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Do I need an ATS?
If one person is hiring for one role, not yet. A spreadsheet or a Notion board holds a candidate list well enough. You need one on the day a second interviewer joins the loop or a second role opens at the same time, because that is when notes, stages, and scores start living in three places. This page says what an ATS actually does for a company of ten to fifty, when the spreadsheet stops working, and what it should cost, so you can decide in five minutes.
What does an ATS actually do for a company of ten?
Strip away the feature pages and an applicant tracking system does five things for a small company.
One place to apply
A careers page and an application form, so candidates land in a list instead of an inbox, with the resume attached to the right person.
One record per candidate
Where they are in the process, who has spoken to them, and what was said, so the second interviewer does not have to ask the first.
The interview attached to the job
The questions for this role, so every interviewer opens the same guide instead of improvising from the job description.
A scorecard per interview
Each interviewer's scores on the same scale, side by side, so the debrief compares evidence rather than impressions.
Scheduling and the emails around it
Invites, updates, and the rejection you owe every candidate you spoke to, sent from the record instead of from memory.
That is the list. Sourcing tools, analytics dashboards, and approval chains matter at forty hires a year and can wait at four. Notice that a form and a spreadsheet cover the first two, badly but adequately, and nothing on your desk does the third or fourth. That gap is the answer to the question, and the rest of this page is about it.
When does the spreadsheet stop working?
Vendor blog posts name thresholds like twenty hires a year, ten to fifteen candidates in a pipeline, or the third open role. They disagree with each other because the real trigger is not a count. Read the posts founders write when they go looking for a tool and the moment is one of two.
A second person joins the interview loop
You ask a co-founder or a manager to interview too. Now two people have asked different questions, written notes in two places, and one says "strong" while the other says "not sure." A spreadsheet can hold both notes. It cannot make the two of you score the same thing.
A second role opens at the same time
Two job posts, two sets of applicants, a candidate for one role who might fit the other, and follow-ups slipping. The stage column stops being updated in the second week, and from then on the sheet describes last week.
If neither has happened yet, keep the sheet. Spend the hour you would have spent choosing software writing down the questions you will ask every candidate and what a good answer sounds like. That hour improves the hire; the software mostly stores it.
Ten people, two roles, two interviewers
The company and the people are invented; the shape of the failure is the one founders describe.
A ten-person company opens an account executive role and a support lead role in the same month. The founder, Maya, and the operations manager, Tom, split the interviews. In week one the sheet is fine: thirty-one applicants, columns for name, source, stage, and notes.
By week three, Tom’s notes are in his email and Maya’s are in the sheet. Four candidates are marked “phone screen done” with nothing recorded about which questions were asked. Two support candidates were asked about quota attainment because Tom reused the account executive questions. On Friday they sit down to decide. “I liked her.” “The other one had better answers.” Better answers to which question? Neither of them can say, because they did not ask the same ones.
Nothing here is a storage problem. The sheet held every name and every stage. What it made invisible was that nobody had written the interview for either role before the first call, so two interviewers ran two different interviews and produced two impressions that cannot be compared. What fixes it is one written interview guide per role, the same questions to every candidate, a scale with a sentence describing each score, and both interviewers’ scores side by side on Friday. A tracker stores that. It does not write it.
Can I get by with Google Forms, Notion, Trello, or Airtable?
Yes, for one owner and one role, and plenty of companies do: a board with a column per stage, an Airtable base, a Notion template with a scorecard field, a form that feeds a sheet. Some ATS vendors also offer a free tier that tracks candidates for one open job at a time. What all of these have in common is that the scorecard field is an empty box. It will hold whatever you type. None of them writes the questions for the role, and the empty box is what a second interviewer fills with “seemed strong.”
So the question to ask a free tool is not “does it track candidates”; they all do. It is “does it give my second interviewer the same questions and the same scale as me.” If the answer is no, you are getting a tracker and still doing the hard part by hand, which is fine for one role and stops being fine at the two moments above.
What should an ATS cost a company this size?
Three pricing shapes exist, and the shape matters more than the headline number.
- 1. Headcount tiers. A monthly price for a company of 1 to 20 employees, charged whether you have three roles open or none.
- 2. Annual contracts. A year paid up front, used by some of the small-business ATSes, with the term often settled in the contract rather than on the pricing page.
- 3. Per open role. A small monthly base plus a charge for each role while it is open, which goes back down between hires.
Published entry prices in the first two shapes run from $1,000 a year to $400 a month for a team under twenty, as read in August 2026 for the ATS pricing comparison, which lists what each vendor publishes and what the entry tier leaves out. A company of ten to fifty hires in bursts, so the third shape is the one to look for: you pay while you are hiring and nothing in the months you are not.
Yardstick is priced that way. Your first three Jobs are free, then it is $49 a month plus $29 per open role, billed monthly, and interviewers join by magic link, so there are no extra seats to buy. A team with two roles open pays $107 a month. The pricing page has the full table.
The part no tracker does for you
The sheet in the example failed because nobody had written the interview for either role before the first call, and Maya could not easily write one for a sales job she had never done. That is the work an ATS should take off you, and a tracker does not.
In Yardstick you describe the role and AI designs the interview guide for it: the questions about specific past work, the follow-ups under each one, and a scorecard with a sentence for every score describing what that level of evidence sounds like. The draft is wrong in places and easier to fix than to write, and it is ready before anyone is scheduled. Every candidate then has the same important conversation, and Tom scores the same anchors Maya does, so Friday compares evidence instead of impressions. The candidate record, the careers page, scheduling through Calendly or Cal.com, and the candidate emails sit around that guide, which is the list at the top of this page.
If the role you are hiring for is one you cannot do yourself, how to interview for a role you cannot do walks through the five moves with a worked first sales hire. How to build a hiring process is the version you will want once the second role opens, and the best ATS for startups compares the tools if you decide today is the day.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need an ATS for my first hire?
No. For one person hiring one role, a spreadsheet holds the candidate list, and the work that decides the hire happens outside any tool: writing down what the role must deliver, writing the interview questions, and scoring every candidate on the same scale. Do those three things on paper and you have done the part most tools leave to you. Where a tool earns its place on a first hire is when you cannot write the interview yourself because you have never done the job. Yardstick designs the interview guide and scorecard for the role from your description, and the first three Jobs are free, so a first hire costs nothing. How to interview for a role you cannot do walks through the method.
Is a free ATS enough for four or five hires a year?
For tracking, usually yes. Read the limits before you rely on one: some free tiers cap you at one open job at a time, and some put scorecards or structured interviews on a higher paid plan, so the part that helps you decide is the part you would be paying for. Yardstick's free tier is the first three Jobs, and the AI-designed interview guide and the scorecards are on every account, including the free one.
Will an ATS reject candidates automatically?
Only if you set it up to, and for a company of ten to fifty you should not. Every applicant you get is worth a person's glance. In Yardstick you can add screening questions with a fixed answer to the application form (a yes/no on a required certification, a number for years in the role), and an application that misses your answer is marked in the queue so your team sees it and decides what happens next. Application review scores each application against the criteria you defined for the job, so you read the likely fits first and your team decides who moves on.
Can I move my spreadsheet into an ATS later?
Yes, and it is worth asking about before you choose. Yardstick imports candidates, jobs, and applications through a preview-first importer: you see the dry run and a person approves it before anything is written. Ask any ATS you consider two questions: what import it offers on day one, and what export you get on the day you leave.
Does an ATS post my job to job boards?
Most do, and for many small companies it is the first thing they want from one. In Yardstick every public job page carries Google Jobs structured data, and there are XML feeds for ZipRecruiter, Careerjet, Talent.com, and Jooble that you submit once from settings and that stay current as roles open and close. Each board decides whether and when it shows a job.
Get the interview written before the second interviewer joins.
Describe the role, get the interview guide and the scorecard for it, and give both interviewers the same questions and the same scale. Your first three Jobs are free.