What is an ATS and how to choose recruitment software

What is an ATS, in simple terms

An ATS (Applicant Tracking System) is recruitment software that stores jobs, candidates and the full history of your work with them. An application from hh.kz, a Telegram message, an employee referral — everything lands in one candidate profile instead of five different places.

Inside an ATS, each job is a pipeline of stages: new application, screening, HR interview, interview with the manager, offer, start date. Candidates move through the stages, and at any moment you can see how many people are at each step and where the pipeline is stuck.

The second job of an ATS is recruitment automation: the system collects applications, sends candidates an email or message, reminds the manager to review a résumé and counts how many days it takes to fill a job. The recruiter spends time talking to people, not copying résumés into a spreadsheet.

Signs it is time for your company to adopt an ATS

Company size matters less than you might think. What counts is the flow of candidates and the number of people involved in hiring. Check yourself against this list:

• Candidates live in Excel. A spreadsheet with "Name", "Phone", "Status" and "Comment" columns and colour-coded cells. One person updates it, everyone else asks in the chat.
• Five job board accounts. The recruiter opens hh.kz, OLX, LinkedIn, a Telegram channel and email one after another just to collect the day's applications.
• Candidates slip through the cracks. A strong candidate applied, nobody replied, and a week later they joined another employer.
• The manager goes silent. Résumés were sent to the hiring manager on WhatsApp, five days later there is still no feedback, and the recruiter cannot show exactly where the process stands.
• No answer to "how long have we been looking for a sales manager?". You cannot quickly work out how many days it takes to fill a job or which source brings people who pass probation.
• High-volume hiring. A retail chain in Almaty needs 30 sales assistants a month, a call centre in Astana needs 15 agents a week. A flow like that cannot be handled manually without losing people.

If three or more points match, an ATS will pay off faster than you expect. If only one does, tidying up your spreadsheet may be enough.

Which ATS features you need and which are just marketing

Every system's presentation has a long list of features. Split it into three groups: what the system is useless without, what noticeably speeds up the work, and what sounds impressive but rarely gets used.

A separate word on data storage. Résumés are personal data, and a Kazakhstan-based company needs to know which servers they are stored on. Ask this on the very first call.

About AI screening: it is useful when applications come in by the dozens and hundreds. The system compares each résumé with the job requirements and shows a match percentage, so the recruiter starts with the best-fitting candidates. Learn more about how AI scoring works on the AI recruiting page.

Questions to ask in a demo

A demo built on someone else's scenario shows the product at its best. Your job is to test your own. Prepare a real job and take it from posting to hire.

Ask for trial access for at least a week and give it to one hiring manager. If they figure it out without instructions, the system will stick. We covered how to prepare questions for the interviews themselves in our article on interview questions.

How to measure the impact of an ATS

A business owner does not need a "convenient pipeline" — they need a number. The clearest one is recruiter hours spent on routine work: collecting applications, copying them into a spreadsheet, sending replies, arranging interview times, reminding managers.

Below is a sample calculation. Plug in your own data.

Monthly savings = routine hours × share automated × recruiter's hourly cost

The second part of the impact is speed. Every day a job stays open costs money: an unstaffed store, a short-handed warehouse shift, an overloaded team. If a job takes 30 days to fill on average and 22 with an ATS, calculate what those 8 days of a new employee's work are worth to the company.

The third part is lost candidates. Look at how many applications went unanswered last month. Even if only two of those people were a fit, that is two jobs that could have been filled sooner.

To measure honestly, record your baseline before implementation: average time to fill, number of unanswered applications, hours spent on routine work. Without that starting point, three months later you will be comparing impressions, not results.

How to implement an ATS in 1–3 days

A long implementation usually means the company is trying to migrate its entire archive and describe every process at once. Start with your current jobs.

• Day 1. Connect your application sources: job boards, Telegram, careers site. Add your open jobs and set up the pipeline stages. High-volume roles need fewer stages, key roles need more.
• Day 2. Invite hiring managers. Spend 15 minutes showing them one screen — where to view candidates and how to rate them. Set up candidate message templates: application received, invitation, rejection.
• Day 3. Move over the candidates currently in progress. Past years' archive can be uploaded later or not at all. Agree on a rule: from today, a candidate exists only if they are in the system.

After two weeks, gather feedback from recruiters and managers and adjust the stages. After a month, open your first source report — it already shows where your job posting budget is best spent.

Mistakes when choosing an ATS

• Choosing by the length of the feature list. Half the features will go unused, while the basics — collecting applications from hh.kz and OLX — may come with limitations.
• Not showing the system to managers before buying. The recruiter loves it, but hiring managers never log in. Hiring drifts back to WhatsApp.
• Not asking about local job boards. Integrations with foreign services are useless if your candidates apply on hh.kz, OLX and Telegram.
• Ignoring what happens after the hire. The candidate is hired — and HR re-enters their data into the onboarding system, HR documents and time tracking.
• Not recording baseline metrics. Without "before" numbers, six months later there is no way to show whether the system paid off.
• Signing up for years without a trial. A week of work with real jobs tells you more than three demos.

Where to start tomorrow

1. Count how many applications came in last month and how many went unanswered.
2. Write down the average number of days to fill your three most common roles.
3. Ask your recruiter to track for a week how much time goes into collecting applications and messaging.
4. List the job boards your candidates actually come from.
5. Take the demo checklist above and run a demo with it — on your own job and with one hiring manager.

If you want to test your company's scenario, open the Recruiting module page and book a demo.