About 94% of hiring professionals claim that implementing an Applicant Tracking System, or ATS has impacted their process positively. It has helped them save time, cut down recruitment costs, improve the quality of hires, and gain meaningful insights in every recruitment cycle. With such a diverse bouquet of benefits, it only makes sense to have an ATS in place.
However, job seekers have had diametrically opposite experiences. Nearly 80% of these find the process of hunting jobs and applying to them stressful. Plus, nearly 60% of candidates abandon the task due to various technological hurdles.
How is it that the very same tool that offers convenience on one front poses hurdles at the other? And is there a litmus test to know if an ATS is fully capable?
Here are five signs of a good ATS that can put your worries to rest:
1. Automate Your Recruitment Process
Despite what the name indicates, an applicant tracking system does a lot more than “tracking.”
An ATS captures candidate information, organizes this data depending on company requirements, matches resumes, screens in candidates, and retains the database for future use. Plus, the scope of the applicant tracking software may extend to posting job listings, scheduling interviews, issuing appointment letters, and even onboarding fresh recruits.
Given the end-to-end capabilities of an ATS in the entire recruitment cycle, having automation by your side can be one of the most highly regarded and sought-after traits of ATS for drawing long-term value. As such, even if you are not harnessing the benefits of automation at the moment (seriously, why not though?) you can at least place it in the pipeline for your future requirements.
2. Helps to Improve Recruitment KPI
Hiring professionals depend on various recruitment KPIs to quantify the performance of a recruitment cycle. Some of these include:
- Time to Hire
- Source of Hire
- Offer Acceptance Rate
- Applicants per hire
- Cost per Hire
- Quality of Hire
- Candidate Experience
While these metrics have their corresponding formulae and relative value, an applicant tracking system can take things one step further through data visualization. Most modern-day ATS tools are loaded with powerful reporting and analytics features that make information readily accessible, useful, and actionable. Apart from displaying these values qualitatively and quantitatively, they present such insights in real-time and in an interactive manner so that you can carry out an intervention at any given time.
3. Promotes Team Collaboration and Communication
Gone are the days when the hiring professionals or the HR teams worked in a vacuum. The period beyond 2021 will be known for collaborative recruitment.
As the name indicates, collaborative recruitment involves the regular stakeholders as well as other team members throughout the recruitment process. It improves the quality of new hires and offsets the occurrence of churn. And where collaboration is involved, communication cannot be far behind! In fact, communication forms the backbone of all the activities, from sourcing talent to hiring and onboarding them – and we are only talking about internal communications here; external communications are a whole different ball game in a world where everyone is connected and expects real-time updates.
As such, your company should be on the lookout for an ATS that supports communication and collaboration through the maximum possible media.
4. Highly configurable based on the recruitment process
While the default traits of ATS must cater to all your requirements, not all ATS platforms can be your end-all-be-all option. Some may perform big on one facet with a trade-off on the other. Similarly, some may possess all the signs of “good” ATS but exceed your budget.
In such a scenario, having an ATS platform that is modular can help bridge the gaps, if any. For instance, if the ATS does not allow interview scheduling natively, it can accommodate such features through third-party integrations with tools like Calendly or Google Calendar.
That being said, the ATS should also allow customization to stick to recruitment-specific preferences. After all, you want results that meet your expectations! And in this context, it would be even better if such changes or modifications can be powered by an AI/ML engine that adapts with every iteration.
In essence, the ATS should be flexible enough to be configurable but intuitive enough to remember customization.
5. Cost-effectiveness
For companies “cost-effectiveness” is a highly vague entity. For some, it is the conformance with the budget while others may view it as the return on investment (ROI). However, the value proposition is the strongest indicator of cost-effectiveness in direct and indirect terms.
To illustrate this point, some companies would save more by cutting down their time to hire while others may not be timebound as they prioritize a hire who is a cultural fit. Against this backdrop, you need an ATS that aligns with the larger organizational goals and delivers to them. And, of course, if you seek concrete numbers you can calculate values like the total cost of ownership (TCO), ROI, time cost savings, value of a quality hire, cost of a bad hire, labor hour remuneration, employee turnover rate, and so on. Such figures will be a window into the cost-effectiveness of the applicant tracking system.
Conclusion
98.9% of Fortune 500 companies are using ATS to meet recruitment goals. Clearly, they have a lot to offer. However, the only obstacle in achieving these goals is to pick the right ATS solution. It empowers businesses to recruit the best candidate without diluting the recruitment experience.
