Technology has changed the recruitment landscape over the years – as more companies use tech to improve their recruitment process. The best candidates today are being recruited by these forward-thinking companies, and the Applicant Tracking System is an example of such technology used in the market.
As of 2019, 95% of the Fortune 500 companies use an ATS to streamline their recruiting process. That is why today we will answer questions like, What is an ATS? Who Needs an ATS? And the benefits of using it.
What Is An ATS?
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a solution that helps a recruiter with scheduling, interviewing, and communicating during recruitment. ATS automates the recruitment process, making it fast, accurate, and efficient. The whole point of an ATS solution is to save the company time, human resources, and money.
Who Needs ATS?
Most companies who do not use an Applicant Tracking System may believe they do not need it, but if you experience some of the following, then maybe you should consider getting one:
- If you find it hard to keep track of the candidate’s progress during a recruitment process.
- If you notice, it’s hard communicating efficiently with the hiring team.
- If you spend a lot of time posting on job sites.
- If you still have to go through resumes manually.
- If you do not keep records of the candidates’ records after recruitment is over.
- If you struggle with communicating with the candidates at the required time.
- If you spend hours on admin work like filing, categorizing, and arranging files, leaving you less productive.
- If you have different HR software running at once during the recruitment process.
If any of these situations apply to you, then an ATS is for you.
Benefits Of ATS
The following are some of the benefits of having an ATS in place.
- Makes It Easier to Post Jobs Online
Posting to job boards can be a time-consuming task. You would need to login into the different sites and post the job adverts on each of them. ATS saves you from this. You can write up a detailed job application, and then with one click, automatically post to various job sites.
- Improves the Quality of Hire
The use of ATS can help to improve the quality of hires. It does this by speeding up the recruitment process. ATS can help to comb through piles of applicants’ resumes quickly and pick qualified candidates from the stack. It does these through keywords you input into the system to find capable applicants, interview the person and extend an offer. You can beat competitors who are also looking out for talents because you have a quicker process.
- Improves Communication Between Team Members
One of the hurdles of the recruitment process is communication. If in-house, the different members of the recruitment process are on different time schedules, and it may be a challenge to always get across to them. Imagine members from various departments who are part of the interviewing team or a multi-national where some of the recruitment members are in other regions. ATS helps by bringing everyone into the software. It is easy to communicate, send reminders, and stay updated with the recruitment process.
- Improves Candidate Experience
One of the biggest complaints during the recruitment process is the candidate experience. Candidates complain about how long they take to complete the recruitment process, including regular updates and feedback on where they stand. Most quality candidates will move on to other companies if the process takes too long. As for those who stay, they will have negative reviews concerning the process. With an ATS, you have less of this problem. You will be able to track the candidate’s progress through the recruitment exercise. You have an overview of each applicant, giving you access to candidate contact information, which allows you to provide timely feedback.
- Helps Your Company Brand
Candidates talk to one another, and therefore, it is not strange for them to talk about your company’s recruitment process. One way to improve your brand is to make your recruiting and onboarding process seamless. Doing this gives your organization an excellent reputation in the labor market.
- Makes the Recruitment Process Efficient
An ATS job is to make the recruitment process simpler for you. It is available to take care of the mundane, repetitive part of the process. Activities like filing, entering data, and searching through resumes are more on the administrative side of things. They do little to add value to the process itself. It helps take care of those activities. So you can concentrate on the important ones.
- Helps Streamline The Onboarding Process: ATS is also great for the onboarding process. Papers they have to sign, company policies they have to read, and other onboarding processes can be done online. It makes the process simple and neat when the new employee has access to all their information from a single system.
How To Find The Right ATS For Your Business
We have seen some benefits of having an ATS to a company. Now, how do you diagnose yourself for the ideal ATS you need?
- Understand The Recruitment Need
This step will need you to do some internal reflection on the needs of your recruitment process. The question, “What is it we want to improve?” should be a guiding beacon in this step.
- Finding the tool that can fix the Gap
This step sees you hunt for the right tool for your recruitment process. This step is essential because if you get a tool that doesn’t address any gap, then the tool has very little value. In other to avoid that, you can think about the following when deciding. The price, the company size, and industry, user experience, analytics, and scalability.
- Choose a Partner Instead of a Provider: When choosing an Applicants Tracking System, search for a partner rather than a service provider alone. Doing this will help you look at the long term instead of a short-term goal. Contacting the companies and using their demo, their responsiveness and attentiveness will point out the company that is best suited for you and the ones that are not. You should also clarify if the company provides onboarding instructions or if you have a designated account manager? Will you be able to contact customer service 24/7 or not? And will they provide training sessions as needed?
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, the ATS is a game-changer, and that’s why more and more organizations are adopting it. It is a tried and tested process, and some reports and surveys have shown how efficient an ATS can be in an organization. The world is becoming more technologically inclined, and software like this will put you ahead of the competition in the 21st century.
