ATS (Applicant Tracking System)

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is software that manages the recruiting process end to end: publishing job postings, collecting and storing applications, screening and ranking candidates, coordinating interviews, and tracking every applicant through defined hiring stages until offer and hire. The ATS is the recruiter's system of record — it centralizes candidate communication, enables collaboration between recruiters and hiring managers, builds a searchable talent pool of past applicants, and produces recruiting metrics such as time-to-hire, source effectiveness, and pipeline conversion rates. Modern ATS platforms add career-site builders, automated interview scheduling, structured scorecards, and increasingly AI-assisted screening — a capability under growing regulatory scrutiny for bias, notably under the EU AI Act, which classifies AI in hiring as high-risk. Two practical notes define the ATS conversation: first, for candidates, ATS parsing is why machine-readable CVs matter — heavily designed documents can lose data in extraction; second, for HR technology architecture, the ATS-to-HRIS handover is a key integration point, ensuring a hired candidate's data flows into the employee record without re-entry, and onward into onboarding workflows and initial LMS training assignments. Compliance features — GDPR-conformant consent and data retention for candidate data in Europe, EEO reporting in the US — are baseline requirements.