Do you know how long the best candidate stays available? On average, ten days only 🤯. That means recruiters should be very nimble to hunt qualified candidates and win them over. But that is easier said than done.
An immense workload and poorly organized hiring process exhaust recruiters, and they can easily miss appropriate job seekers by losing candidates' resumes or failing to reach out in a timely manner. Things become much easier with the recruitment process automation, or so-called applicant tracking system, or ATS.
Being a SaaS design agency, Eleken embraces design trends from various industries to be able to help our clients with even the most specific requests. Thus, we have some insights to share with you regarding the recruitment industry as well.
What is an applicant tracking system?
An applicant tracking system or ATS facilitates collecting and processing data of specialists applying for a specific position. The ATS's primary purpose is to streamline the recruitment process through workflow automation and optimization.
Although the recruitment tools market is quite saturated, offering various services from common recruiting platforms to technology-based services like Textio, you can still build a unique ATS solution that will perfectly fit your niche needs.
When does your company need an ATS?
The time to think about implementing an ATS comes when you find your business in any of these conditions:
- Your business is rapidly growing, and you lack manpower in a people management department to handle all the new openings.
- Your employee turnover rate is high, and the staffing process gets out of control.
- You have issues with reporting and legal compliance due to the applicants' data being scattered chaotically.
- Your HR staff is running with sweat in an attempt to fulfill the positions.
- You're hiring during pandemics and need the help of AI-driven analytics tools to find the best candidates.
Applicant tracking system benefits
If you're still considering building an applicant tracking system, most recruiters would agree it's a worthwhile investment. Just look at the advantages an ATS dashboard can bring to your organization.
Saved time on candidate matching
The reality is that around 80% of submitted applications don't match job postings and just waste recruiters' time spent on the analysis. Thanks to the candidate management system, recruiters don't spend tons of time on application screening, which is the most time-consuming part of the recruitment process.
Reduced recruitment costs
Without an ATS, you'd probably need to expand your recruiters' headcount to handle the staffing process. That means you have to increase your monthly payments by thousands of dollars, whereas the ATS cost is around a hundred dollars a month per user. Isn't it attractive mathematics from a business perspective?
Simplified the hiring process
The ATS layout visualizes each candidate's interview stage and makes it easy to track progress by moving cards on the Kanban board. You won't lose resumes. And you don't need multi-sheet Excel files to keep the hiring process on track.
Improved legal compliance
This ATS's functionality keeps recruiters aware of changes in laws and regulations that can impact hiring decisions. Besides, the system preserves all the information about an applicant and justifies the refusal to hire if someone, for example, has lawsuits.
Faster hiring of top candidates
Usually, the best candidates are taken first. According to the research, the brightest professionals stay on the market only for ten days before getting hired, so the quickest company wins. The ATS system allows you to be quick.
How to design an applicant tracking system?
Despite the abundance of software tools on the recruitment market, finding a suitable solution does not seem to be such an easy task. Either the feature is lacking, or the UX is bad, the reality is that almost half of the companies that implemented ready-to-use ATS are not satisfied with their choice.
The same situation happened to our client, who came to Eleken for UI/UX design of his own ATS called Hirerise. While all the existing ATS system examples on the market were a bit outdated and complex, we wanted to design an app that is both appealing and functional.
So, if you decide to tackle this challenging task and build your in-house ATS, here are some tips on arranging the process and approaching ATS system design that we learned while working on the Hirerise project.
Define your expectations from ATS
You basically have to answer three simple (relatively) questions:
- What are those issues you want to address with the help of the new ATS?
- What frictions do you want to avoid in your applicant tracking system UI?
- And what features do you want to add to/remove from your current ATS (if you have any)?
To make the process of answering the above questions more effective, it's crucial to conduct a competitive analysis. It will give you a clear understanding of what customers expect to find in your applicant tracking system, and it will allow you to define your competitive advantage.
Once you're confident with the expectations from the new ATS, it's time to outline a list of features. Not to base such important design decisions on bare assumptions, you'll need to question your recruiting team (that is, conduct user research). Together with the specialists directly involved in working with recruitment tools, you'll be able to shortlist the must-have features and then rate them in order of importance.
Going through user research helped us to make very important decisions on how to streamline team communication in Hirerise. The thing is that the whole hiring process consists of many stages that require the involvement of various people from different departments (consequently, they need to communicate with each other). Recruiters complained that the hiring flow they got was complex and confusing, as each time they wanted some feedback from other team members, they had to somehow contact them.
To make this process simple and straightforward, Hirerise users can create a team, add the needed members, and together easily comment on candidates, tag each other, or set tasks. Besides, we placed comments on the same screen as the applicant's bio, so users don't have to switch between tabs.
Design a user-friendly ATS software
To be successful, the app has to be beautiful inside and outside. That is, it has to provide both great UI and UX. As a customer-focused design agency, we approach UX design with special responsibility as the experience customers get when using your ATS literally decides the product's success. Taking care of the UX, you'll be one step ahead of the competition since lots of current staffing tools don't pay due attention to the ATS user experience.
Here is what you should consider when designing your ATS:
It should be intuitive and easy to use. What would be your first impression if you looked at the system with an unbiased eye? Does it evoke a desire to try using or better closing it? Go with your guts and mind that with high probability, other users may feel the same way.
It should be a no-brainer for recruiters. Do you know that it takes more than four months to hire new staff? If you plan to expand your recruiters' team, they should be able to learn fast and hit the ground running as soon as possible. The self-explanatory ATS will ultimately reduce time and cost for long introduction training.
It should be mobile-ready. As we've already discussed above, the reality is that recruiters often work on the go. Thus, it's crucial to design your ATS the way evenly usable on desktops and mobile devices.
And here's how we took care of Hirerise's look and feel:
- To perfectly think out a clear structure, logical, and convenient design elements placement, we used wireframing.
- To create a clean and intuitive user interface for Hirerise, we, together with the client, created a moodboard that put our design ideas in the right direction.
- As a result, we managed to design an app that makes the hiring process hassle-free and pleasant.
Build your ATS MVP
The next step after the brainstorming sessions is to create a minimum viable product or a pilot version of your new ATS. With such a fundamental product, it's wise to start small and check if you go right direction before making huge investments.
When building your MVP, it's important to think carefully about which features your system should include. Here are some of the core functionalities you might consider adding.
- Social sharing (LinkedIn integration is a must-have!)
Once a job description is ready to go, you can quickly distribute it with a few clicks to different social media platforms.
- Fast CV download
You can effortlessly download a candidate's resume to the database with just one click, especially when the system supports resume parsing to automatically extract key information. You just need an API (an application programming interface) to integrate your applicant tracking system with job boards, job search platforms, and social media websites.
- Database search
Typically, ATS includes a large applicant database, so you can make a keyword or a Boolean search within it. The keyword search means you can quickly find a suitable candidate by typing in specific skills, experience, or job requirements. The Boolean search allows you to search for several parameters simultaneously. Search functions help significantly reduce the time spent on candidates' pre-selection.
- Smart scheduling
When talking about scheduling, a Google Calendar integration comes to mind, enabling you to have all set appointments in one place. A smart scheduling tool extracts data from participants' calendars so a recruiter can see free slots and suggest appropriate timing for an interview. It's as easy as pie to set up the interview just with a couple of clicks.
Here's how the calendar looks in Hirerise:
- Inbuilt analytics
That's already a common thing for a modern ATS to have analytics and reporting capabilities that help teams monitor important recruitment metrics.
For Hirerise, we added the analytics report to the dashboard's overview tab. We designed it with a lot of white space and only the most crucial indicators so that users can spot the needed information in a few seconds.
- Mobile optimization
In the era of smartphones, when most people spend five-six hours daily on their mobiles, it's no wonder that a job search has also moved to mobile devices. So, mobile hiring can be fairly named one of the most noticeable trends in recruitment. Your ATS should be easily used on smartphones. Thus, make sure it fits any size screen and loads fast.
Iterate based on user feedback
Launching your ATS MVP is only the beginning. Once recruiters start using the system in real hiring scenarios, you'll quickly discover what works well and what needs improvement. Real user behavior often reveals issues that are impossible to predict during the design phase.
To ensure your ATS evolves in the right direction, it’s important to continuously monitor performance and gather feedback from recruiters and hiring managers. This allows you to refine workflows, improve usability, and introduce new features based on real needs rather than assumptions.
Here are a few ways to track your ATS performance and improve it over time:
- Monitor user behavior. Analytics tools help you understand how recruiters interact with the system, which features they use most frequently, and where they encounter friction.
- Collect recruiter feedback. Regularly ask hiring teams about their experience with the platform. Short surveys or quick feedback sessions can reveal usability issues and feature gaps.
- Track hiring efficiency metrics. Measure indicators such as time-to-hire, candidate response rate, and interview scheduling speed to evaluate how effectively the ATS supports the recruitment process.
- Prioritize improvements. Use the insights from analytics and feedback to create a roadmap for future updates and improvements.
By continuously refining the system based on real-world usage, you can turn your ATS from a basic hiring tool into a powerful platform that truly supports recruiters' workflows.
UI/UX best practices for applicant tracking system design
Even the most feature-rich ATS UI can fail if recruiters struggle to use it. Hiring teams work under constant pressure, as they review dozens of applications daily, coordinate interviews, collaborate with multiple stakeholders, and make quick decisions about candidates. If the interface slows them down or hides important information, productivity drops immediately.
Based on our experience designing hiring tools and understanding how applicant tracking systems work, here are several UI/UX best practices that help create an ATS recruiters actually enjoy using.
Visualize the hiring pipeline
Recruitment is a multi-stage process. Recruiters constantly track where candidates are in the pipeline: applied, screening, interview, offer, or hired. If this information is buried in tables or spreadsheets, it becomes difficult to manage multiple applicants at once.
A visual hiring pipeline makes the process much clearer. Many modern ATS platforms use Kanban-style boards that allow recruiters to move candidates between stages with simple drag-and-drop actions.
A well-designed pipeline should allow recruiters to:
- quickly see the status of every candidate;
- move applicants between stages in one click;
- filter candidates by role, recruiter, or hiring stage;
- highlight candidates that require immediate attention.
Centralize all candidate information
Recruiters collect candidate data from many different sources, including resumes submitted through job posting platforms, LinkedIn profiles, emails, interview notes, and feedback from hiring managers. If this information is scattered across tools, it becomes difficult to evaluate candidates properly.
An effective ATS should create a single, structured candidate profile that gathers all relevant information in one place.
A good candidate profile typically includes:
- resume and portfolio;
- contact details and social profiles;
- interview history and feedback;
- recruiter notes and tags;
- communication history with the candidate.
Minimize context switching
Recruiters constantly switch between tasks such as reviewing resumes, automating resume screening, discussing candidates with colleagues, scheduling interviews, and updating hiring stages. If they need to jump between multiple tabs or tools to complete these actions, the workflow quickly becomes inefficient.
Good ATS design keeps related actions within the same interface whenever possible.
For example, recruiters should be able to:
- comment on candidates directly inside the candidate profile;
- tag colleagues to request feedback;
- schedule interviews without opening a separate calendar tool;
- view resumes and notes without downloading files.
Make search and filtering powerful
Large companies often receive hundreds or even thousands of applications for a single role. Without efficient search tools, recruiters can easily lose promising candidates in the database.
A well-designed ATS should make it easy to locate and rank candidates using multiple parameters.
Helpful search capabilities include:
- keyword search for skills, roles, or experience;
- Boolean search for complex queries;
- filters for location, experience level, or hiring stage;
- tags that group candidates by specific attributes.
A wrap-up
Many applicant tracking systems constantly evolve. They bring immense value to businesses by optimizing the recruitment process and bringing the best professionals on board. Even though building and designing your own ATS is not that simple, this game is worth the candle. Let us know if you need any design help on the way. And here we have more about system design - check out our article about how to design a CRM.
