When vacancies exist they need to be filled — and fast. However, making the correct choice is important to the health of the organisation. You don’t want to move hastily and end up with a bad-fit employee. The strategy of making decisions based on “gut instinct” alone doesn’t have longevity or scalability. Enlisting an Applicant Tracking System, or ATS, will not only help, but will lead to a data-driven recruitment process that is much easier and more organised.
What is an Applicant Tracking System?
Applicant Tracking Systems allow Human Resources and ultimately employers to manage the entire recruitment process more efficiently and cost-effectively. They allow you to use a data-driven recruitment process to pair with your gut feelings about the candidate. Further, they ensure that you never miss out on a good candidate due to too long of a period between application and interaction. With an ATS, the HR department can thrive by producing hires that add value to the company culture.
How does it work?
The right ATS solution manages everything in your recruitment process. From the moment a vacancy presents itself to the time a hire is made, the right ATS will help you maintain organisation and provide assistance throughout every step.
Organisation
Organisation is essential to any recruitment process. With multiple vacancies, countless candidates and adverts posted on different job sites, organisation is key to success. The right ATS will organise your data-driven recruitment process automatically.
It should allow you to see, through an easy to use interface, how many candidates you have at any given point. Further, the right ATS will send you notifications when new applications come in. This way good candidates won’t be missed. Also, your ATS should allow you to email candidates in bulk to expedite your communication process. This will help your business to provide a better candidate experience and will reduce your administrative workload.
The right ATS will also allow you to set-up, track and monitor interviews. It will provide you with a current interview schedule to help plan your time accordingly ensuring that you have the right resources necessary. It will also record your past interviews and their outcomes, providing data-points from those applicants’ resumes and tracking them against current candidates’ to ensure best-fit.
Finally, an ATS should allow you to search candidates by skill-set and qualification and then add them to your talent pool categorised as such. Then, you can organise appropriately in regards to your vacancies. An ATS can provide a level of structure and organisation parallel to no other solution.
Step-by-step assistance
A good ATS will provide you with step-by-step assistance throughout your recruitment process. The minute a vacancy presents itself an ATS will post job adverts to predetermined and effective job boards and social platforms. This ensures that your jobs are advertised quickly, helping to reduce your time-to-hire.
Next, an ATS will manage your recruitment pipeline, providing the best-fit candidates for the position. It will also manage the recruitment agencies you enlist to ensure that only the most competent are being used. This will save you time and money.
Once the candidates are automatically sorted, the ATS will help organise and schedule interviews with the most qualified and best-fit applicants. The ATS will then provide the necessary information to help you make a data-driven decision to fill the vacancy. Finally, the ATS will even help you onboard the new employee. An ATS will help you throughout the entire recruitment process and take a great deal of stress out of the process for HR.
Common Questions
So, if an ATS is so great, why haven’t you enlisted one yet?
Some firms believe that they don’t need an ATS because they use a CRM. ATS’ are essentially advanced CRMs and migration can be seamless.
What to do if HR is on board with adopting an ATS, but the hiring managers are stuck in their ways?
Not to fear! Using the ATS is intuitive and the learning curve can be painless. The key to migration to an ATS is engagement. Once your team begins using an ATS, they won’t want to stop.
To learn how Webrecruit’s ATS can transform your hiring process, Book a Demo Today!
