The ATS (Applicant Tracking System): Who To Ask Functional Knowledge On "How It Works"

There are soooooo many “experts” (who are NOT) giving misleading, false or flat out wrong advice/information on how the ATS works, so I am going to give you a list of TITLES you can search for of people that have in-depth knowledge of how the ATS functions.

Employer Side

-Corporate (“Internal”) Recruiters: They are in the ATS 8+ hours a day, and use the ATS the most in terms of functionality. They get training on initial use and then updates if/as they occur. In addition they often have administrative user permissions which allow them to make changes to areas such as email templates, adding/enabling certain features in smaller employer environments.

-HRIS Analyst/TA Operations Specialist: these are the team members that Recruiters generally turn to in larger organizations when something isn’t working, goes wrong, or there is a feature request. They have Administrative User Permissions, can test bugs and new features, and are usually the internal resource that interacts with the ATS vendor. A fairly recent example from my own past working for a mid-size employer: Canada has recently updated its pay transparency laws in several Provinces, including ones where we hired people. I created a ticket for our TA Ops team because we needed to add a field to display the Canadian pay ranges (in addition to the American ones.)

Vendor Side

There are literally hundreds of ATS vendors; each one is a bit different so if you want to ask a question of a specific ATS feature, this is who you would want to reach out to.

-Sales/Marketing/Account Managers: they sell the systems to employers, so they need to be able to understand the functionality. They usually have access to sales demos.

-Solutions Engineer/Architect, Pre-sales Engineers - customer facing engineers who work on customizations for systems during the integration phase ("getting it up and running"). Engineers usually have software programming skills and can go deep into the technical specs of the systems.

-Product Managers may be able to answer questions about specific features.

-Trainers/Instructional Designers – this is the team that creates the training collateral for both their internal sales and marketing teams as well as for end customers (employers).

-Customer Success – this team is often the first or second line of contact when customers are having issues.

Titles Who Do NOT Generally Have The Answers:

HR -*unless they also perform Recruiting/Talent Acquisition Function at smaller employers.

-Executives -ANY exec including Talent Acquisition/Recruiting *unless they rose up through the ranks fairly recently; this would be Directors, VP’s, Sr. VPs, Chief People Officer, Head of HR/TA. They will have an understanding of how the HIRING access function works, but not the much more expanded since they are not using it regularly.

Are there exceptions to these titles? Of course, especially in a small company. When I worked at a startup, my manager held the title of VP of Operations – but he had a tech background, and helped me with the implementation of the system we upgraded to (Lever).

Words to look for on a LI profile: “implementation”, “integration”, “administrative” (in conjunction with user permissions); on the vendor side: “feature set”, “sandbox”, “staging”.