Jul 22, 2025
Samuel Nygren

Founder and CEO of Hirefly. Samuel used to work at a mid size company, struggeling to manage applications every time they were hiring and decied to build and affordable alternative.
For small and medium-sized businesses, the benefits of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) are simple and direct: you'll reduce your hiring time, lower costs, and create a far better candidate experience. By finally ditching chaotic spreadsheets and overflowing email inboxes, you reclaim hours of your day and build a professional hiring process that actually attracts top talent, strengthening your employer brand.
Escaping the Spreadsheet Black Hole
Let’s be honest: managing hiring with a spreadsheet feels like trying to run a busy restaurant with a handful of sticky notes. It’s a recipe for chaos. For growing companies with 20–100 employees, this manual approach quickly turns into a "spreadsheet black hole" where great candidates and crucial feedback simply disappear.
This isn't just an inconvenience; it has real costs.
Every hour a founder or operations lead spends digging through a cluttered inbox to track applicants is an hour not spent growing the business. Relying on makeshift tools creates a disjointed and often unprofessional experience for candidates. Think about it: inconsistent communication or long delays can sour your employer brand before you even get a chance to make a first impression.
The Hidden Costs of Manual Recruiting
The pain of a broken process shows up in wasted time, missed opportunities, and higher-than-necessary expenses. It’s painfully easy for a promising applicant to slip through the cracks, accepting an offer from a more organized competitor while their resume sits unread in your inbox. This reactive, disorganized method is completely unsustainable for any SMB trying to scale.
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) isn't some luxury reserved for giant corporations; it's a fundamental tool for winning the talent war, even if you don't have a dedicated HR department.
This infographic breaks down the clear benefits by comparing the old way with the new.

The data speaks for itself. Companies using an ATS don't just hire faster and more affordably—they also keep more candidates engaged throughout the entire process.
To see just how different the two approaches are, let's compare them side-by-side.
Manual Recruiting vs. an SMB-Focused ATS: A Quick Comparison
This table highlights the core differences between relying on manual hiring processes and implementing an ATS built for small businesses.
Hiring Task | Manual Method (Spreadsheets/Email) | With an ATS (Like Hirefly) |
---|---|---|
Candidate Tracking | Juggling multiple tabs, cells, and email threads. High risk of losing track of applicants. | Centralized, visual pipeline. See every candidate's status at a glance. |
Team Communication | Endless email chains and Slack messages to share feedback. Hard to find what you need. | All notes, feedback, and ratings are stored in one place, tied to the candidate's profile for easy collaboration. |
Candidate Experience | Inconsistent, slow, and often unprofessional. Candidates feel like they're in a black hole. | Automated, timely messages and a professional, branded career page. Candidates feel valued. |
Time Investment | Hours spent on administrative tasks: updating sheets, sending follow-ups, scheduling. | Drastically reduced admin time. The system handles repetitive tasks so you can focus on people. |
The contrast is stark. Moving to a dedicated system like Hirefly, which is built specifically for SMBs, addresses these pain points head-on. It replaces administrative headaches with a simple, visual pipeline and automated messaging, letting your team get back to what matters: building relationships, not managing spreadsheets.
Building Your Centralized Talent Hub
Think about the last time you tried to find a specific candidate's resume. Was it buried in an email thread? A stray folder on a shared drive? Or maybe just lost in the shuffle?
One of the most powerful applicant tracking system benefits is that it puts an end to that chaos. It creates a single, organized hub for every piece of candidate information—resumes, interview notes, team feedback, and application history. No more frantic searching.
This organized database isn't just a digital filing cabinet. It becomes a strategic asset. You can build a proactive talent pool from promising past applicants (including spontaneous applications), giving you a head start the next time a role opens up.
Get Your Whole Team on the Same Page
An ATS isn’t just about storage; it’s about collaboration. Instead of messy email chains where feedback gets lost, your entire hiring team—from founders to hiring managers—can see the exact same information, instantly.
This unified access breaks down bottlenecks and makes the entire review process faster. When everyone is working from the same playbook, decisions are quicker, fairer, and more coordinated. This is a huge reason the global ATS market is projected to hit $4.6 billion by 2032—businesses are tired of disorganized data and costly errors.
A centralized system means no great candidate gets forgotten and no critical feedback gets lost in the noise. It lets your team leave structured comments and ratings directly on a candidate’s profile, creating a clear, auditable trail for better decision-making.
This is especially critical for small businesses where multiple people wear the hiring hat. It keeps your process consistent and professional, even if you don't have a dedicated HR department.
With a system like Hirefly, this hub doesn't have to be complicated. Our tools are designed to be simple but powerful, giving your team a single source of truth for hiring without the headaches. See how Hirefly’s collaborative features can bring your team together.
Winning Back Your Day with Smart Automation
What could you accomplish with an extra ten hours in your week? For busy founders and ops leads at SMBs, this isn't just a thought exercise. One of the biggest wins you get from an applicant tracking system is its power to take over the tedious, repetitive tasks that eat up your day.
Think about your hiring process humming along in the background, even when you're not watching. An ATS can instantly fire off a personalized "we got your application" email the second someone applies. It’s a small touch, but it tells candidates you’re on top of things and protects your employer brand from day one.
This isn’t about taking the human touch out of hiring—it’s about focusing it where it actually counts.
By handing off the administrative busywork, you’re giving your team the gift of time. Time they can spend on high-impact conversations with top contenders, building real relationships, and thinking about growth—not digging through a chaotic inbox.
Let Workflows Do the Work
Automated workflows are the real engine of an ATS. They’re what make sure no great candidate ever falls into that dreaded communication "black hole," a problem every small team knows when they're stuck using spreadsheets and email.
You can set up simple rules to:
Automatically send polite rejection emails to applicants who aren't a fit.
Trigger an interview scheduling email the moment a candidate gets moved to the next stage.
Nudge the hiring team to submit their interview feedback on time.
This level of organization is a lifesaver for small teams juggling a dozen other priorities. For a bigger picture on how to reclaim your time, it's worth exploring strategies for automating repetitive tasks. An ATS like Hirefly just applies these core principles directly to your recruitment, building a system that works for you, so you can focus on finding the people who will build your company.
Crafting a Professional Candidate Experience
For a small business, your hiring process is a direct reflection of your brand. When a top candidate clicks "apply," that experience shapes their entire perception of your company. A clunky, outdated process—like a simple "email us your resume" link—can make even the most exciting startup feel small and disorganized.
This is where an ATS helps you punch way above your weight. A system like Hirefly lets you build a branded, professional career page that looks polished and established. This seamless, modern application process elevates your company and makes a great first impression. It's a simple way to strengthen your employer brand and attract better talent.
But a professional image goes beyond just the application form. It’s also about consistent, automated communication.
Keeping Candidates Engaged and Respected
An ATS ensures every single applicant gets a timely confirmation, even if they applied on a whim. That small courtesy makes candidates feel seen and respected, which is absolutely crucial for building a strong reputation. In fact, a positive experience is so impactful that 86% of recruiters agree an ATS improves the overall candidate journey.
A great candidate experience isn't about fancy bells and whistles. It’s about clear communication, respect for the applicant's time, and a process that feels organized and professional from start to finish. This builds goodwill that pays off in referrals and a stronger talent pool.
This positive experience builds a powerful reputation in the talent market. When candidates—even the ones you don't hire—walk away feeling respected, they're far more likely to speak highly of your company and drive future referrals.
If you want to see how a lightweight ATS can instantly professionalize your hiring, you can book a quick Hirefly demo and explore the features for yourself. It’s a great way to get a firsthand look at how easy it is to build a process that attracts top talent instead of deterring it.
Making Smarter Hiring Decisions with Data
Relying on "gut feelings" to build your team is a gamble, especially for a growing business. Let's be honest, we've all done it. But one of the biggest wins you get from an applicant tracking system is the shift away from guesswork and towards objective, data-informed hiring. It gives your team the tools to collaborate effectively and choose the best person for the job based on clear evidence, not just a hunch.
This all starts with a visual Kanban pipeline. Imagine your whole team seeing every candidate's progress—from "Applied" to "Hired"—all in one place. It clears up the confusion instantly and turns a chaotic process into a simple, manageable workflow.
From Messy Emails to Structured Feedback
A core benefit here is getting all that team feedback out of scattered email chains and into a single, structured system. With an ATS like Hirefly, every note, review, and rating is logged right inside the candidate's profile. Finally, a single source of truth for your entire decision-making process.
This centralized feedback naturally leads to fairer, more consistent evaluations. Instead of relying on who-remembers-what, your team can review concrete data points, compare candidates side-by-side, and make a collective, confident choice. Getting this right doesn't just streamline hiring; the quality of people you bring on board has a huge ripple effect, especially when it comes to improving employee engagement across the company.
When every piece of feedback is logged and visible, bias is reduced, and decisions become more defensible and objective. This empowers your team to hire for skill and fit, not just a gut feeling.
Even without a dedicated HR analyst, you can start tracking simple but powerful metrics like time-to-fill and source-of-hire. This data gives you real, actionable insights to sharpen your strategy over time. It’s no surprise that 78% of the market prefers cloud-based ATS deployments; it's largely driven by SMBs using affordable tools to get these kinds of competitive insights. If you want to dig into how small and medium businesses are adopting these tools, you can explore more market findings here.
Choosing the Right ATS for Your SMB
Not all applicant tracking systems are created equal, and this is especially true for a growing business. It’s easy to fall into the trap of picking a watered-down enterprise tool. That’s like buying a cargo ship when all you really need is a speedboat—you end up wrestling with complicated features and paying for bloat you’ll never touch.
The key is to sidestep the systems built for massive corporations. They often come with steep learning curves, frustrating setups, and rigid, expensive contracts that lock you in. For a company with 20–100 employees, that approach is a fast track to wasting time and money.
Focus on What Truly Matters: Simplicity and Power
The best ATS for an agile business is lightweight, affordable, and built for teams that care more about functionality than fluff. You want a system that delivers powerful core features without the unnecessary complexity. This is especially true for founders and operations leads who are already juggling multiple responsibilities.
This demand for targeted solutions is why the applicant tracking system market is projected to hit $4.04 billion by 2029. SMBs are the ones driving this growth, ditching clunky systems for affordable tools that solve their actual problems.
An SMB-focused ATS gives you exactly what you need: a visual pipeline, automated messaging, and collaborative feedback. It empowers you to compete for top talent on a level playing field, without the enterprise-level price tag.
Solutions like Hirefly were created specifically for this reason. We’re built to avoid bloated feature sets and confusing contracts, offering clear, straightforward value from day one. For any budget-conscious decision-maker, checking out the transparent pricing of an SMB-focused ATS is the perfect next step. You’ll see just how accessible these powerful tools have become.
Common Questions About Applicant Tracking Systems for Small Businesses
Making the jump to a new hiring tool naturally brings up a few questions. Let's tackle the most common concerns we hear from founders and small business leaders when they're thinking about an ATS.
Isn't an Applicant Tracking System Too Expensive For a Small Business?
Not anymore. It's a common myth that all ATS tools come with a hefty enterprise price tag. While that used to be true, modern solutions like Hirefly were built from the ground up specifically for SMB budgets.
We offer affordable, transparent monthly subscriptions—no getting locked into painful long-term contracts. When you factor in the hours you save and the impact of making better hires, a lightweight ATS becomes one of the smartest, most cost-effective investments a growing company can make.
Will An ATS Make Our Hiring Process Feel Impersonal?
It’s actually the opposite. A good ATS automates the impersonal stuff, like sending out "we got your application" emails or manually updating a spreadsheet. That's the work that nobody enjoys anyway.
This frees up your team's time and energy for meaningful, human interactions. You get more time for personal follow-ups, thoughtful interview prep, and building genuine connections with your top candidates. Your process becomes more personal, not less.
A lightweight ATS doesn’t replace human judgment; it removes administrative friction. This allows your team to focus their energy on the high-touch, relationship-building activities that truly define a great candidate experience.
Is An ATS Hard To Use If We Don't Have a Dedicated HR Department?
It's a valid concern, but only if you choose the wrong tool. Many platforms are bloated with features designed for large HR departments.
But systems designed for SMBs, like Hirefly, are intentionally built for simplicity. They’re made for founders, office managers, and team leads—the people who actually do the hiring in a small company. With an intuitive visual pipeline and a setup that takes minutes, you can be up and running fast without any technical background.
Ready to see how a simple, affordable ATS can genuinely change how you hire? Hirefly gives you all the essential tools to attract top talent without the enterprise price tag or complexity. Start managing your hiring process the smart way.