An applicant tracking system, or ATS, is software that employers use to publish jobs, receive applications and move candidates through hiring stages. Many also host a public job board for the employer, which search engines and job sites can read.
Why it matters for hiring data
The ATS is where a posting begins. The employer publishes a role there once, and the system shows it on the employer's job board and can pass it to job sites. The public board is therefore the nearest thing to a primary source for a company's open roles: it carries the posting as the employer wrote it, with its dates and status. Each system has its own board address, feed format and field names, so a pipeline that reads many companies has to normalise titles, departments, locations, dates and pay across them before hiring data from different boards can be compared.
When a company changes system
A company that moves to a new system changes boards. The old board's postings go and the new board's postings appear, so open postings can fall and then return to the earlier level. That is a change of board, not a freeze, and it is worth checking for before reading a fall in hiring as a decision. In Fokals data a first observation of a board sets a baseline: its postings are never counted as new.
To spot a change of system in Job Postings, list the systems a company has used and when each was seen:
select company_id, board_platform,
min(first_seen_at) as first_seen, max(last_seen_at) as last_seen
from job_postings
group by company_id, board_platform
order by company_id, first_seen;Two systems whose dates follow one another point to a migration. Two whose dates overlap mean the company runs more than one board.
In Fokals data
Job Postings carries every role a company publishes on the major applicant tracking systems and on its own careers page, labelled by job function, seniority and ten role flags, with location, work mode, advertised pay and the tools named. Each posting names the system whose board it came from, so a migration from one system to another is visible in the data, and Hiring Activity counts open, new and closed postings per company each day. The hiring dataset holds the postings, and the article on reading job postings at the source explains why the employer's own board is used.
Related terms
- Job function: the kind of work a posting describes, assigned from its text.
- Web crawler: the program that reads public web pages.
- Data coverage: which companies and boards a dataset can see.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between an ATS and a job board?
An ATS is the employer's system for managing jobs and candidates. A job board is a public list of vacancies. Many systems publish a board for the employer, so the board is often a view of the ATS, while job sites collect postings from many boards. Reading the employer's own board gives the posting as the employer published it.
Which applicant tracking systems do job posting datasets cover?
It depends on the provider. Fokals Job Postings covers the major applicant tracking systems and job markup on companies' own careers pages, and each posting names the system it came from, so you can group a company's postings by board.
Can a change of applicant tracking system look like a hiring freeze?
It can. When a company moves to a new system, its old board empties and the new one starts as a first read, so open postings can dip and then return to the earlier level. Fokals treats the new board's first observation as a baseline, so its postings are not counted as new. Look for a fall followed by a recovery before you read it as a freeze.
The queries and code on this page are examples to adapt. Test them in your own environment before you rely on them.