ATSs are packed with unique features designed to streamline and simplify recruitment for talent acquisition teams, including marketing, job descriptions, interviews, diversity surveys, and personalized communications. With so many ATS options, it can be difficult to choose the right one to meet your hiring needs.
Hiring without an applicant tracking system can feel hopeless, especially in today’s competitive talent market. The ATS forms a critical part of any talent acquisition strategy you use to source and hire top candidates.
Both recruiting and candidate experience can enhance with these systems. Here are just a few of the benefits.
- Enhanced efficiency
- Reduced costs and time
- Analyses and reporting
- Feedback from candidates and surveys
- Communications that are streamlined
- Interviews that are structured
Recruitment leaders and talent acquisition leaders can drastically improve their hiring process by using the right applicant tracking system. Which ATS is right for you? I want to explain the basics of applicant tracking systems before we get started.
The applicant tracking system consists of a number of components.
There are different types of ATS. For hiring purposes, companies use an applicant tracking system to collect and organize candidates. The system enables employers to collect information that assists recruiters in reviewing candidates based on various demographics and skillsets.
Besides automating many of the manual tasks associated with recruitment, applicant tracking systems also allow hiring teams to conduct bulk hiring, outreach and communications, surveys, and diversity recruiting.
A tracking system for applicants: what does it do?
Applicants and hiring teams need a streamlined process to manage hundreds, if not thousands, of applications and resumes. In this situation, companies can benefit from an applicant tracking system, both in terms of recruiting and candidate experience. What exactly does an applicant tracking system look like?
An applicant tracking system collects and stores candidate information (such as resumes and cover letters) in a centralized database for recruiters. The hiring teams can access and reference this information for a long period of time when organizations store this information.
Recruiters may also be able to move both candidates and their information into various workflows to track outreach, interviews, and other aspects of the recruiting process, depending on the system they use. Customers of Lever are able to access a candidate relationship management system plus an applicant tracking system all in one.
How does an applicant tracking system benefit your company?
Automating manual recruiting tasks, as well as engaging and nurturing top talent, are among the benefits of applicant tracking systems.
That being said, applicant tracking systems are now used by most organizations to streamline every aspect of their hiring process. Companies need an ATS for a variety of reasons, including:
- Due to poor experiences with the application process, candidates abandon the process
- The interviewer shows up late or does not show up at interviews, and has no idea who he or she is interviewing
- Time is being taken up by administrative tasks and away from more strategic initiatives
- Talent pipelines are not visible to hiring managers since they are not aligned
- Your hiring process is slow, and candidates quit before you hire them
- A lack of reporting capabilities prevents you from seeing where your processes can optimize
However, before you can implement an applicant tracking system, you must first identify why and how you wish to leverage it. Ready to start making better hiring decisions? Get a demo ats today!
Here are eight essential applicant tracking system features for recruiting
Having determined your ‘why’ and ‘how’ for choosing an applicant tracking system, you will begin researching different systems and their features. In terms of functionality and features, many applicant tracking systems have some similarities, so you’ll want to select an applicant tracking system that offers more than just candidate data storage. Consider these 8 must-have features when onboarding an applicant tracking system.
Recruiting candidates
Building a robust pipeline of qualified candidates is more important than posting open positions on job boards or using LinkedIn to track applications. With the right applicant tracking system, you can grow your talent pool and enrich your pipeline as you source and hire candidates. Consider whether the ATS allows you to quickly store and refer to candidate information, create unified profiles, and automate outreach.
Interview management
You will want to look for features that streamline interviewing for both your team and candidates since interviewing can add a significant amount of time and stress to the hiring process.
Your ATS might, for example,
- Scheduling interviews quickly and integrating your team’s calendars
- Providing prescriptive feedback forms and structured interview kits
- Provides anonymous resume reviews and integration with DEI tools
Recruiters can easily manage and offer this great candidate experience using seamless interview features.
Management of candidate relationships
It’s not uncommon to come across a candidate whose skills are ideal for the role, but not yet available. When you have a candidate relationship management tool (or ‘CRM’), you can use that candidate down the road when it’s appropriate.
Your applicant tracking system can also serve as a candidate relationship management tool that helps you cultivate your candidate pipeline so you don’t overlook applicants who would enhance your company culture.
Your candidate database should be able to tag, filter, and search, among other features. Additionally, consider creating workflows that enable you to view past outreach while maintaining touchpoints or communication with candidates.
Dashboards, reporting, and analytics
You want to be proactive when sourcing and hiring the right candidates when so much about recruiting is reactive. Recruiting could cost you a lot of money if you don’t have the insights to make informed hiring decisions.
The deeper the data, the more useful it is. By combining reporting and analytics in one tool, hiring teams can better understand their candidate pipeline, boost diversity recruiting, and track hiring progress. Having a dashboard that lets you collect, store, and present data is also beneficial when strategizing recruitment or changing your hiring process.
Decentralization
Even before getting to the interview stage, managing candidates can become a full-time job between spreadsheets, job descriptions, career sites, and outreach. To centralize these efforts, more recruiters and hiring managers use applicant tracking systems.
The centralization of information about candidates makes it easier to create concise workflows that organize candidate profiles, feedback, interviews, communications, and more.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) reporting
It’s one thing to track and measure recruiting pipelines and performance, but what about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)? Organizations are growing more serious about diversity recruiting, which means hiring teams need access to deeper data that helps them drive progress with DEI.
These insights should be provided by your applicant tracking system. Recruiters can create custom surveys using LeverTRM’s Advanced Analytics to collect feedback from candidates, and EEO dashboards and reporting allow them to analyze the diversity of their talent pool and candidate pipeline.
Marketing for recruitment
Recruiting marketing is often misunderstood as being only comprised of what your company does via social media. Today’s hiring landscape requires recruitment marketing to encompass every contact point a candidate has with your company.
If the recruiting software you are evaluating supports recruitment marketing efforts, consider it carefully.
Personalization and automation
In recruiting teams looking to source, engage, nurture, and hire top talent, poor workflows can be one of the greatest obstacles to productivity, especially when those workflows create more work and manual tasks than is necessary.
Automating and personalizing workflows is critical to moving the needle forward. Using a few clicks of a button, you should be able to set up interview processes, collect candidate feedback, schedule meetings, and personalize outreach at scale. Integrations can also speed up hiring, for example when your team is prioritizing high volume hiring.
