Applicant Tracking System

When to invest in an ATS?

Not everyone needs an ATS. The below are indicators that imply that you need an ATS.

• You plan on expanding rapidly in the current or upcoming quarters.
• You are hiring for at least 3 different roles simultaneously.
• Inability to reach and manage candidates on various platforms efficiently.
• You juggle multiple systems on an everyday basis to cover your recruiting needs - job boards, calendars, video interview tools, career site, social media, and so on.
• You do not have that one place where you track all candidate information. Instead, it’s buried in sticky notes, messages, emails and may never be found again.
• There is no place to save candidates for later roles or time.
• Candidates fall between the cracks due to gaps in communication.
• A lot of time is spent on doing the same tasks manually over and over again. For example, follow-ups, sending out reject emails, notifying interview panel members, etc.
• If your recruiters are spending at least 20% of their energy and time checking for someone’s availability, collecting feedback, or simply discussing the hiring decision.
• You lack visibility into what’s happening within the process due to which you are unable to identify what’s working, what’s not, and what you should be doing.

 How do Applicant tracking systems work?

Applicant tracking systems handle everything in between raising a requisition and hiring a superstar.

Collects requisitions - First, the hiring managers raise a requisition on the ATS to let the TA know about open roles or upcoming roles.

Sources the best talent -The sourcing team then discusses with the hiring manager and creates a job description for the open role and broadcasts it through the ATS. Some Applicant tracking software has inbuilt JDs to make the process easier. An ATS enables your sourcing team to publish the job to the career site, social media channels, and various integrated job boards of your choice. One-click and your job reaches top talent in the market.

Manages candidate inflow - Once the job is published, candidates start applying. When candidates apply, they automatically start flowing into the ATS where they are represented as candidates in the system.

Screens candidates - The ATS parses the resumes of the candidates and populates the candidate profiles. This makes it easy to filter candidates. If you want to pull up candidates who have worked for more than 10 years? It’s a breeze.

Pre-asses candidates - You can do another round of deep screening with the help of pre-assessment tests for roles that require them. For example, you can ask candidates applying for engineering roles to take a coding test from Hackerrank or HackerEarth. Based on the test scores you can decide to advance or reject them.

Enables smart interview scheduling - After you have filtered candidates and have a list of interview-worthy ones, check for availability of panel members (through calendar integrations) and schedule interviews right, left and center. You can make use of scorecards in the ATS to rate or score candidates objectively. It enables recruiters to gather feedback from the panel in a single place and makes hiring decisions easy.

Optimizes offer management - When a candidate impresses your panel, you can roll out an offer right from your ATS HR Software. Offer letter templates make this quickly possible.

Fetches reports and analytics - They let you see in detail everything happening inside your pipeline and process. You can pull a report for every need - sourcing reports, pipeline reports, interview scheduling reports, offer acceptance reports, etc.

Automates repetitive tasks- The autopilot or recruitment automation feature in the ATS gives you the ability to automate repetitive processes like emailing, follow up, sending out reject emails, advancing candidates based on referrer or source, notifying panel when a candidate is advanced to the interview stage, etc.

Covers pre-onboarding - As soon as a candidate signs your offer, an ATS turns him/her into an employee on your system. It covers all the pre onboarding activities like form-filling, document-signing, and more. In addition, E Signatures make this a purely paperless and efficient process as they eliminate thousands of downloads and uploads.