How to recruit staff practically with ATS software

For most small and medium-sized companies, hiring someone is the HR process that eats up the most time and ends up worst documented. Applications arrive through three or four different channels, CVs end up scattered across each manager's inbox and, two weeks later, nobody knows for certain who has been interviewed, who has been rejected and why.

ATS software solves exactly that problem: it centralises every application in one place and moves each one through the stages until the hire. In this article we explain what an ATS is, what it does that a spreadsheet cannot, and how to use it, end to end, in a real selection process.

What ATS software is

ATS stands for Applicant Tracking System. It is a tool that organises the entire selection process from a single place: from the moment you publish the vacancy to the day the chosen person joins the company.

The core idea is that each application stops being a loose email and becomes a record with a status. Every person sits in a specific stage of the process («received», «phone interview», «technical test», «offer»), and any member of the team can see where they stand without having to ask anyone.

That is what separates an ATS from a folder of CVs: it is not a file store, it is a workflow. And because it records who made each move and when, it is also the audit trail of the process.

What you stop doing once you have an ATS

The best way to understand what an ATS is for is to look at what happens when there is not one. These are the tasks that disappear the day you centralise selection.

What an ATS takes off your plate

• Collecting applications from eleven places: job boards, email, LinkedIn and the form on your website stop travelling separately and all land on the same board.
• Retyping data: the name, phone number and experience already come from the form; there is nothing to copy into a spreadsheet.
• Losing candidates: nobody is left without an answer because their email slipped between two conversation threads.
• Duplicating profiles: if someone already applied six months ago, the ATS has them on file with their history.
• Improvising the criteria: the stages and the questions are the same for everyone, which makes the process comparable and defensible.
• Not knowing what happened: every stage change, every note and every rejection is recorded with an author and a date.

There is a less visible but equally real cost: applications abandoned halfway through. When a process takes weeks to show signs of life, the strongest profiles —who usually have more than one offer on the table— walk away. The negative review on the job boards follows.

What a recruitment process covers

An ATS does not replace the process: it holds it together. There is no single script —every company adjusts it to its own size and pace— but almost every hire ends up passing through the same points.

From the need to the first day

• Spot the need: decide whether this is a replacement or a new role, and exactly which duties it will cover.
• Plan the process: define the stages, who takes part in each one and how long each step should take.
• Publish the vacancy: write the advert and distribute it through the channels where the people you want actually are.
• Source and screen: gather the applications and filter them against the requirements of the role.
• Run tests and interviews: assess each candidate's competencies and take notes the team can share afterwards.
• Evaluate and decide: compare the finalists against the same criteria and negotiate the terms of the offer.
• Onboard the person: the first few weeks are what determine whether the hire ends up working out or not.

Publishing, screening and coordinating the finalists are the three points where an ATS changes things most. We take them one at a time: how to write the advert, how to filter the applications that come in and how to carry the finalists through to the decision.

How to write and publish a vacancy that attracts

A vague advert attracts vague applications. If you write «we are looking for a proactive person for a dynamic department», you will receive a hundred CVs and none of them useful. The description has to let whoever reads it rule themselves out, which is precisely what saves you work later on.

What the advert must not leave out

• Role, work centre and work model (on-site, hybrid or remote), with the number of positions.
• The real day-to-day duties, not a generic list of responsibilities.
• Essential requirements kept separate from desirable ones: mixing them up stops good profiles from applying.
• Working hours, contract type and salary range.
• A trimmed application form: ask only for what you will actually use to decide. Every extra field is one application fewer.

The salary range will not stay optional for much longer. Directive (EU) 2023/970 on pay transparency requires the salary or the pay range to be disclosed before the interview and bans asking candidates what they earned in their previous job. The transposition deadline is 7 June 2026. We cover it in detail in our article on the EU Pay Transparency Directive.

Screen before interviewing, not afterwards

Screening is where the most time is lost in the whole process. Reading a hundred CVs to find the ten that meet the minimum requirements is mechanical work an ATS can do for you, provided you give it the criteria up front.

The mechanism is simple: you attach a questionnaire to the advert, mark which answers you expect from a good candidate, and the system scores each application automatically as it comes in.

How to build a good screening questionnaire

• Knockout questions for requirements that admit no exception: a driving licence, a qualifying degree, availability for night shifts, an essential language.
• Scored questions for the desirable requirements: years of experience with a specific tool, a second language, sector experience.
• Single choice, multiple choice or free text depending on what you are asking; free-text answers are not scored automatically, but they give you context before you call.
• Few questions, clearly worded: a twenty-question form makes good candidates give up halfway through applying.
• Sort by match percentage and start at the top, but do not reject blindly: the score prioritises, it does not decide.

That nuance matters. Automatic screening is there to sort the queue, not to replace the judgement of the person recruiting. An excellent profile can score low simply because they do not fit a tick box; that is why it is worth reviewing the ones sitting just below the threshold too.

The visual pipeline and the final decision

Once you have your finalists, the problem stops being volume and becomes coordination. Who has already done the technical interview? Who has been waiting for an answer for five days? A visual pipeline answers those questions at a glance, because each candidate is a card sitting in a column.

How to get the most out of the pipeline

• Define the stages once and save them as a template: every new vacancy comes pre-configured.
• Move candidates by dragging and dropping as they progress, so the state of the process is always up to date.
• Write the note right after the interview, with an author and a date. Three weeks later nobody remembers why candidate number seven was rejected.
• Watch the counters per stage: if candidates pile up in one column, that is the bottleneck in your process.
• Always close the loop with rejected candidates: a timely «no» is what makes that person apply again for your next vacancy.

The metrics you should be watching

An ATS does not just tidy the process up: it makes it measurable. These are the indicators that explain where you are losing candidates and money.

Basic recruitment indicators

• Time to hire: days between publishing the advert and the offer being accepted. It is the indicator that most affects the loss of good profiles.
• Time per stage: where the process gets stuck. The bottleneck is often not the screening but the diary of whoever has to interview.
• Conversion rate between stages: how many candidates move from each step to the next. A sharp drop points to a badly calibrated filter.
• Source of the application: which channels bring in the profiles that end up hired, not simply the ones that bring in the most volume.
• Drop-off rate: candidates who withdraw during the process. If it is high, review the length and the communication.
• Offer acceptance rate: if many finalists say no, the problem is usually the salary range or the terms, not the recruitment itself.

Candidate data is personal data too

This is the part most companies overlook. A CV contains personal data, and the fact that someone sent it to you voluntarily does not entitle you to keep it indefinitely. Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (the GDPR) and Spain's Organic Law 3/2018 (LOPDGDD) apply to a selection process exactly as they do to payroll.

Personal data shall be kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed.

In practical terms: when the process ends, the purpose that justified holding that CV has been exhausted. If you want to keep it for future vacancies, that is a different purpose and needs its own informed, separate consent.

The minimum you need to have sorted

• Prior information (art. 13 of the GDPR): who the controller is, what the data is processed for, how long it is kept and how to exercise data subject rights. It must be shown at the point of application.
• Evidence of what was disclosed and when: if you change the privacy policy, you must be able to prove which version each candidate saw.
• Separate consent for the talent pool, distinct from the consent to take part in a specific process.
• A defined retention period and, above all, one that is actually applied: having it in writing is worthless if the CVs stay in your inbox forever.
• An audit trail for manual entries: when a recruiter adds a candidate by hand, it must be on record who vouches for having obtained that data lawfully.
• Access control: applications should only be visible to the people taking part in the process, not to the whole workforce.

Common mistakes when rolling out an ATS

The mistakes that stop the tool from working properly

• Building fifteen stages because the tool allows it. An SME's process works with four or five; stages nobody uses only clutter the board.
• Still taking applications by email in parallel: if the alternative channel stays open, half the process carries on outside the system.
• Writing an endless questionnaire: every extra question is one application fewer, and the ones you lose tend to be the profiles with the most options.
• Rejecting on score alone without reviewing the profiles close to the threshold.
• Not replying to rejected candidates, which is the most direct source of negative reviews on job boards.
• Not closing the vacancy: if it stays open once the role is filled, the metrics stop making sense and candidates keep applying.
• Forgetting onboarding: hiring is not the end of the process, it is the beginning of what determines whether the person stays.

How to recruit with Horalia

Horalia's recruitment module is designed so that a small or medium-sized company can set up a complete selection process in one afternoon, with no spreadsheets and no folders of CVs lost in an inbox.

The whole process, inside the same tool

• Openings in minutes: a five-step wizard takes you from the role details to the application form, with a live preview of what the candidate will see.
• A job portal of your own with your own web address and your logo, and no Horalia branding in the footer. If you have a corporate website, you embed the listing with an iframe.
• Google Jobs indexing: every opening is rendered on the server with the JobPosting structured data that job search engines need.
• A visual pipeline with custom stages (your own name, colour and icon), drag and drop, counters per stage and reusable templates.
• Automatic screening with single choice, multiple choice or free text questionnaires, disqualifying answers and a match percentage to sort the list.
• A talent database with search and filters by opening, stage and tags, a built-in CV preview, internal notes with author and date, and WhatsApp contact with candidates who have consented.
• GDPR compliance: it stores which privacy policy each candidate saw and when, manual entries are attributed, the talent pool has its own separate consent and data is deleted automatically once the retention period is up.
• From candidate to employee in one click: when you hire, the record moves across to your workforce without retyping a single detail.

And here is the real advantage of keeping recruitment inside the same platform as the rest of HR: on their first day, the person is already in time tracking, in absence and holiday management and in the work schedules, and the contract can be sent for signature from document management with electronic signature without printing anything. You can discover Horalia or try it for free.