What "applicant tracking" means at small-business scale
An ATS, at its core, does one job: it gives every applicant a status so you stop re-reading the same resume and stop losing track of who you already rejected. Enterprise ATS platforms build a great deal on top of that — interview kits, panel scorecards, approval workflows, compliance tracking for regulated hiring — because their customers run dozens of open roles with dedicated recruiters managing them.
If you are hiring one to ten people a year, most of that layer sits unused. What you actually need is the base layer: post the role, collect applications in one place, mark who is worth a call.
Five ways small businesses actually track applicants
Here is an honest rundown of what each option gets you, and where it breaks down.
- ApplyHere ($9/post). A guided flow gets a job live in minutes, with a shareable link and a candidate dashboard included. No pipeline stages beyond New/Shortlisted/Rejected, no scorecards — the trade for a five-minute setup.
- Breezy HR (free for one role, then $157+/mo). The free tier is genuinely useful for occasional hiring: a careers page, application collection, basic candidate management. Once you need more than one open role at a time, the price jumps.
- Workable (from ~$169/mo). Built for teams that rely on automatic distribution to 200+ job boards and AI-assisted sourcing. Earns its price at volume; at two or three hires a year you are paying monthly for tooling you rarely open.
- Google Forms + a spreadsheet (free). Genuinely works for very low volume — a handful of roles, a handful of applicants each. What you lose: no status tracking beyond manual spreadsheet edits, no candidate communication built in, and file uploads require the applicant to be signed in to a Google account. Our Google Forms vs. job application software comparison covers this trade in more depth.
- Greenhouse (roughly $5,000–$8,000/yr entry tier). The most capable option on this list, and the most expensive by a wide margin. It is quoted by headcount and requires a sales call to get a number. Built for HR teams running structured, high-volume recruiting — not a founder making their third hire.
