ATS (Applicant Tracking System)
An ATS is the system that manages hiring — job postings, applications, candidate pipelines, interview stages and offers — from requisition to accepted offer.
Also known as: applicant tracking system, recruitment software
Its core job is the pipeline: knowing where every candidate stands and who owes the next action. Hiring runs on momentum, and the most common cause of a lost candidate is nobody being sure whose turn it was.
It is also the record that makes hiring measurable. Time to hire, source effectiveness and stage drop-off are all questions the pipeline data answers and email cannot.
The handoff to onboarding is where an ATS earns its place in an HRMS rather than beside one. A candidate who accepts should become an employee record without anyone retyping their details, and the offer terms should carry into the appointment letter unchanged.
Handled in SignHR
Recruitment & Hiring
Recruitment & hiring — job openings, a drag-and-drop candidate pipeline, interview scorecards, offer letters and one-click convert-to-employee. No re-keying.
See recruitment & hiringRelated terms
Offer Letter
An offer letter is the document proposing employment — role, compensation, start date and key conditions — issued before the employee accepts and joins.
Onboarding
Onboarding is the process of turning an accepted offer into a working employee — collecting documents, creating accounts and access, and getting the person productive.
Cost Per Hire
Cost per hire is total recruiting spend over a period divided by the number of hires made in it — the standard measure of what filling a role actually costs.
HRMS (Human Resource Management System)
An HRMS is the system of record for an organisation's people data and the processes that run on it — employees, attendance, leave, payroll inputs, performance and documents in one place.