing software: For companies that are mostly looking for more effective ways to expand their talent pool, a recruitment marketing solution might be a viable alternative to an ATS. These platforms offer a range of features designed to source and attract candidates for open positions, such as social recruiting tools, job posting features, and candidate relationship management functionality. However, they might lack the more robust workflow management functions of a fully-featured ATS. Many ATS products now have integrated recruitment marketing capabilities, including automated job posting.

Recruiting automation software: Rather than manage candidate sourcing using an ATS, companies may look to recruiting automation software to automate the work of finding qualified applicants. Recruiting automation solutions use artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze candidate profiles and recommend best-fit candidates for particular positions. 

Staffing software: Recruiting agencies and staffing firms may prefer platforms designed specifically for the staffing industry. These solutions facilitate the relationship between candidates looking for work, companies that need to fill positions, and staffing firms that act as mediators during the process. While these products are often similar to an ATS, platforms designed for recruiting agencies typically offer specialized features like managing job posts for different clients and tracking client position needs.

Software Related to Applicant Tracking Systems

Related solutions that can be used together with an ATS include:

Job boards: Job boards, also known as job marketplaces, provide job listing databases for companies to advertise their open positions to job seekers. Companies can use their ATS solution to share job postings on multiple different job sites with a few clicks. Recruiters can then add associated filters to their company page to help interested and qualified candidates seek out the appropriate positions.

Video interviewing software: Video interviewing software helps HR teams and recruiters simplify and streamline the hiring process by enabling interviews to take place at any time, at any location. These platforms give candidates the ability to either record video of themselves answering questions the recruiter has selected or join a live session with an interviewer. Most video interviewing platforms integrate with an ATS to facilitate the seamless transfer of applicant data.

Pre-employment testing software: Pre-employment testing software are data-driven recruiting software that helps streamline the hiring process by managing and filtering large applicant pools through the use of candidate assessments. These solutions help HR departments and personnel make informed hiring decisions. These tests—including aptitude, personality, and skills—are an objective and standardized method of collecting data on candidates during the hiring process. 

Background check software: Organizations use background check software for pre-employment screening solutions, including work, criminal, and driving history screening. Background check software usually integrates with an applicant tracking software and is often used with core HR software. HR personnel typically integrate background check solutions with their ATS to streamline the job application process by syncing all pertinent candidate information including background screening through one portal.

Reference check software: Reference check software helps HR personnel, recruiters, and hiring managers reach their potential hires’ professional references. These tools send out surveys or other kinds of automated messages to solicit information from people designated as references for prospective employees, saving recruiters the time it would take to contact references manually by phone or email. Reference check software often integrates with recruiting platforms like an ATS to provide for the seamless transfer of applicant data between the systems.

Onboarding software: Onboarding software streamlines the onboarding process of new employees. Hiring managers implement onboarding software to help efficiently transition new hires into their roles and the company while also simplifying the administrative work necessary. Onboarding software that integrates with a company’s ATS or HRMS facilitates a seamless transition for new hires into their new role by transferring data from their time as a candidate directly into the onboarding system. These solutions provide HR personnel, hiring managers, and employees with a way to make the onboarding process streamlined, transparent, and organized.

Challenges with Applicant Tracking Systems

Applicant tracking solutions can come with their own set of challenges. 

Ruling out quality candidates: One of the risks companies undertake when they use an ATS to analyze candidate submissions—like applications, cover letters, and resumes—is the possibility that the system will err in how it rates candidates on their fit for a potential role. On the one extreme, a system could let candidates who truly aren’t qualified for a role through an initial screening because they happened to have the right keywords in their resume or application. Alternatively, an ATS resume parsing tool might exclude qualified candidates because their resume was missing the phrases that the ATS was looking for. An ATS scanner also might misinterpret data in an applicant’s resume because of the way the resume is formatted, a particular font choice, or an unusual spelling. The resume analysis capabilities of ATS products are now incorporating sophisticated AI that can scan resumes more effectively, but pitfalls still exist. Recruiters can address these potential shortcomings by maintaining some human quality control in the process. Recruiters should use analytics data to evaluate their current process if they aren’t getting the qualified candidates they are looking for. A periodic audit to examine applicants that the ATS deemed less qualified could also be helpful in determining if candidates with high potential are being improperly screened out. 

Lack of personal touch: Automation is great for saving recruiters time, but taking the human element out of a recruitment process could also negatively affect the candidate experience. An ATS provides employers with a variety of ways to automate their recruiting processes, including posting jobs, scheduling interviews, updating candidates with their application status, and contacting references. If a candidate feels that they are being treated as just another application, however, they may be less compelled to engage with that company or accept an offer if one is extended. The solution for many companies is leveraging personalization tools that are increasingly becoming an important part of an ATS. That includes branded career portals, candidate dashboards for tracking the status of applications, CRM tools to track interactions with candidates, and surveys that ask candidates about the experience. A personal touch could be the difference between landing a great employee or losing that person to a competitor. 

Lack of integration or customizability: If multiple products need to be used for the entire hiring process, some tasks might be short changed and the recruiter may need to increase their time allotted on specific operations. Some companies might still be using one product for talent mining, one for recruitment marketing, and one for job distribution. If a company or hiring manager is using multiple tools for each step, integration might be tricky; this can result in reduced transparency and a convoluted job hiring process. These disparate tools may not effectively share information, resulting in more manual data entry and greater potential for errors. In addition, certain ATS solutions might not be agile enough to alter workflows to fit a company’s specific process. When purchasing recruiting software, businesses must be certain that these tools can integrate with their existing systems and are adaptable enough to accommodate the company’s processes. 

Which Companies Should Buy Applicant Tracking Systems?

Almost any company can benefit from having a centralized system like an ATS for managing, hiring, and tracking the status of candidate applications. However, a few business types, in particular, would especially benefit from upgrading to a modern ATS: 

Staffing agencies: Since recruiting is an essential function of any successful staffing business, having a capable ATS to organize that process is a must. Staffing firms that need to field requests from client companies for filling specific kinds of roles should verify that any ATS they are considering has that kind of external recruiter functionality.

Small to mid-sized businesses: While legacy ATSs came with higher upfront costs and were oriented more toward enterprise businesses, the advent of smaller vendors selling cloud-based ATS products on a more affordable monthly subscription model has made it more realistic for smaller companies to use these systems. In addition, increasingly advanced automation functions means a company doesn’t need a large recruiting team in order to extend their hiring reach—they need an ATS that can do that for them.

How to Buy Applicant Tracking Systems

Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Applicant Tracking Systems

Before starting a search for an ATS, buyers should consider which common features of ATS products they need the most. Most applicant tracking software will have similar core features, such as resume parsing and application management. However, products differ in their capabilities in other areas of recruiting.  

For example, if the company is having a hard time generating a significant number of applications, it would make sense to look for an ATS with strong recruitment marketing capabilities, such as job board distribution, social recruiting, and email marketing. If a company is struggling with managing large numbers of candidates applying to open roles, tools with more advanced AI-assisted resume scoring and interview scheduling functions could help handle the volume of applications.  

Once these must-have features have been identified, companies can turn to making a list of possible solutions.

Compare Applicant Tracking Systems Products

Create a long list

An initial list of ATS candidates should include any products that meet the company’s essential feature requirements. At this point, buyers should just be aiming to get a sense of the options that at least meet the basic requirements. 

Create a short list

After a long list has been created, it’s time to look at each product in more detail to determine if it sounds like it will meet the needs of the company’s recruiters. This should include evaluating additional features of each product beyond the ones identified as essential to determine if that additional functionality would enhance the company’s recruiting process in a way they hadn’t anticipated. 

Conduct demos

When the time comes to contact sellers for a demo, buyers should have certain questions in mind to ask the vendor. For example, what automated sourcing capabilities does the product have? How customizable are the workflows within the ATS? How user friendly is the interface? What tools for enhancing the candidate experience are included? How is the pricing of the product structured? 

Selection of Applicant Tracking Systems

Choose a selection team

The selection team should include any stakeholders who are typically involved in the hiring process and are likely to be the primary users of the ATS. This means that recruiters and HR managers should be involved, as well as at least some hiring managers representing different departments.

Negotiation

Once the buyers have found a product that appears to meet the company’s needs, it’s time to negotiate an agreement. When negotiating, they should consider the different pricing packages for an ATS and whether the company truly needs a package at the higher level, or if they can negotiate to find a middle ground between two pricing packages. Buyers might also consider negotiating a discount in exchange for signing a multi-year contract. 

Final decision

The final decision on an ATS purchase should rest with a company’s recruiting team since they are the most likely users of the software. Of course, they should solicit and consider input from other areas of the business as well. 

What Do Applicant Tracking Systems Cost?

ATS vendors offer several different kinds of pricing structures that buyers should be aware of: 

Pay per user: This is one of the most popular models, in which companies pay a monthly fee that varies based on how many ATS users the company has. A company that has five recruiters using the ATS will pay more than a company that is using two. While this offers buyers some flexibility, it also means companies need to pay more if they have a lot of different individuals involved in the recruitment process.

Pay per job opening: In this model, companies pay a fee for each vacant position they list. This might make sense for companies with low hiring volume, but the costs can add up for companies that have frequent hiring needs. 

Pay per module: This is a more common pricing structure for ATS products that are part of a larger HRMS suite. These all-in-one suites tend to include a variety of modules that manage HR functions, including payroll, time and attendance, performance management, and training. Companies pay a certain price to have the ATS module included in their package. 

Flat fee: Companies pay a flat monthly or annual fee for the ATS, regardless of how many ATS users or job listings they have.

ATS sellers frequently offer multiple packages of features, with a starter package including basic sourcing and candidate management tools and higher-level packages adding on more advanced screening and management capabilities. For buyers considering buying a larger HRMS suite that includes an ATS, part of the cost of a new ATS might need to include fees for implementation consultants to transition a company from one system to another.

Return on Investment (ROI)

The key factor in realizing a solid ROI for an ATS is in making the recruitment process faster and more efficient. By automating sourcing and many of the tasks recruiters would otherwise be completing manually, an ATS can reduce time to hire and help companies realize lower costs for marketing, job board posting, external recruiter fees, and other expenses associated with hiring a new employee. Buyers should judge the ongoing cost of their ATS against the money saved by improving the efficiency of the recruitment process. 

Implementation of Applicant Tracking Systems

How are Applicant Tracking Systems Implemented?

Implementation of applicant tracking software often depends on how the system will integrate with other products. Companies that are replacing an entire HRMS suite with multiple modules—including an ATS—often hire implementation consultants to assist with that transition. Such consultants might not be necessary for a company adding a standalone ATS product that is designed to integrate with the company’s existing software tools. In that case, the ATS seller’s onboarding team might be sufficient to ensure the ATS integrates effectively with the company’s other HR software. 

Who is Responsible for Applicant Tracking Systems Implementation?

The implementation team often includes team members who will be responsible for administering the ATS, such as recruiters and hiring managers, as well as representatives from the ATS seller who specialize in implementation. For more complex implementations, external consultants may also assist with setting up the ATS. 

What Does the Implementation Process Look Like for Applicant Tracking Systems?

Implementing an ATS involves evaluating the current state of the recruiting processes, considering what a successful future state would look like, deploying and configuring the new system, migrating data, and training users. 

First, companies should analyze their existing recruitment processes and the pain points involved. What systems are currently in place that aren’t working well? Once an honest appraisal of the recruiting process is complete, the next step is to think about the future state of the company’s recruiting process, including workflows that the buyer wants to design differently and other products that the ATS will need to integrate with. 

Once the team is ready for deployment, key stakeholders will work with the ATS seller to determine how to integrate the ATS with other systems and migrate legacy data over to the new system. The new system also needs to be set up with workflows that fit the company’s process, which could require some customization on the part of the seller. 

After these initial implementation phases are complete, the company will need to test the software to ensure the system works as designed for all users who need to access the ATS. Training to help users understand the capabilities of the new ATS is also an essential part of ensuring maximum ROI from the implementation.

When Should You Implement Applicant Tracking Systems?

Determining an implementation timeline is an important part of an ATS implementation. Especially at high-growth companies, ATS buyers should consider whether they are in the midst of a recruiting push and whether it would make sense to wait on an ATS implementation. Buyers should also work with the ATS seller to develop a realistic timeline for completing all of the steps in an implementation, since configuring systems, conducting user testing, managing integrations, and migrating data can take months to fully complete for complex systems.

Applicant Tracking Systems Trends

Social recruiting

To find the best candidates, recruiters must cast a wide net, and that includes reaching candidates on social media. Built-in social recruiting functions enable ATS users to automatically post information about open positions to popular social media sites as well as job boards. Analytics tools help the recruiter determine which social campaigns generate the best results. Social engagement also extends to employee referrals, as some products enable employees to connect with their own social networks to share open positions at their company. Social media has become an essential way that recruiters engage with potential applicants.

Remote recruiting

Companies had been gradually allowing more employees to work from home in recent years, a trend that was only accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. That shift in how people see the workplace is also translating to recruiting, as ATSs build in more functionality for recruiting no matter where either party is located. Major ATS products now offer experiences that are optimized for mobile devices. For candidates, that means being able to fill out applications or search for open positions using any device. Mobile-friendly tools for recruiters let users view candidate profiles, set up interviews, and check on the status of applications. ATS products also integrate with video interviewing platforms, now an increasingly essential tool for enabling interviews to happen remotely. 

Diversity recruiting

Leaders at many companies are putting a greater emphasis on diversity and inclusion, which includes how they approach diversity in hiring. Hiring platforms, including ATS products, have begun to implement functionality that aims to reduce unconscious bias in hiring. One example is the ability to generate a digital scorecard that interviewers use to rate each applicant on various attributes, such as skills or personality traits. In that way, applicants are judged by similar criteria. Hiring managers are also making use of pre-employment testing software that integrates with ATS products, giving companies a more objective data source to consider for each candidate. Analytics reports in an ATS can also help recruitment managers evaluate the results of their hiring processes from a diversity standpoint and determine whether they need to make changes to generate more diverse candidate pools and ultimately more diverse teams.