What Is an Applicant Tracking System?

What is an applicant tracking system? An applicant tracking system, or ATS, is the software an employer uses to run hiring. It holds open requisitions, publishes them to a career site and job boards, collects applications, and moves each candidate through stages until an offer is accepted or the role is withdrawn. Most mid-sized and large employers run one.

What an applicant tracking system stores and does

1. Requisitions. The approved request to hire: title, team, location, headcount, hiring manager, budget and the job description. A requisition exists before anything is public and becomes a posting when it is opened.
2. Postings and distribution. The ATS renders a career site, hosted on the vendor’s domain or embedded on the employer’s, and pushes the posting to boards such as LinkedIn and Indeed through feeds and integrations. This is the only part of the system the public sees.
3. Candidates and applications. Every applicant becomes a record: the resume, fields parsed from it, answers to screening questions and the source that brought them. Sourced candidates and referrals are stored the same way.
4. Pipeline stages. Applied, screen, interview, offer and hired, with scorecards, interview scheduling and messaging attached. Compliance reporting, such as equal-opportunity records in the US, sits on top of the same stages.
5. Offer and close. The offer letter, acceptance and the handoff to the HR system of record. When the requisition closes, the posting comes down from the career site and the board copies expire on their own schedules.
6. The vendors. Workday Recruiting and SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting sit inside large HR suites; iCIMS, Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, SmartRecruiters and Workable are standalone recruiting platforms; BambooHR and Paylocity bundle an ATS with payroll and HR for smaller employers. Each hosts its customers’ career sites under its own domain or a per-customer subdomain.

The last point is why the ATS matters to anyone working with jobs data. Every ATS career site is a public feed, and most postings appear there first, before a board copies them. Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby publish per-company job endpoints that need no key; Workday tenants serve their listings from a JSON call under myworkdayjobs.com. The catch is that each one is addressed per employer, so reading the market means maintaining a directory of tenants across every vendor. The mechanics are in the ATS job aggregator page, the per-vendor detail is under sources, starting with Greenhouse, and the glossary defines an ATS API. The boards also differ in what employers put on the posting. Here is the share of active postings that state a salary range, by board:

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. Seven of those sources are ATS career sites, which is where JobsPipe reads most of its postings, and the tenant directory is maintained for you. One request spans several vendors:

curl -X POST https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/jobs/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $JOBSPIPE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "source_or": ["workday", "greenhouse", "lever", "ashby"], "posted_at_max_age_days": 7, "limit": 50 }'

Each row names its origin in sources[0].provider and carries status, closed_at and closed_reason once the requisition closes, so the public side of the ATS lifecycle is on every record.