FAQs

ATS pricing varies widely. Enterprise systems often run thousands of dollars per month with annual contracts and per-recruiter seat pricing, while systems built for smaller teams typically range from around $100 to $500 per month depending on job and user limits. Many vendors do not publish pricing at all and require a sales call for a quote.

Free applicant tracking systems exist as well, usually as limited free tiers of paid products, with caps on jobs, users, or features that most hiring teams outgrow quickly.

Polymer publishes its pricing. There are three plans, Starter at $124 per month, Growth at $233, and Scale at $415, billed annually. Month to month the same plans are $149, $279, and $499. Every plan includes the complete feature set. The only differences between plans are published jobs (5, 20, or 50), users (5, 20, or 50), and monthly Plato AI credits.

The best applicant tracking system for a small team is one that works on day one without implementation projects, sales calls, or per-job pricing that punishes growth. Whether you call it small business hiring software, recruiting software for small business, or an ATS for startups, small teams should look for the same things, self-serve setup, a careers page included rather than sold separately, unlimited candidates, transparent published pricing, and no feature gating that holds core functionality hostage on cheaper tiers.

Polymer is built for exactly this. Your branded job board is created automatically when you sign up, a first job post requires only a title and description, every plan carries the full feature set, candidates are unlimited on every plan, and pricing is published on the site. There are no sales calls in the signup path.

AI candidate screening is the use of AI to review job applications against a role's requirements, so hiring teams focus on the strongest candidates first instead of reading every application in arrival order. The core of it is AI resume screening, reading what a candidate has actually done and comparing it to what the role actually needs. Good candidate screening software doesn't just produce a score, it shows the reasoning behind the score, because a number you can't interrogate is a number you can't trust.

Plato is the AI built into the Polymer applicant tracking system. It screens every application against the requirements in your own job description, core, preferred, and bonus, working through them one by one and marking each criterion as a full match, a partial match, or not a match, with its reasoning written out under every criterion. Personal details like name, location, and email are removed before scoring, so the assessment stays focused on the work. The result is one of five fit levels, and because the reasoning is always visible, you can see exactly why a candidate scored the way they did.

Unlike most AI recruiting software, Plato is included in every Polymer plan, with monthly AI credits built in, 50 on Starter, 100 on Growth, 150 on Scale, and there is no per-seat AI upcharge. One credit covers one completed review. Teams screening at higher volume can add more credits anytime, as one-time top-ups or as a credit subscription.

An ATS follows the shape of a hiring process. You publish a job, applications flow into a shared inbox, and candidates move through stages like screening, interviews, and offer, with candidate management, review, and communication happening in one place and every action recorded on the candidate's record.

In Polymer, a job is created with seven default hiring stages, Inbox, Screen, Interview, Decide, Offer, Hired, and Archived, and you can rename, reorder, add, or delete stages to match any process. Email to candidates is built in, hiring team permissions are set by role and by job, and once you turn on auto-reviews for a role, Plato screens candidates the moment they apply.

It depends on how much you hire. A small business hiring once a year from a handful of applicants can survive on a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet breaks the moment volume arrives. Candidates get lost in shared inboxes, nobody knows who replied to whom, promising applicants go stale while the team debates, and there is no record of why anyone was rejected. That last one matters beyond tidiness. If your hiring practices are ever questioned, a consistent, documented process, who applied, how they were evaluated, and why decisions were made, is what you want to be able to show. An ATS exists to make hiring a process instead of a pile, and a record instead of a memory.

Polymer is designed to be the first ATS a team adopts. Setup is self-serve and takes minutes, there are no sales calls, candidates you have already collected elsewhere can be imported by CSV, and the 14-day free trial starts when you publish your first job, not when you sign up to look around.

Look at five things. Pricing transparency, whether the vendor publishes prices or makes you call sales. Feature gating, whether core features are withheld on cheaper plans. Data portability, whether you can export your candidate data yourself, without asking. Candidate privacy, whether the system handles data deletion requests properly. And setup cost, whether you can be running the same day or face an implementation project.

Polymer publishes its pricing, ships the complete feature set on every plan, lets you export your entire organization's hiring data as CSV or ZIP from your own settings, has candidate data deletion built into every message a candidate receives, and sets up self-serve with your job board created automatically at signup.

Yes. A good ATS handles job distribution, getting your jobs onto free job posting sites and paid boards beyond your own careers page. Included with Polymer at no extra cost: Google Jobs (on by default when you publish), LinkedIn, which posts jobs to your company page via LinkedIn Limited Listings, X Hiring, and We Work Remotely. Paid placements are separate and optional. WhatJobs premium distribution is $175 for 30 days across 500+ recruitment partners, and We Work Remotely postings start at $299 for 30 days, the same price as posting directly on their site. Any individual job can be opted out of external listings entirely.

Yes. Polymer comes with a 14-day free trial, which begins when you publish your first job. You can even change plans mid-trial, if you start on Starter and realize you need Growth, you can switch without ending the trial, which is something many products don't allow. And before the trial ever starts, you can explore Polymer for as long as you like without entering payment information, creating jobs, setting up your job board, adding team members, and previewing exactly how everything will look.

Yes to both. Candidate privacy is built into Polymer rather than handled by support ticket. Every message a candidate receives through Polymer ends with a link to manage their data. When a candidate requests deletion, the organization owner is notified, and an Admin can complete it. Deletion removes all personally identifying data from all of the candidate's applications, names, contact information, links, answers, and files, irreversibly, and the candidate receives an email confirming it. For AI review, personal details are removed before any candidate is sent to Plato for scoring.