Applicant tracking system

What is an applicant tracking system?

An applicant tracking system is the system of record for hiring: it holds the open roles, the people who applied to them, what stage each person has reached, and the evidence gathered along the way. OpusHire’s ATS carries requisitions and their approvals, per-requisition candidate pipelines, interview scorecards, and the analytics that come out of them.

The reason an ATS exists is continuity. Hiring runs over weeks, across several people, and the expensive failures are almost always losses of context — a candidate who went cold because nobody owned the next step, or a decision nobody can reconstruct three months later when it is questioned.

How do requisitions and approvals work?

A requisition carries the role definition, the screening requirements and the approval chain. Because the requisition is also what screening, sourcing and assessments are scored against, the definition of the role and the mechanics of evaluating for it are the same object — changing one changes the other, rather than leaving a spreadsheet out of date.

Candidates progress through stages defined per requisition, so a graduate pipeline and an executive search do not have to pretend to be the same process. Each candidate's position is per-requisition, which matters for the common case of one person being considered for several roles at once: their stage in one search says nothing about their stage in another.

Who can see candidate data?

Access is scoped to the workspace that owns the requisition, and within it by role. A recruiter sees the candidates in the searches they work on; an auditor can review the trail without being able to alter it. Requests for records outside a user’s entitlement return a not-found response rather than a permission error, because confirming a record exists is itself a disclosure.

Privileged actions — viewing personal data, exporting, changing roles — are written to a tamper-evident, hash-chained audit trail. Entries cannot be edited or deleted after the fact, including by administrators, which is what makes the trail worth having when it is examined during a security review or a data-subject complaint.

Each company operates in its own workspace, and candidate records are reachable only through a requisition that workspace is entitled to.

How do interview scorecards work?

A scorecard defines what interviewers rate a candidate on for a given role, so feedback arrives as comparable ratings against named criteria instead of free-form impressions. Because every interviewer for a role fills in the same scorecard, the panel can see where they actually disagree rather than discovering it in a debrief.

Unstructured interview feedback is difficult to aggregate for a simple reason: two interviewers writing prose about the same candidate rarely address the same things. One notes communication, the other notes technical depth, and the hiring manager is left comparing paragraphs that do not overlap.

Scorecards attach to the candidate record alongside the interview recording and transcript, so a rating can be traced back to what was actually said — which is what makes a decision explainable weeks later when someone asks.

What can the analytics actually tell you?

Hiring analytics in OpusHire report on the pipeline the platform observes: how candidates move between stages, where they stall, and how sources compare on outcomes rather than volume. Where a figure has no denominator the platform can measure honestly, it reports no value at all rather than a confident zero.

That last constraint is deliberate and occasionally unwelcome. A dashboard that renders "0%" when it means "we have no data" is worse than an empty cell, because it invites decisions built on a number nobody checked.

Frequently asked questions