According to research by Capterra, 94% of HR professionals say their applicant tracking system (ATS) positively impacted their hiring process. A survey conducted by GetApp revealed that 78% of end-users confirmed that using an ATS improved the quality of their hires, while 86% of respondents said it significantly decreased their time-to-hire.
However, your ATS implementation can run into many issues, both pre-implementation and post-deployment, with the average digital transformation effort failing seven times out of ten.
A study by Aptitude Research Partners estimates that less than half of all ATS implementation projects are delivered on time, while 68% exceed budget. And those figures don’t get better if you’re a smaller enterprise. 78% of SMB ATS buyers will have their implementation efforts exceed budget and timeline, simply because there’s no definite change management process for adopting new technology.
This guide provides a practical, step-by-step roadmap for implementing an ATS successfully. You’ll learn how to align workflows, avoid common pitfalls, and enable end-users with contextual, in-app guidance to maximize adoption and ROI.
What Is an ATS Implementation?
An applicant tracking system modernizes the entire recruitment function and is essential to HR transformation. ATS implementation refers to the process of installing, configuring, and integrating an applicant tracking system software within an organization’s recruitment and hiring processes. It also includes pre-implementation phases, such as HR tech needs assessment and change management planning, as well as post-implementation phases that include end-user onboarding, in-app assistance and support, and usage monitoring.
How ATS Transformation Drives Business Outcomes
ATS solutions drive HR transformation and hiring business objectives by automating processes, reducing hiring times, ensuring compliance, and filling each role with high-quality candidates. Here are some of the most critical areas that benefit from maximizing ATS return on investment (ROI):
- Optimized recruitment budget: ATS platforms make every aspect of recruiting and hiring more efficient by automating the posting of job openings and screening residents as they come in. This efficiency allows recruiters to spend less time with tasks that can be handled by the ATS and shift their focus to issues and processes that require a human touch. Over time, these efficiencies save thousands of dollars and maximize your organization’s recruitment budget.
- Enhanced hiring efficiency: An effective ATS makes hiring more efficient by using recruiting metrics and insights to eliminate irrelevant candidates and allowing hiring teams to focus on applicants who are well-suited to the positions that need to be filled, ultimately reducing the time to hire.
- Improved quality of hires: By eliminating irrelevant and under-qualified candidates, applicant tracking systems help hiring teams pick out the best applicants for open positions. This improves employee experience across organizations and reduces turnover, which allows businesses to perform better and stay competitive in evolving markets.
- Data-driven hiring decisions: Applicant tracking systems include recruiting analytics tools that analyze data to improve hiring processes and help eliminate risks of unconscious bias in the hiring process. These insights give hiring teams all the information they need for effective decision-making across the board.
- Alignment with hiring goals: A high-quality ATS includes customized recruitment workflows and talent pipeline tools that help HR teams hire based on strategic organizational goals and objectives. By building a candidate database full of highly qualified candidates, applicant tracking systems can help hiring teams find candidates who best align with organizational needs and adapt the entire recruiting process to grow and improve along with any organization.
Internal Barriers to ATS Adoption
Even with best-in-class recruiting technology, organizations often struggle to get consistent usage across their hiring teams. The issue isn’t just technical, it’s cultural, operational, and behavioral. Here are the most common internal blockers that stall ATS adoption:
- Cultural resistance to change from recruiters and hiring managers: Recruiters and hiring managers are creatures of habit. If they’ve spent years coordinating interviews over email or manually updating candidate data in spreadsheets, adopting a structured ATS workflow can feel like a burden, not a benefit. Some resist because they fear being slowed down. Others simply don’t see what’s in it for them especially if they view the ATS as “just another HR system” rather than a tool that makes hiring easier and faster.
- Poor initial training and role misalignment: Traditional ATS rollouts often involve one-time training sessions or generic LMS modules that fail to account for the specific needs of different users such as recruiters, coordinators, hiring managers, HR admins. Without role-specific onboarding and contextual walkthroughs, users struggle to retain what they’ve learned. That lack of confidence leads to inconsistent usage or complete abandonment of the system for day-to-day tasks.
- Reliance on legacy tools: Even post-implementation, recruiters often revert to familiar tools like spreadsheets to manage pipelines, Slack for candidate updates, or Outlook for scheduling, bypassing the ATS entirely. This leads to fragmented candidate data, missed communications, and poor collaboration across the hiring team. And worse, it results in decision-making that’s not backed by a unified source of truth.
The Risk of Poor ATS Adoption
When end-user adoption falls short for ATS platforms, it can lead to challenges that hinder the entire hiring and recruitment process. In this section, we’ll explore the potential pitfalls and consequences of inadequate ATS utilization, shedding light on how it can impact the efficiency, accuracy, and overall success of an organization’s hiring endeavors.
- Failed ATS implementation: When an ATS is not implemented successfully, the system isn’t set up and used the way it’s supposed to be. This could result in confusion among users who may not fully understand how to use it for their tasks. For example, suppose the system is not configured to match the organization’s specific hiring processes or lacks the proper integration with other hiring tools. In that case, it can lead to inefficiencies, poor software ROI, unproductive team members, and missed hiring goals. ATS end-user might need help navigating the system, causing delays in posting jobs, reviewing applications, and communicating with candidates.
- Unproductive recruiters who miss hiring goals: Poor ATS adoption can make recruiters less productive since they’ll default to completing tasks manually, running parallel workflows alongside the functionality the applicant tracking system offers them for free. This lack of productivity can cause the organization to fall short of its hiring goals, impacting overall workforce efficiency.
- Dirty talent-related data: Dirty data in the context of ATS means that the information about candidates and the hiring process is not accurate or reliable. For example, if recruiters don’t regularly update candidate profiles or if there are duplicates in the system, it can lead to confusion. Imagine having two profiles for the same candidate or outdated information on a candidate’s skills – this can affect decision-making. Dirty data can result in offering jobs to the wrong candidates, overlooking qualified individuals, or facing difficulties in compliance with regulations.
Why Traditional Training Doesn’t Fix ATS Adoption
Many HR and talent acquisition teams assume that training ends after rollout but most recruiters need far more than a one-time demo or a few slide decks to truly adopt a new ATS. Here’s why conventional training models fall short:
- LMS modules don’t translate to real-world usage: Most LMS-based ATS training is designed around ideal workflows, not actual recruiter behavior. Users click through videos and quizzes, but when it’s time to schedule interviews or move candidates across stages, they still default to old habits. The result? Low retention, low usage, and stalled adoption.
- Static content doesn’t support recruiters in the flow of work: Slide decks and documentation can’t keep up with the pace of hiring. When recruiters get stuck mid-task, they don’t have time to sift through PDFs or internal wikis. Without guidance embedded inside the ATS, even trained users abandon workflows midstream.
- No visibility into where adoption breaks down: Traditional training doesn’t tell you what’s actually working. Where are users getting stuck? Which features are being underutilized? Without behavioral analytics, HR and IT teams are flying blind; unable to improve training or address friction before it derails adoption.
Building an Effective ATS Adoption Strategy
Adopting a new applicant tracking system (ATS) is about more than just turning it on; it’s about transforming how recruiting teams attract, evaluate, and hire talent. But even the best system falls flat if recruiters can’t use it with confidence or if hiring managers disengage after a week.
To pull off a successful ATS implementation and drive adoption organizations must prioritize user-centric rollout, contextual support, and continuous optimization. According to Everest Group, organizations that use Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) like Whatfix accelerate software adoption by 30–50% and increase productivity by up to 25%.
Here’s a six-step roadmap to ensure your ATS is embraced, not bypassed, by the people who need it most.
1. Pre-Go-Live Testing With Recruiters & Hiring Managers
An ATS might pass internal UAT, but still fail in the field if recruiters find it clunky or unintuitive. Pre-deployment validation with real users is critical to avoid friction later.
Why it matters: Recruiters often work fast. If job requisition flows or interview feedback loops aren’t intuitive, adoption suffers. HR tech teams need insight into what actually works for different roles.
How Whatfix Helps:
With Whatfix Mirror, teams can spin up a replica of their ATS environment and observe how recruiters and hiring managers interact with key workflows. This de-risks rollout, uncovers UX gaps, and allows training content to be built in parallel before go-live.
2. Role-Based Onboarding for Recruiters, Managers & Coordinators
Recruiters, HR coordinators, and hiring managers don’t use your ATS the same way, so why train them as if they do? Generic onboarding is a recipe for confusion.
Why it matters: Personalized onboarding helps users reach proficiency faster, boosts confidence, and reduces early frustration that leads to abandonment.
How Whatfix Helps:
With Task Lists, Flows, and Smart Tips, Whatfix provides in-app onboarding tailored to each user group. Whether it’s a recruiter screening candidates or a manager submitting interview feedback, users get step-by-step help in real time.
3. In-Flow Support for Critical Recruiting Tasks
No matter how strong your kickoff training, users forget steps especially for tasks they perform infrequently, like configuring offer letters or requesting background checks.
Why it matters: Without real-time support, users stall mid-task or flood HR with tickets. That slows hiring and hurts candidate experience.
How Whatfix Helps:
With Self Help widgets, users get on-demand access to FAQs, walkthroughs, SOPs, and videos, all embedded inside your ATS. No context switching. No guesswork.
4. Change Communication & Policy Enforcement
ATS workflows evolve constantly with new DEI guidelines, updated approval hierarchies, or refreshed rating scales. If recruiters aren’t aware or don’t comply, the changes won’t stick.
Why it matters: Uncommunicated changes erode data quality and delay adoption of high-priority updates.
How Whatfix Helps:
With Pop-Ups, Beacons, and Smart Tips, HR teams can proactively surface what’s new and enforce data hygiene (e.g., required job fields, approval logic) with embedded guidance and validations.
5. Boosting Usage of Underutilized ATS Features
From structured interviews to integrated scheduling or referral workflows, many advanced ATS features go untouched. Users stick to basics, leaving value on the table.
Why it matters: Underutilization means poor ROI and inefficient hiring.
How Whatfix Helps:
Whatfix proactively nudges users toward high-value features with contextual Flows and prompts. Analytics help HR teams identify usage gaps and deploy targeted adoption strategies that drive meaningful engagement.
6. Continuous Optimization With Behavioral Insights
You can’t improve what you can’t see. If recruiters are abandoning workflows, delaying updates, or entering incomplete candidate data, you need to know why.
Why it matters: Poor adoption isn’t always about intent, it’s often about friction.
How Whatfix Helps:
With Product Analytics, you get clear visibility into where users drop off, struggle, or succeed. This helps optimize recruiting workflows, reduce support dependency, and deliver a smoother, more compliant experience.
Case Studies of Maximizing ATS ROI With Whatfix
Whatfix DAP and Analytics provide hiring teams with the tools to increase the ROI of the applicant tracking system. Easy-to-use tools for creating personalized in-app learning experiences like Tours, Task Lists, and Smart Tips help HR leaders engage employees as they learn to work within your new applicant tracking system. Self-Help libraries, in-app Surveys, and powerful user-behavior analytics help leaders provide additional support and identify areas for process improvement.
Whatfix is proven to help companies tap into ATS benefits by facilitating user adoption and identifying areas of user friction. Here are two organizations that successfully enabled their recruiters and facilitated ATS transformation with Whatfix:
1. Manpower’s ATS Transformation
Manpower Group is a Fortune 500 staffing firm that used Whatfix to accelerate the adoption of its new ATS, Bullhorn. With Whatfix, Manpower provided recruiters with relevant, in-app guidance and real-time support as they learned to utilize this essential new technology.
ManpowerGroup worked with Whatfix’s professional services and onboarding team to smoothly integrate its DAP with Bullhorn. Post-implementation, the L&D team wasted no time creating real-time help and post-training content with Whatfix. They used five of Whatfix’s main features:
- They created 119 Flows—on-screen step-by-step guided instructions—to walk recruiters through essential processes, like adding a candidate and scheduling an interview.
- They used Smart Tips—in-app tooltips that prompted recruiters to see helpful hints when they hovered over specific fields—to increase accuracy when entering data or to provide additional context or information. For example, they used Smart Tips to provide context for forms with fields that had multiple drop-down options.
- They used Beacons—pulsing red dots on clickable icons that provide text clarification when hovered over—to explain to recruiters what these features within Bullhorn could be used for.
- They used Pop-ups—box overlays that appear right in the Bullhorn application—to distribute targeted announcements and conduct surveys.
- They integrated Searchable Self Help—a widget that enabled users to find exactly what they needed right in the Bullhorn application—to make help content more accessible. Self Help could surface personalized content through custom API based on the user’s needs. For example, system admins would see different Self Help entries compared to recruiters. The L&D team created and distributed content through Whatfix to help recruiters find solutions at any stage of the 5 Moments of Need.
Read the Manpower+Whatfix case study now!
2. The Select Group’s ATS Transformation
The Select Group is a technical services firm that provides customized solutions to help organizations with project development, team scaling, and optimal service delivery. This firm invested in the Whatfix DAP to help recruiters adopt a new ATS through in-app guidance and self-help support.
TSG created Flows and help content for all their major Bullhorn business processes, both for onboarding and training purposes. They had Flows for simple tasks, like changing your password, and more complex ones, like creating automated workflows.
Whatfix guided recruiters, no matter their career stage, to become more proficient with Bullhorn and, by extension, provide better client services. TSG housed their Flows and help content within Whatfix’s Self Help that could be accessed anytime within the Bullhorn application.
Ready the TSG+Whatfix case study now!
ATS Clicks Better With Whatfix
Rolling out a new ATS is one of the most important decisions for HR and talent acquisition leaders, but the real test lies in how smoothly it is implemented, adopted, and optimized. Without the right support, even the best platforms risk low adoption, poor data quality, and wasted investment.
Whatfix ensures your ATS investment delivers measurable results by guiding users from pre-go-live testing through onboarding, compliance, and long-term adoption. With in-app support and powerful analytics, HR teams can shorten time-to-hire, reduce errors, and maximize ROI.
See how Whatfix transforms ATS implementation into business impact. Request a demo with us today.
