What is an applicant tracking system (ATS)?

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is software that employers use to post jobs, collect applications and move candidates through the hiring process. It hosts the public job posting and the application form, stores every applicant’s resume and answers, and gives recruiters a pipeline to review, move and reject candidates. Tolta’s auto-apply fills in these employer forms directly.

What is an example of an applicant tracking system?

Workday, Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby are widely used applicant tracking systems. Each gives an employer a public careers board with a recognizable address, such as jobs.lever.co/company for Lever or jobs.ashbyhq.com/company for Ashby. Large enterprises lean toward Workday and SAP SuccessFactors; startups and tech companies often use Greenhouse, Lever or Ashby.

Jobscan, which checks the careers pages of the Fortune 500 every year, detected an ATS at 487 of the 500 companies (97.4%) in its 2026 report.

Why does an ATS matter for job seekers?

The ATS is where your application actually lands. A posting on the company’s own ATS board is the original, and the employer’s form there feeds straight into the recruiter’s pipeline. Reposts on aggregators can be late, stale or ghost jobs, and Easy Apply shortcuts may skip the employer’s own questions.

Three practical consequences:

• Apply on the source board. Finding roles on ATS boards is the core of the hidden job market.
• Use a text-based resume. The ATS reads your file to fill your profile; image files and scans often can’t be read.
• Answer screening questions accurately. Work authorization, location and licence questions are where most automatic filtering happens.

Does an ATS reject 75% of resumes?

No published study supports the figure. It circulates widely without a dataset or method behind it. In Enhancv’s 2025 interviews, 23 of 25 US recruiters (92%) said their ATS doesn’t auto-reject resumes on content or formatting; rejections were manual or came from eligibility knockouts.

That doesn’t mean the system is neutral. In Harvard Business School’s Hidden Workers survey (2021), more than 90% of employers using such systems said they used them to initially filter or rank candidates, and 88% agreed that qualified high-skills candidates were screened out for not matching the job description’s exact criteria. The honest summary: rigid criteria and knockout questions filter people out, and recruiters choose which ranked candidates to read. A resume isn’t silently deleted by keyword count, but a mismatched answer to a required question can end an application.