An applicant tracking system, or ATS, is software that helps employers manage recruitment from a single place: posting vacancies, collecting applications, moving candidates through interview stages, and keeping a record of the whole process. Instead of tracking applicants across email threads and spreadsheets, everything sits in one system that both hiring managers and recruiters can see.
In short:
- An ATS is software that manages recruitment end to end, from posting a vacancy to hiring a candidate.
- It centralises applications from multiple job boards into one place, rather than scattered inboxes.
- Candidates move through pipeline stages (such as applied, screened, interview, offer) that are visible to the whole hiring team.
- A good ATS also supports UK-specific needs, like right-to-work checks and GDPR-compliant handling of candidate data.
- It replaces manually tracking applicants across email and spreadsheets, which gets unreliable once a business is hiring for more than one role at a time.
What is an applicant tracking system?
An applicant tracking system is software built specifically to manage the recruitment process. At its core, it does three things: it lets you publish a vacancy in one place and push it out to multiple job boards, it collects every application against that vacancy automatically, and it tracks each candidate’s progress through defined stages until someone is hired.
The name comes from what the software was originally built to do, track applicants, though modern systems typically go further, covering interview scheduling, candidate communication, and reporting on how a hiring process is performing.
What does an ATS actually do?
A typical ATS covers the full hiring journey:
- Posting vacancies. Write a job advert once and publish it to your careers page and external job boards like Indeed or LinkedIn, rather than posting the same advert manually in several places.
- Collecting applications. Every application against a vacancy lands in one place automatically, with the candidate’s details, CV, and any other documents attached to their profile.
- Managing a pipeline. Candidates sit in stages, such as applied, screening, interview, or offer, and the hiring team can see at a glance where everyone is in the process, usually by dragging candidates between stages.
- Supporting interviews. Scheduling, feedback, and scoring against role criteria typically live in the same system as the rest of the candidate’s record, and some platforms now support AI-assisted first-round screening to help highlight stronger candidates.
- Reporting. An ATS can show how long a vacancy has been open, where candidates are dropping out of the process, and how many applications a job board is actually generating.
How is an ATS different from just using email and spreadsheets?
Email and spreadsheets work for the occasional single vacancy, but they break down quickly once a business is hiring for more than one role, or more than one person is involved in the process. Applications end up spread across several inboxes, spreadsheets fall out of date the moment someone forgets to update a row, and there’s no single, current view of where every candidate actually stands.
An ATS solves this by giving everyone involved, hiring managers, HR, and anyone else on the panel, the same live view of every vacancy and every candidate, without needing to forward emails or reconcile separate spreadsheets.
What should a good ATS include for UK employers?
Beyond the core pipeline and job board features, a few things matter specifically for UK-based hiring:
- Right-to-work checks. UK employers are legally required to check that a job applicant has the right to work in the UK before they start, using either the applicant’s original documents or an online or Identity Document Validation Technology (IDVT) check. Copies of that evidence need to be kept for the duration of employment and for 2 years after someone leaves. An ATS that builds right-to-work checks into the hiring flow, rather than handling them separately, makes this easier to stay on top of.
- A branded career site. Vacancies published somewhere candidates recognise as your company, rather than only on third-party job boards.
- GDPR-compliant data handling. Candidate applications contain personal data, so how long that data is kept and who can access it matters (more on this below).
- A straightforward pipeline view. Simple enough that a hiring manager who only recruits occasionally can still use it without training.
Sense HR’s recruitment module covers this end to end: vacancies that post to job boards like Indeed and LinkedIn in one click, pipelines with stages and scoring, AI-assisted first-round screening via the recruitment agent, and right-to-work checks built into the hiring flow.
Do UK employers need to think about GDPR when using an ATS?
Yes. Candidate information, names, contact details, CVs, interview notes, is personal data, so it’s covered by UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 in exactly the same way as any other personal data an employer holds. The Information Commissioner’s Office publishes specific guidance on recruitment and selection, covering how long candidate data should be kept, who should be able to access it, and what candidates need to be told about how their data is used.
In practice, this means an ATS should let you control how long unsuccessful candidates’ data is retained, restrict access to what each member of the hiring team actually needs to see, and keep a clear record of consent and communication with each candidate.
Tips for choosing an ATS
- Check it posts to the job boards you actually use, not just a generic list.
- Make sure the pipeline view is simple enough for occasional hiring managers, not just recruiters.
- Confirm it supports UK right-to-work checks as part of the hiring flow, not as a separate manual step.
- Ask how candidate data retention and deletion is handled, since this is a GDPR requirement, not just good practice.
- Look for a straight line from candidate to employee record, so a hire doesn’t mean re-entering all their details again.
Recruitment, connected to the rest of HR
Chasing applications across inboxes and spreadsheets gets harder the moment more than one role is open at once. Sense HR’s recruitment module keeps vacancies, pipelines, right-to-work checks and candidate records in the same HR software as the rest of the employee lifecycle, so a hire becomes an employee record without re-entering their details.