An applicant tracking system (ATS) is the software in which a company records every open job, every application, every interview and every offer. It is the system of record for hiring: the one database that the company treats as the official version of who applied for what, and what happened next. Most recruiters at medium and large companies use one every day.
An ATS does four main jobs. First, it publishes each job on the company's career website and sends it to job sites. Second, it collects the applications. It reads each CV and pulls out the name, phone number, past employers, skills and years of experience. This is called CV parsing. Third, it moves each candidate through stages: applied, shortlisted, tested, interviewed, offered and hired. Every stage change, comment and interview score is recorded against the candidate. Fourth, it produces the offer letter.
Take, for example, a software services company in Kochi with 600 staff. It opens a job for a test engineer. In two weeks, the ATS receives 420 applications. The recruiter has set two screening questions: "What is your notice period?" and "Can you work from Kochi?" The ATS sets aside candidates whose notice period is longer than 60 days. The recruiter reads the rest and shortlists 35. The ATS sends each of them a link to a coding assessment. The scores come back into the ATS, and the top 12 are invited to interviews. The ATS finds free slots in the interviewers' calendars and sends invitations. After each technical interview, the interviewer fills in a feedback form in the ATS. One candidate is selected. The ATS creates the offer letter with the salary, and records the candidate's acceptance.
After the offer is accepted, the ATS starts background verification. When the check is clear, the ATS sends the new hire's details to the HRIS and payroll system. From that point, the person is an employee, not a candidate.
The ATS also tells the company how well it hires. It reports how many days each hire took and which source, such as a job site or an employee referral, produced each hire.
Applications reach the ATS from many places: from programmatic job advertising, from AI recruiting tools and, for freshers, from a campus recruiting platform. Large employers add a candidate experience platform, which runs the career site and a chatbot for candidates.