Applicant Tracking Systems – How do they work?

The modern day corporate world is one featuring many competitive forces at work. On the one hand, candidates (and highly-qualified ones at that) are on the lookout for rewarding and lucrative job openings in the top companies. On the other hand, well-placed businesses are in competition with each other to hire the services of the best talents. In this scenario, it is not uncommon to have the recruitment department being flooded with job applications and resumes from potential candidates. In fact, there have been many cases where companies have tried to manage the entire recruitment drive manually, and have ended up wasting valuable time and money. Thankfully, businesses can now streamline their recruiting processes for employees, making the whole procedure cheaper and much quicker.

Hiring an employee can be compared to an investment decision, with the candidate representing human capital. Due diligence is required to train and educate the new employees with their job responsibilities, making human resource (HR) management extremely crucial indeed. When it can be palpably disce
ed that, recruitment drives are taking up much of the time that should have been allotted for HR-related issues, companies should turn to Applicant Tracking System. It comes in the form of a software product and phases out the manual recruitment process of the company. As a result, the business can get hold of the ideal candidates quickly, easily and in a much more efficient way. The ATS can be applied at the front-end (i.e., used in the company website) also. In such cases, potential candidate resumes are screened at the application stage itself. Alte
atively, ATS can be applied in collaboration with job portals (Monster, HotJobs or Career Builder, among others). In these cases, after careful selection of the applications, the information is suitably passed on to the companies, by the ATS itself. Thus, the system can function in multiple procedures, making it a convenient employee-hiring tool for firms.

Since its first appearance as a closed source model in 2006 (named as CATS), Applicant Tracking System have evolved over time, and have moved towards becoming open source models by the end of 2008. ATS are flexible tools, and can be applied by both small businesses as well as large enterprises. Multiple vendors supply ATS software products at this time, and their costs vary according to their features and the size of the company they are meant to be recruiting candidates for – that is the extent to which the software is to be used.