Articles 
“ATSs are systems of the past” is something that I have read in too many blog articles and presentations by emerging recruiting systems and even analysts. And yet, the applicant tracking software market keeps growing at a staggering 8 percent a year and is expected to reach 2.34 billion by 2026. All major companies have one, or are spending millions replacing and implementing one. The reason why is simple: The need to track applicants is not going anywhere.
State of the Nation: Addressing the Current Applicant Tracking Software Market
To understand why ATS solutions are being questioned,it’s important to analyze the current market landscape of recruiting systems. On the one hand, you have the legacy applicant tracking system vendors, those that inaugurated the category and are struggling to survive by purchasing other companies or even sunsetting their systems and promising their customers with a new platform panacea that has no clear horizon.
And on the other hand, you have a new wave of vendors that are the sons and daughters of the era of social media – and most importantly of venture capital. They have reduced the talent acquisition needs of large corporations to something that looks more like a social media platform than a business transformation platform. And don’t get me wrong, TA as with any other practice that involves multiple stakeholders, is a social endeavour, but by no means it is as trivial as sharing a picture of your brunch.
Aligning talent acquisition with the core objectives of the business, complying with privacy regulations, handling recruiting across multiple branches of the business at a global scale, collecting and processing complex data, and adapting to the needs of individual stakeholders are only some of the huge challenges TA teams face in their daily lives.
The Point Problem That Also Hits Applicant Tracking Systems
In the last decade we’ve also seen the rise and fall of a big variety of point solutions. We can all probably name at least 10 systems that became trendy for a while and eventually lost their candor. From assisted search to mobile application systems, some of them were really interesting technologies, but they were mostly band-aids meant to cover the shortcomings of legacy systems. In a way they distracted the market and generated a sort of point solutions FOMO syndrome.
All in all, in most cases these band-aids couldn’t save traditional applicant tracking systems from themselves and became yet another integration point that broke from time to time. Moreover, the lack of centralization resulted in yet another system recruiters had to log into and with data scattered across different platforms, reporting suffered as well. So, even though they made some improvements to the current TA tech stack of some companies, for most it only delayed the inevitable: finding a new applicant tracking system.
So, Where Is the Claim “the ATS Is Dead” Coming From?
Legacy applicant tracking systems were not built to keep up so when social interactions, consumer expectations and all-in-all technology evolved, they were simply left behind. They were unable to embrace change and use it to make their offerings relevant to their (new) age.
The new wave of recruiting platforms, the “ATS denialists” as I will call them from now on, landed on the market with the promise that their systems are built to be relevant and deliver on what people are expecting today. What people are used to today. And today is the keyword here. Because that’s where the applicant tracking system denialists become one with what they are denying. Their architecture makes them very similar to what legacy ATS vendors are: one trick ponies. They are built with very specific business logics in their code, based on their best practices of today. And that is like building a road that ends on a cliff. The same cliff that legacy vendors are falling off now: change.
A New Applicant Tracking System: Built For Change
We all agree with the fact that legacy ATS systems are not what companies need in order to keep pace with the level of disruption and innovation of this modern age. However, this doesn’t mean they don’t need an applicant tracking system. It just means that the job application tracker needs to be re-defined.. But this needs to happen from the ground up. The new applicant tracking systems need to be flexible, enable innovation, be extensible and should be disruption-free. And that can only be achieved with a platform model that allows companies to use the system as their own innovation lab.
This is where applicant tracking systems, both legacy and emerging have trapped customers into their way of recruiting. They haven’t been enablers of recruiting and applicant tracking practices, more so the contrary: they have limited them. And this is something we have been working on at Avature since we started. We have conceived our system as a business and innovation tool that can be used as an applicant tracking system.
Most importantly: that can be used as what our customers consider their ATS should be. And we understand that that will change over time, it might become more complex, simpler or just different, and that’s why Avature was built to change and adapt together with you. This is the way our code has been built and the way it has evolved over 10 years. Enabling change is something that is embedded in our system architecture. We truly believe that that’s what makes Avature unique.
We’re not alone in thinking that. Brandon Hall Group honored the Avature ATS with its gold award for Best Advance in Talent Acquisition Technology in both December 2019 and 2020. In their own words, the Avature ATS combines modern web technology with powerful customization and automation, and they were impressed by the collective results achieved by our clients.
The Applicant Tracking System Dichotomy
So, that’s why “the ATS is dead” is not only a false premise that lacks depth, but it is also a trap: it is a wolf disguised as a sheep. It is a legacy ATS disguised as a unicorn. I believe that the really meaningful questions are: how will your system allow you to embrace the change you ignore will happen? Will you outgrow it? What is your current system’s ability to turn upside down completely? If the technology you are using doesn’t have a good answer to these questions, it’s scary. Because this is not something that can be changed easily. Asking a system to do something different to what it’s architecture dictates is like asking a chicken to be an eagle: It won’t fly high.