Reviewed & authored by: Vanya Goel
Co-Founder, Pitch N Hire | HR Tech Leader | GenAI & SaaS Expert
Vanya Goel is a seasoned HR leader and 3x SaaS co-founder, currently serving as the Co-Founder of Pitch N Hire, an AI-powered recruitment and applicant tracking platform trusted by growing businesses globally.
With 10+ years of hands-on experience in HR technology, talent acquisition, and recruitment process automation, Vanya specializes in building scalable, GDPR compliant hiring solutions for startups, SMEs, and enterprise teams particularly in UK and global markets.
Hiring tools can look similar on paper but choosing the wrong ATS can cost months.
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If you're currently in charge of hiring in India, you need to understand that when selecting an ATS, it is not about getting the most features it is about selecting the right features based on your level of hiring, the number of recruiters you have, and your level of compliance.
In India, hiring teams often experience the same frustration: They have to screen resumes one by one, plan interviews on different platforms, and end up losing great candidates. The answer is not always an overpriced complex enterprise system. The right ATS for you will be the one that will enable you to reduce the amount of time you spend on screening, help you coordinate interviews more efficiently, and adapt to your business to help you grow.
Here's the key difference: simple resume-storage tools lose to workflow-driven ATS platforms every time, especially in high-volume and campus hiring. When your ATS automates the right processes, your recruiters sort, and spend more time on decisions.
If you're hiring 10 or more candidates a month, manual screening and delays are a time and money sink.
Hiring teams are modernizing ATS integrations to streamline processes and reduce hiring cycles by 50%. Learn how in a free, no-pressure walkthrough.
As we mentioned earlier, hiring teams can now view and evaluate how prospects and candidates interact with ATS systems.

This resource was created because not all companies will require the same ATS system. We have customized our resource for:
If you find yourself in any of the categories mentioned above, this resource will save you in avoiding costly ATS blunders and selecting the system that aligns with your processes.
Self assessment: Does your existing vacancies and hiring processes involve the use of systems like spreadsheets, or even worse, missing email threads with lost candidates data? If yes, then a new ATS system is overdue.
Modern hiring teams Evaluating ATS: and Evaluating ATS systems is relatively sprightly, is viewing and evaluating how candidates and applicants engage with the ATS systems and.
When hiring teams look at Pitch N Hire, Zoho Recruit, and Darwin box, India's hiring teams look at these four factors:
How quickly can your ATS move candidates to shortlisting? This is a determining factor for how quickly you hire. An ATS should be able to reduce a multi-day process to a couple of hours. If you have to hire 50 candidates for every position, it can take a week just to do a manual shortlist. The right ATS can do it in just a few hours, and then your team can move on to real evaluations.
Does the ATS reduce the amount of work recruiters have to do? Recruiters should be having conversations with candidates, not manually inserting data. The best ATS enhance automation for duplicate resumes and initial qualification, leaving recruiters with 15 to 20 hours more in their week.
How does your ATS work once you have a shortlist to move to the next round of interviews? Does it automate scheduling? Does it automatically move candidates to next interview and collect feedback from interviewers? These workflows are what separate best in class hiring companies from the rest to avoid delays in decisions.
What does your ATS do in terms of Compliance audits, tracking, and the reporting the Indian labor law requires. India's hiring teams should not have to address these issues with more work, and their ATS should be able to do it for you.
Use this framework in your hiring flow.
Now, let's examine the tools that hiring teams in India currently assess. These descriptions highlight end goals instead of marketing initiatives.

Most effective for teams who handle:
Pitch N Hire caters to the specific needs of Indian recruiters. It emphasizes streamlining the hiring process by automating every step, from resume filtering to final interview scheduling. The platform is particularly effective in managing high volumes of applications, ensuring that the recruitment process flows smoothly without any bottlenecks. Users of this platform have reported significant enhancements in the candidate experience, as well as an acceleration in the overall hiring cycle.
Key benefit: Purposefully built for India's campus hiring seasons, with automation for bulk application workflows.
Here's an example of this hiring workflow.





Most effective for: Startups and small companies when formalizing hiring processes.
Zoho Recruit provides an intuitive interface that is easy to set up. If you need to hire about 5-10 employees each month, and don't have a need for more sophisticated automation, this is the ideal platform. It includes basic tools for resume and candidate management, team communication, and candidate tracking, avoiding the issue of overwhelming team members.
Trade-off: Less automation means more manual processes. Best to use temporarily, before the need to scale arises.
Indicative price point: Affordable for startups.


Best for: Large corporations and companies that require integrated HR solutions.
Offering more than just ATS functionality, Darwin box also encompasses onboarding, payroll, and employee management. If you need functionality for the entire HR ecosystem in addition to recruitment, this is a consideration. This also means more time and resources for implementation.
Trade-off: More time and resources spent on more complicated implementation. Best for companies with advanced HR frameworks already in place.
Indicative price point: Pricing for enterprise level solutions.
Vaibhav Patel – User-Friendly & Efficient “It has a user-friendly interface that makes navigation easy, and its streamlined features allow for efficient management of HR tasks.” Capterra

Alekhya H – Mobile UI Needs Improvement “Its mobile user interface is slow and needs to be improved.” Capterra

Best for: Companies with a focus on local compliance, and companies with feature requirements that pertain specifically to India.
Naukri Fast recruit is fully integrated with India's largest job portals, enabling application management, and access to a candidate database via a dedicated ATS. This is also valuable if you are already using Naukri for job postings.
Key advantage: Naukri's candidate pool is integrated, providing a native interface Indian recruiters know, and Indian labor law compliance support.
Trade-off: Ecosystem Naukri integration; if you source across multiple channels, it's not as customizable.

Best for: Organizations concentrating on passive candidate recruitment and developing a talent pool.
LinkedIn Recruiter is a sourcing and screening tool, not a full ATS, but is worth its weight in gold for sourcing good candidates because of its integration with LinkedIn's vast ecosystem. It is best used with another ATS for interview process and ultimate decision tracking.
Key advantage: Advanced filtering, InMail, and access to millions of passive candidates.
Trade-off: No interview process management and no end-to-end recruitment funnel. Needs to be integrated with other platforms.

Factor | Pitch N Hire | Zoho Recruit | Darwinbox | Naukri Fastrecruit | LinkedIn Recruiter |
| Best For | High-volume & campus recruitment | Startups & small teams | Enterprise & large organizations | India-centric recruitment | Passive candidate sourcing |
| Hiring Volume | 50-1000+ applications/month | 10-50 applications/month | 100-5000+ applications/month | 50-500+ applications/month | Varies by sourcing |
| Automation Level | High (workflow-driven) | Medium (basic features) | Very High (complete HR suite) | Medium-High | Medium (sourcing-focused) |
| Implementation Effort | 1-2 weeks | 3-5 days | 6-12 weeks | 1 week | 2-3 days |
| Interview Workflow | Advanced | Basic | Advanced | Good | Basic |
| Compliance Support | Strong (India-focused) | Standard | Very Strong | Very Strong (India laws) | Standard |
| Indicative Pricing | ₹20,000-50,000/month | ₹5,000-15,000/month | ₹1,00,000+/month | ₹10,000-40,000/month | ₹50,000+/month |
| Scalability | Excellent | Limited | Excellent | Good | Excellent |
| Integration with Job Portals | Multiple | Multiple | Multiple | Native (Naukri) | LinkedIn only |
Unsure which ATS is suitable for your hiring volume? Get personalized assistance

When looking for ATS solutions, do not get lost in unnecessary features. ATS solutions offer a myriad of features, most of which would not improve the hiring process. Focus on the core features that will drive hiring efficiency, and do not compromise on these:
An ATS should automatically generate structured candidate profiles from the resumes it receives. Entering resumes manually is a waste of time. The top tier ATS offer the ability to use artificial intelligence to identify and structure information based on skill, experience, education, and many others. Good ATS should do this without requiring the recruiter to input anything.
What to test: Run a test to verify how well and accurately each platform extracts the information after uploading 10 resumes to each platform. Does it accurately capture relevant skills? Does it create usable candidate profiles?
You gather applicants from diverse sources job boards, LinkedIn, referrals, and company career pages. Your ATS should bring together all submissions to one screen, allowing you to manage candidates without sifting through various portals.
What to look for: Does the platform integrate with Naukri, LinkedIn, Indeed, and your company careers page? Are you able to capture applicants without having to switch between applications?
This is where you save the most time. Your ATS needs to screen candidates automatically based on your selection criteria. Required Skills, years of experience, geography, and education level against which you screen should already be in the system. This transforms your screening from hours into minutes.
Red flag: If your ATS needs you to do manual screening for each and every candidate, it is clearly failing to resolve your most significant pain point.
It is a nightmare to schedule interviews across multiple rounds with multiple interviewers. Your ATS should automatically schedule interviews, send reminders to candidates and interviewers, and block slots so that interviewers do not book at the same time.
Bonus feature: if there is an integration for video interviews (some tools include video interviews tools), it simplifies scheduling for the first rounds.
What do you do to capture feedback after each interview? Do your interviewers give feedback via email (lost to inboxes) or in the system (tracked and organized)? Your ATS should make in-system feedback collection seamless – no more than 2 clicks to give feedback.
What's important: The system should consolidate feedback and pull out the outliers and make the decision obvious.
India's hiring laws require you to document hiring decisions, store candidate data securely, and provide audit trails if requested. Your ATS should do these automatically – storing the records, tracking decision dates, and keeping data secure.
Most important for: Campus hiring, high-volume hiring, or any situation where you are screening many applicants.
You should know: How many applications for each role? What is the conversion at each step? How long did each department take to fill their roles? Your ATS should provide these insights without the need for custom reports.
What to ask: Will you be able to generate a report with the candidates at each stage? How many days does each candidate spend in each stage? Which channels bring the most qualified candidates?

Most teams either overpay for features they'll never use or underpay and struggle with insufficient tools.
We've created a complimentary checklist for you to pinpoint what you require prior to deciding on an ATS.
Download Your Free ATS Buyer Checklist
You have the ATS. You've invested in training your team. Yet, six months down the line, your recruiters are still doing manual resume screenings, and the ATS has become just a sophisticated resume storage.
The situation is more common than expected. Here is the explanation for the phenomenon.
The difference between ATS success and failure comes down to design of the workflows. Here is what modern hiring teams do differently.
See if this model fits your hiring team.

Most companies obtain the right ATS and still end up possessing it underutilized. Here's how you avoid this case:
Do not purchase an ATS and then learn how to utilize it. First, outline your existing recruitment process:
Why this is important: Once you are aware of your recruitment process, you can select an ATS that is aligned with your recruitment process instead of making your recruitment process fit the software.
Before your system goes live, improve the state of your legacy candidate database. Edit out duplicates, unresponsive, and blank records. Patching your database prevents you from doing a lot of manual system cleanup.
The first step in automated screening is creating a rubric for what a qualified candidate is for the role.
Most ATS training sessions miss the mark because they talk features ("Here's the advanced search option") instead of workflows ("Here's how we moved Jane from Applied to the Interview stage"). Focus on the latter.
What works: Tell recruiters how their workflows will change. "Instead of checking your email to see if there are new applications, you will log on to the ATS every morning, and all of the new applications will already be here, pre-screened."
Be realistic. It will take 2-3 weeks for full implementation. Recruiters are going to be slower, and there will be a slowdown in hiring until the ATS is fully adopted. After a month, however, you will see a 30-40% reduction in time spent on recruiting.
Then, set an adoption checkpoint for 30 days: After 30 days, acknowledge the switch cost, and celebrate early wins.
Instead of introducing the ATS to 20 recruiters at once, start with 2-3 who are willing to change, fix any issues that arise, and then scale. This will demonstrate ROI to any skeptical team members.
Timeline: 2 weeks for the pilot, then gradual implementation to the entire team.
Every company has a unique way of hiring their employees. We are going to streamline your ATS to fit your model and selecting a growth stage.
Your hiring profile includes:
What you require: Straightforward, inexpensive and needs to be implemented rapidly. You do not require enterprise features: you require a rapid and simple decision.
Best option: Zoho Recruit, Lieutenant ATSs.
Cheers to Free tip: Begin Lean. When you outlass ATSs Low-cost options, it is likely to be when you are at 50+ hires a year
Check Low-cost ATSs for start-up companies
Your hiring profile includes:
What you require: An ATS which provides the -, does not require weeks of to set up, coordination, and the screening of resumes. You require a quick.
Best options: Pitch N Hire (workflow-first), modern platforms designed for scale without complexity
Pro tip: Mid-size companies typically realize the quickest ROI as they have the right amount of hiring volume to leverage automation, but it isn't so large that they require enterprise infrastructure.
See scalable ATS workflows for mid-size companies
Your hiring profile:
What you need: A broad system with strong automation, compliance, and analytics. A reasonable level of implementation effort is required and necessary.
Best options: Pitch N Hire (for campus-focused), Darwin box (for integrated HR), enterprise platforms
Pro tip: At this scale, the cost of manual hiring is sky-high. A well-configured ATS tends to cut recruiter work by 40-60%.
Schedule a walkthrough of the enterprise ATS.
Campus hiring means hiring from colleges/universities, which require handling lots of applications, multi-step automated feedback interviews, and large-scale feedback collection. In India, Pitch N Hire is built for such cases, with specific workflows for campus drives. It particularly automates the challenges of campus hiring, such as, high volume, several rounds of interviews, and substantial structured feedback, all with little to no manual oversight.
Alternative: Naukri Fast recruit also works well for campus hiring, especially if your students apply through the Naukri portal.
The pricing for the ATS system in India greatly varies on the features prescribed and the volume of hiring done. The software pricing is as follows:
Key point: An expensive ATS may prolong hiring cycles, and therefore justify the cost. An ATS that reduces your hiring cycle from 45 days to 25 days is worth Rs. 25,000/month, and in that sense, the ATS structure would provide a great benefit.
Take note of some other costs:
ATS is not legally mandatory and hence is not required to be implemented.
Contact: info@pitchnhire.com | https://pitchnhire.com/contact-us
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