The human resource department at Mega Corporation is overwhelmed with a constant flood of résumés submitted through its website and in response to the ads it places for job vacancies. Aanya, the department’s manager, is concerned that the company will overlook excellent candidates because employees don’t have time to carefully evaluate or remember all the applicants. How might an applicant-tracking system help the department?

The answer to the question, How might an applicant-tracking system help the department; is pretty simple. What this question really asks for is to explain the innovation of the Applicant Tracking System (commonly abbreviated as ATS). So the foremost thing to do is to describe the Applicant tracking system. Application tracking tracking systems (ATS from hereon), are digital systems that are designed to make the recruitment process for employers way less tedious than it normally should be. Imagine you had to hire for a huge company like Microsoft that could receive tens of thousands of applications everyday for a specific role. It would be pretty tedious to determine the most qualified for the role if you had to go through all the applications yourself. Even if you had a team of people, it would still be stressful and error prone because, as humans we can make mistakes and slip in the wrong file for an interview or even misplace an application or mix something up somewhere. Now imagine if you didn't have to do all that because a computer program can do it with more precision and speed than you and your whole team are capable of. That would be splendid, right? Well, you don't have to. Aanya in the question above does not have to bother the department with the tedious work. The ATS will take care of a good chunk of the work. Here's how it works. The ATS is comprised of bots that are programmed to scan through applications and arrange them in order of qualification and matching of requirements. A bot is software application that's preset to run programs automatically, usually over the internet. So when people apply on Mega Corporation's platform, the applications are sent through to the scanning of the ATS. Now the requirements for the job role will be filled in by the department ATS so it knows what it's looking out for. For example, if one of the requirements for the job is a Master's degree in Psychology, applications without Master's degrees will be grouped separately from those that have. Same thing for other criteria like years of experience, Age, etcetera. The ATS receives all these applications and groups them such that, at the deadline of the application process, the ATS would have screened a good portion of the applicants and only the most qualified would be left for the next stage of screening. This is how the Applicant Tracking System would help the Human Resource department at Mega Corporation.