The primary benefit of an ATS is that it increases the efficiency of your talent acquisition team through streamlined, automated workflows. These tools can also be quite impactful: 94% of recruiters believe using ATS software has positively impacted their company's hiring processes.

Other benefits include improved employer branding, access to detailed analytics, and smooth engagement of managers & employees outside of HR/TA teams.

• Customized workflows: An ATS that can customize and automate tasks like application processing, screening, and collecting feedback can dramatically improve hiring efficiency. This benefit is especially significant to organizations hiring from very different candidate pools. If, for example, your team is hiring both truck drivers and software engineers, you can bet these workflows won’t be interchangeable.
• ‍Improved employer branding: A top ATS will help your organization create and manage a custom career site to help your company stand out. Showcasing your best features will make it easier to attract top talent, and with integrations with networks like LinkedIn, reaching a wide audience is easy. ‍
• Better quality talent pools: The best ATS software can save time and money by maintaining already-sourced candidates. If you maintain occasional contact with a pool of qualified candidates, your recruiting process doesn’t start from zero each time you open a new role.‍
• Wider internal engagement: Rather than relying exclusively on your HR/TA teams for recruiting, the best ATS software will also include your hiring managers and employees as part of the process. Employee referrals, feedback on job candidates, and social media can all be leveraged to fill open positions.‍
• Streamlined hiring and onboarding: An ATS can do more than streamline recruiting; it can work wonders for onboarding. A good first impression sets the stage for employee engagement and, ultimately, retention, so it’s critical to make the onboarding process employee-focused, timely, and effective.‍‍
• More effective recruitment strategies: An effective hiring process is data-driven. Any good ATS software dashboard will put recruiter productivity, cost per hire, cost for job boards, cost for paid media, time to hire, and other data at your fingertips.

The primary benefit of an ATS is that it increases the efficiency of your talent acquisition team through streamlined, automated workflows. These tools can also be quite impactful: 94% of recruiters believe using ATS software has positively impacted their company's hiring processes.

Other benefits include improved employer branding, access to detailed analytics, and smooth engagement of managers & employees outside of HR/TA teams.

• Customized workflows: An ATS that can customize and automate tasks like application processing, screening, and collecting feedback can dramatically improve hiring efficiency. This benefit is especially significant to organizations hiring from very different candidate pools. If, for example, your team is hiring both truck drivers and software engineers, you can bet these workflows won’t be interchangeable.
• ‍Improved employer branding: A top ATS will help your organization create and manage a custom career site to help your company stand out. Showcasing your best features will make it easier to attract top talent, and with integrations with networks like LinkedIn, reaching a wide audience is easy. ‍
• Better quality talent pools: The best ATS software can save time and money by maintaining already-sourced candidates. If you maintain occasional contact with a pool of qualified candidates, your recruiting process doesn’t start from zero each time you open a new role.‍
• Wider internal engagement: Rather than relying exclusively on your HR/TA teams for recruiting, the best ATS software will also include your hiring managers and employees as part of the process. Employee referrals, feedback on job candidates, and social media can all be leveraged to fill open positions.‍
• Streamlined hiring and onboarding: An ATS can do more than streamline recruiting; it can work wonders for onboarding. A good first impression sets the stage for employee engagement and, ultimately, retention, so it’s critical to make the onboarding process employee-focused, timely, and effective.‍‍
• More effective recruitment strategies: An effective hiring process is data-driven. Any good ATS software dashboard will put recruiter productivity, cost per hire, cost for job boards, cost for paid media, time to hire, and other data at your fingertips.

Any business choosing any type of ATS should aim to get the maximum functionality for its price point (while ensuring key functions for its specific business are best-in-class), focus on potential long-term benefits rather than short-term costs, and understand the software vendor's product roadmap.

• ‍What do you want to achieve with the ATS?: Depending on your business, you can have one person or multiple teams across your company branches interacting with the ATS day-to-day. Each may have a different pain point they want the recruitment tool to tackle. Knowing the center goals of these stakeholders and the importance of each can equip you with a list of features ranking from most to least desired.
• What can you afford?: An ATS that can schedule interviews, manage employee referrals, and parse resumes will lighten the load on your HR/TA team, leading to increased efficiency. That said, investing in a feature-rich ATS could mean more complexity, steeper learning curves, and higher costs to the system. So, besides the feature list, you’d need to note down your allowed budget and the human resources involved in onboarding and maintaining the ATS system.
• Focus on individual features during your vendor research: Evaluate precisely what you need. The feature list and resource note that you have prepared in the earlier steps will help you stay focused on options that truly matter.
• Think long term: Trying to anticipate the future is critical given how hard these tools are to replace over time (migrating tons of candidate data, different workflows for different types of job, etc.). Beyond the capacity for the platform to scale up as you grow, you should pay attention to how this growth will affect product pricing and, therefore, the ATS ROI.‍
• Understand the road map: A tool with no future plan for improvements may cause trouble for future software switches, but a vendor with an ambitious list of feature enhancements announced yet a very humble track record of delivery is not any better. Ask the sales rep specific questions relevant to your business needs and review content published on company channels for more information.

Here are some guidelines on pricing based on company headcount. This information is intended to help you get a general sense of ATS pricing. Keep in mind that ATS software comes in all shapes and budget sizes. Here we provide mid-range samples for reference.

• Small business (<100 employees): $250 up to $12,000 USD per year.
• Medium-sized business (100-500 employees): $3,000 to $25,000 per year.
• Large business (501-5,000) employees): $15,000 to $50,000+ annually.‍‍
• Enterprise (5,000+ employees): From $125,000 per year.