ATS vs. CRM: What’s the difference and do recruiters need both?
ATS and CRM are two of the most common recruitment acronyms you’ll stumble across. You might be familiar with the terms — but do you really know what they’re all about? And given ever-tightening recruitment budgets, do you genuinely need both?
This article’s a primer on everything you need to know:
- What’s the difference between ATS and CRM?
- What features does an ATS include versus CRM?
- What are the benefits of an ATS vs. CRM?
- Do you need both an ATS and CRM?
What’s an ATS?
An applicant tracking system (or applicant tracking software) is technology that tracks applicants through the recruitment process. It registers the moment an applicant enters your recruitment process by applying for a job, then tracks them through screening, interviews, hiring, and onboarding. It also stores their details in your candidate database.
At its most simple, an ATS gives you visibility into your recruitment process. It shows you which applicants you have, how applicants are progressing, and what action your team need to take.
A more comprehensive ATS should do more than passively track, though. It’s a digital version of your recruitment process, enabling you to configure the workflows you want and automate the tasks involved.
What features does an ATS include?
Although ‘ATS’ is a commonly accepted term, there can be lots of variance in what’s included. That said, you’d expect a modern ATS to have:
- Job creation
- Job distribution
- Jobs overview dashboard
- Jobs or careers page
- Resume parsing
- Automated candidate comms
- Application process builder
- Internal workflow builder
- Candidate database
- Advanced search
- Candidate profiles
- Candidate status tracking
- Candidate screening
- Candidate scoring
- Interview scheduling
- Hiring manager dashboard
- Candidate dashboard
- Automatic reminders and prompts
- Analytics and reporting
- Lots of automation
What are the benefits of an ATS?
Unless you’re a small business without growth plans, you’ll struggle to hire well without an ATS. The major benefits of an ATS are:
1. Better collaboration
An ATS is designed for multiple people to collaborate in real-time. Whether that’s a huge global team or just you and a handful of managers.
- Create a single source of truth that everyone’s working from
- Remove confusion, overlap, errors, and duplicated work
- Navigate easier, so you waste less time hunting for info
- Automate task reminders: less time waiting or chasing
- Save managers’ time, so they can focus on their actual job
2. Faster, cheaper sourcing
An ATS gives you a database of candidates who’ve already engaged with your organisation, and the tools to search that database easily. It’s like building your own mini-LinkedIn, just for you.
- Never forget a great applicant again
- Source people faster with dedicated tools
- Reduce agency and advertising costs
- Stop spreadsheet snow blindness 🕶️
3. Less admin; more automation
A good ATS shouldn’t just track your processes. It should empower you to design and build the processes you want, tailored for specific roles, then automate everything. In other words, an ATS makes the whole recruitment process miles faster, heaps easier, and much less faffy.
4. More effective advertising
At its core, an ATS empowers you to create and distribute jobs. This can range from super-basic text-only jobs that you manually post to the boards you use, through to advanced, modern tools like rich, multi-media ads and programmatic distribution.
- Create and post jobs faster (so you can hire faster)
- Streamline permissions to keep the organisation safe
- Increase reach and optimise ad spend
- Increase engagement, click-throughs and applications
5. Improve the candidate experience
One of the major benefits of an ATS is taking charge of your candidate experience.
- Create slick, fast, modern, tailored candidate journeys
- Communicate with candidates automatically (no more ghosting!)
- Spot and unclog progress roadblocks
- See all your candidates at-a-glance, so nobody’s forgotten
6. Make better decisions
One of the core components of any ATS should be robust reporting and analytics. (A CRM should come with the same but takes a different angle to your ATS).
- Channel recruitment spend where it matters most
- Understand and align team and manager behaviour
- Create and send reports to the right people instantly
- Improve tactical and strategic recruitment decision-making
That’s the down-low on an ATS. Now let’s compare to a CRM.
What’s a CRM?
A candidate relationship management system (or candidate relationship management software) is technology that allows you to build and nurture relationships with candidates.
A CRM empowers you to attract candidates into talent pools, then nurture them once they’re there. It’s a mainstay of recruitment marketing, which is the core of proactive, front-foot-forwards hiring.
Where an ATS focusses on processes and organisation, a CRM focusses on people and engagement.
What features does a CRM include?
Like an ATS, the specific features of a CRM can vary lots between vendors. And there’s often overlap between ATS and CRM, as vendors often package these together. You’d expect a CRM to include:
- Candidate database
- Candidate profiles
- Talent pooling
- Resume parsing
- Tagging and segmentation
- One-to-one and bulk communications
- Email and SMS functionality
- Ad-hoc or scheduled campaigns
- Landing page builder
- Campaign builder
- Recruitment marketing analytics
- Custom cookies for tracking
- Team collaboration
- Automated candidate comms
What are the benefits of a CRM?
An ATS is more focussed on optimising your current recruitment process. Where a CRM comes into its own is maintaining engagement, with a view to making future hiring easier and faster.
The major benefits of a CRM are:
1. Build stronger candidate relationships
An ATS helps you keep your internal processes organised and fast, which is table stakes for a good candidate experience. But a CRM helps you go the extra mile, delivering relevant, interesting content that keeps candidates engaged.
For example, you might share relevant job opportunities, career guidance, or industry research. A CRM empowers you to become a useful career resource for candidates. Giving, not just taking. When candidates actively get value from being part of your talent pool, they’re much more likely to apply to you in the future.
An ATS focusses on now. A CRM focusses on tomorrow. By building those longer-term, future-focussed relationships with candidates, you’re more likely to get applications from candidates who really understand and value what you stand for.
A CRM isn’t just about increasing your available talent pool. It’s about giving candidates a chance to self-select into your organisation over a longer period of time, because they really know you. That’s a totally different calibre of applications from the masses who use AI to apply indiscriminately to bazillions of live jobs.
3. Strengthen your employer brand
It’s easy to forget how little most brands mean to most candidates. The average jobseeker applies for 162 jobs before landing a role, research shows. And that’s only active processes.
Extrapolate that over the number of opportunities candidates’ might have applied for over, say, five years, and that’s a whole heap of talent pools candidates are part of, often without any memory of who, what, and where.
Sending engaging, relevant content can make the difference between candidates languishing on yet-another database they don’t remember joining, versus their engaged presence within a talent community.
And that’s what can make a real difference when those passive candidates become active jobseekers.
4. Improve hiring for hard-to-hire roles
A CRM empowers recruiters to build proactive talent pools around the roles you usually struggle to fill. It gives you the luxury of time and space before hiring’s urgent – to gather prospective talent, build relationships, and create a pool of people to approach when you do need to hire.
That can be a game-changer for hard-to-hire roles, giving you a leg-up on the sourcing process.
5. Lower recruitment costs and hire faster
When you create your own, owned pool of engaged talent using a CRM, you slash agency and advertising spend. Plus you’re not dependent on the whims and whimsy of external boards, who might change strategy or pricing overnight.
We see time and again: if you invest time upfront in building engaged, well-segmented talent pools, recruitment is both faster and cheaper. You don’t need to spend big looking externally when you’ve got people right there to approach first. It’s not a magic bullet, but it helps.
6. Maximise ROI on your sourcing efforts
However good your internal talent database, you’re almost certainly spending a chunk of cash on external sourcing channels. But without a CRM, a huge chunk of that cash is wasted – because you only get value from the candidates you actively hire right now.
If you’re paying for 500 applicants, wouldn’t it be great to get value from most of those, rather than the handful you hire? Or if you’re going to careers fairs, wouldn’t it be lovely if the people you added to your ATS didn’t just gather dust? A CRM helps you maximise value from your investment into sourcing, creating long-term value when immediate gains don’t happen.
7. Join-up recruitment reporting
We’ve already talked about how an ATS gives you better recruitment analytics across your processes. When you add a CRM, you also get analytics across wider sourcing efforts, like your careers fairs and recruitment marketing campaigns.
This joined-up data view gives clarity across your holistic hiring function, so you can make smarter decisions that consider the whole picture. We’ve said it plenty of times before: better recruitment data makes for better recruitment. A CRM is another tool to that end.
So… what’s the difference between an ATS and a CRM?
Although there’s some overlap between an ATS and a CRM, they have different purposes. An ATS is useful for managing your recruitment processes, where a CRM is useful for building and nurturing relationships.
Another difference between ATS and CRM is the time-horizon it’s focussed on. An ATS helps you organise and track your current processes – a CRM helps you build and maintain relationships longer-term, with a view to making future recruitment easier.
You can almost think of CRM as wrapping around your ATS. An ATS helps move your active applicants through your process smoothly. But a CRM helps you attract candidates into your talent pools then engage and nurture people for the future.
It’s tempting to conceptualise ATS and CRM as two different platforms, but in reality many recruitment software providers today integrate them – to give you complete control over the talent acquisition pipeline. So… do you need both?
Do you need both an ATS and CRM?
As we just said, the whole “ATS vs. CRM” question is a false binary. ATS and CRM aren’t so much two separate pieces of software as descriptions of functionality that (we believe) effective recruitment software should include.
They’re two sides of the same coin:
- An ATS is about processes; a CRM is about people.
- An ATS is about today; a CRM is about tomorrow.
That means, ultimately, most organisations will benefit from recruitment software that includes both ATS and CRM. Yes, we know getting budget signed-off is a nightmare, especially at the moment. But joined-up ATS and CRM functionality really does make a difference to the effectiveness and efficiency of your hiring function. And helps stop the ever-present threat of recruiter burnout).
(Ideally you’ll have both integrated into one seamless platform, rather than bolting on different bits of software into a sprawling, complex mass. ATS and CRM should work together to make life easier, not harder).
But what if your current ATS doesn’t include CRM? Can you get away without it?
The short answer is, yes, sometimes. But it depends what ‘get away with’ means for your organisation.
If you’re a smaller organisation with manageable, predictable hiring needs that you’re already handling without many issues, a CRM probably isn’t indispensable. At least not immediately.
But that’s not many organisations. Recruitment today is a million times more challenging than it was ten years ago:
- Candidate expectations are much higher, driven by modern, fast, slick consumer experiences setting a high bar. Providing value, not just haranguing about job opportunities, is a major differentiator.
- Standing out matters more than ever, as AI-enabled candidates apply to endless numbers of roles. Recruitment marketing is becoming an indispensable attraction and sourcing strategy.
- Recruitment costs are increasing. Developing your own, owned pools of engaged talent helps mitigate those costs, creating a future-proof asset that serves you well for years to come.
Meeting these challenges is hard enough, even with all the help you can get. Meeting these challenges without the right tools is almost impossible.
And the longer you go without, the further you fall behind. Building and nurturing relationships is, inherently, a longer-term strategy than reactive hiring. You might be just about on top of firefighting right now. But what’ll happen when you start not to be?
Choosing recruitment software that includes both ATS and CRM functionality helps you shift from reactive to proactive recruitment; accelerating hiring and reducing costs. It helps you create a function – and brand – that can better withstand storms.
Even if you’re not actively on the market for recruitment software today, socialising the ATS and CRM conversation across the business now can lay the foundations for when you are looking. (For more support, check out our guide to building a business case for recruitment software).
Tribepad is the trusted tech ally to smart(er) recruiters everywhere. Combining ATS, CRM, Video Interviewing, and Onboarding, our talent acquisition software is a springboard for fairer, faster, better recruitment for everyone.
Trusted by organisations like the BBC, Tesco, NHS Professionals, and Subway, 30-million people in 16 languages use Tribepad.
