Applicant tracking software (ATS) helps organizations streamline their recruitment activities. It standardizes and automates process, offers great visibility into recruitment, helps recruiters handle resumes effectively, and helps with collaboration.
Hiring or recruitment involves multiple stakeholders and a variety of tasks that have to be performed effectively for it to be successful. It involves a lot of menial and administrative tasks like data entry, scheduling, just sending and receiving mails, and so on. Often, in this clutter, the actual objective of recruitment – infusing the organization with fresh talent that can take it to newer heights – is missed, and recruiters and top management focus more on getting these menial tasks right instead of achieving their objectives.
To ensure that this does not happen, and to ensure that all the stakeholders have their eye on the superordinate objective, you need applicant tracking software (ATS), which allows you to manage all these different aspects of recruitment effectively while ensuring efficiency and productivity of all those involved. It also helps recruiters and candidates avoid some of the common pitfalls of recruitment, and allows both parties to conduct their affairs in a more efficient manner. There are many benefits to using an ATS, starting with automating many of the menial tasks to improving visibility and coordination in the recruitment process.
Let us see some of the biggest benefits of using this software in this post:
Standardization
Recruitment involves many processes which are often run in an ad hoc manner. And who can blame recruiters – candidates have their own unique needs and capabilities, and recruiters often accommodate them. However, this also leads to lack of standardization in processes as well as individual tasks. Further, candidates submit their resumes in formats they like, and not in formats the recruiters would want. This means that recruiters have to spend more time gleaning information from resumes to decide whether or not the candidate can be shortlisted.
Instead, with an ATS, all the processes in recruitment can be standardized completely so as to ensure that minimal time is spent on admin tasks. Further, candidates can also use the ATS to standardize a format for their resumes, which allows the recruiters to make decisions quickly and effectively.
Automation
Automation and standardization go hand in hand. When you have well-designed, pre-defined workflows, they can be automated easily using the ATS. Also, when you automate processes, you standardize them. Since the ATS also offers you analytics, you can see where you were right to standardize and where recruiters need a little bit of flexibility. With the software, many of the tasks related to hiring such as receiving resumes, tracking them for keywords, sorting them according to pre-defined rules, sending notifications, and so on can be automated. Indeed, one of the biggest benefits users get from the ATS is automation, since it reduces a lot of time and effort, and makes the process efficient.
Resume Handling
As recruiters know, resume handling can be quite a job. Candidates send their resumes and expect to receive an answer and keep pinging the recruiter till they do so. Further, many organizations collect resumes even when there are no open positions in the hopes of building a resume bank that they can turn to when they do have an opening, and the sheer volume of resumes that need to be managed will be a headache for recruiters. If there is no taxonomical approach to sorting and storing resumes, it becomes hard to retrieve when necessary. Also, since resumes contain contact information and other personal details, you don’t want everyone accessing them, though you want your recruiters and senior management to access them when needed. All of this becomes very complicated when you use manual processes and spreadsheets. In contrast, with the ATS, resume handling becomes exponentially easier. The software will automatically sort and store resumes, and you can easily search for and retrieve them from the database.
The ATS is also helpful for candidates since candidates will be notified of the status of their resumes so as to alleviate confusion. The ATS also helps in shortlisting the right candidates after checking their resumes and alerting the recruiters to possible matches and mismatches.
Collaborative Platform
As already mentioned, recruitment involves multiple stakeholders including top management. Getting all of these stakeholders to collaborate is not an easy task. Also, in the absence of an ATS, when organizations use multiple tools, there is no effective collaboration among these stakeholders. To be able to work together, what these stakeholders need is a common platform that all of them can use, and share data and information with one another. Recruiters need to collaborate with departmental managers in charge of hiring, and these managers in turn need to collaborate with the senior management. This is what the ATS is. It handles all the tasks related to recruitment, and offers a common platform for all these stakeholders to come together and share. Also, since the candidates themselves are involved in the process, it becomes easy to manage everything.
Communication is an important component of collaboration. To ensure that communication among the stakeholders happens organically and seamlessly, the ATS has communication modules which enable users to communicate with one another. Further, since the software automates communication, all the parties are kept informed throughout. No more missing tasks or deadlines since you forgot to send a mail or did not see the mail – the software not only sends notifications but also reminders to make sure the tasks are completed.
Visibility
The importance of recruitment is well known. However, this recruitment is not only under the purview of the recruiters. While they perform the actual tasks, everyone in the organization has a stake in recruitment.
Therefore, it is in the best interests of the organization that senior management monitors the process. However, this becomes hard when they do not enjoy visibility into the different tasks in recruitment. They would want to increase the productivity of their recruiters and find employees who are a best fit for the organization, but they cannot do so since they do not have visibility. Part of the reason for this is the multiple tools that organizations use for recruitment. Part of the reason is that monitoring tasks takes a lot of time, time which senior management might not have.
This is another place where the ATS is very helpful. Apart from the fact that it is a single centralized platform where all the recruitment-related activities are carried out and therefore all the data is contained within, the software also logs all the actions taken by the users, which means that auditing can be done easily.
Analytics
The ATS comes with an analytics module. Using this module, managers can analyse different aspects of the recruitment process to understand how healthy the processes are. Analytics will tell you everything – the number of resumes in the database, those received in a given period of time, the time it takes for recruiters to process resumes, the success rate of each recruiter, and so on. Analytics are easy to run and can be done by anyone – there is no need for any training. In effect, what this software does is to take analytics away from the purview of the BI team and make them accessible to everyone.
Also, the software makes it easy to prepare reports. Once a process or a task has been analysed, these results will have to be shared with different stakeholders.
Also, to maintain visibility, senior management needs to be sent periodic reports, which can be automatically done by the software.
Integrations
Lastly, we move to integrations, which transform the way you handle your recruitment. As mentioned earlier, the ATS replaces your myriad tools and offers a single centralized platform. However, this ATS can be deployed as a standalone solution or as a part of the HRM suite of applications. Also, other third party solutions can also be integrated to make processing faster and more effective. Say you want to conduct a survey of your candidates to understand how happy they are and ow effective your recruiters are – with an integrated survey application, this can be done right from the ATS interface without switching. Same is the case with a number of other functions that are related to recruitment or HRM but are strictly not a part of the solution.
The above are some of the benefits of using an applicant tracking system. One of those that is not mentioned here is convenience – the ease and comfort with which recruiters can manage all the activities. An ATS is a must have in today’s digital world – it may give you that much more edge over your competition, and help you recruit the best of talent into your organization.