How Do Applicant Tracking Systems Work?

How do applicant tracking systems work? An ATS runs each requisition through a fixed lifecycle. A hiring manager opens it, the posting goes to the career site and the boards, applications arrive and are parsed into candidate records, recruiters move candidates through stages, an offer is made and the requisition closes. Only the posting is public; everything else stays inside.

How an applicant tracking system works, stage by stage

1. The requisition opens. Someone requests headcount, finance and the hiring manager’s chain approve it, and the ATS creates a requisition with a title, location, level and job description. Nothing is visible yet; a requisition can sit approved for weeks before anyone publishes it.
2. Posting to the career site and boards. Publishing renders the posting on the ATS-hosted careers page and syndicates it to LinkedIn, Indeed and other boards through feeds or direct integrations. What the world sees from this step: title, location, description, sometimes a salary range, a posted date and an apply link.
3. Intake. Applications come in through the ATS apply form or through board integrations such as Indeed Apply and LinkedIn Easy Apply, and each becomes a candidate record with a source tag. Referrals and sourced candidates enter the same pipeline. None of this is public.
4. Parsing and screening. The ATS parses the resume into fields, applies knockout questions and, in many products, ranks or tags candidates against the description. Recruiters review the queue and advance or reject. The rejection emails candidates receive come from this step.
5. Stages and interviews. Candidates move through the pipeline stages the employer configured, with scheduling, scorecards and feedback recorded on each one. The posting stays up throughout, which is why an active posting says nothing about how far along the search is.
6. Offer and close. An offer is generated, negotiated and accepted, the hire is handed to the HR system, and the requisition is closed. The posting is removed from the career site at that moment; copies on aggregators expire later on their own schedule.

So the public record of a hire is two events: a posting appears and a posting disappears. Everything between them is inferred. That is the whole basis of posting-based hiring data, and it is why the source matters: on an ATS career site the disappearance means the requisition closed, while on a board it may only mean a listing expired. The definition and the main vendors are in what is an applicant tracking system.

Where JobsPipe fits

JobsPipe is a jobs data API that collects live postings from LinkedIn, Indeed, Y Combinator, Naukri, Workday, Greenhouse, Workable, SmartRecruiters, Ashby, Lever and Paylocity, returns them as one schema with closure tracking and a ghost score, and includes a free tier of 1,000 jobs a month. It reads the public side of the lifecycle above: discovered_at marks the first sighting, last_seen_at the most recent, and when a posting is gone the record gets status set to closed with closed_at and closed_reason. Removal is checked continuously on Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, Y Combinator and Paylocity and at listing expiry on LinkedIn and Indeed, a distinction the job posting lifespan page measures board by board. Postings that stay up far longer than their board’s norm are the subject of the ghost jobs page, and the ghost score on every record is the short version of that check. To see the closed side of one employer’s pipeline:

curl -X POST https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/jobs/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $JOBSPIPE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "company_name_or": ["Example Corp"], "status": "closed", "posted_at_max_age_days": 90, "limit": 50 }'