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With December and January being peak times for recruitment, now is a good time to assess how hard your applicant tracking system is working for you – and whether its time to consider a change.
There are many reasons why changing will benefit your company both financially and organisationally, but what should you consider when choosing a new ATS to ensure it is future proof and can grow with your business?
1. One of the most important considerations is finding an ATS that offers a platform for complete talent engagement. This is vital because if a candidate cannot join your talent pool without making an application first, you are likely to be missing out on some great future talent.
2. Make sure you understand how the ‘front-end’ of the ATS – the job search and applications – will integrate with your careers site. This is hugely important both from a branding exercise and from a candidate satisfaction point of view. ‘Cookie-cutter’ integrations, where candidates attracted by a vibrant careers site are redirected to a run-of-the-mill application process and candidate area, result in a disjointed application process that can be confusing for the applicant – not to mention quite unprofessional looking for your company. Embedding the complete candidate experience within your careers site pages and branding is a must.
3. An ATS with connected hiring manager and vendor portals – one that is simple to use, and is accessible on any device and at any time – means there is a greater chance of your hiring managers and preferred supplier list (PSL) vendors interacting with it.
4. Get to grips with the analytics within the ATS – can you define your own metrics and KPIs? Receiving spreadsheets and reports that don’t offer the information you need in a format that you understand means they are unusable when it comes to monitoring and reporting recruitment performance.
In fact, with in-house recruiters rightly demanding far more from their ATS, the future is not an ATS. The future lies in having an end-to-end recruitment management system that includes talent pool engagement and Candidate Relationship Management; features that really help recruiters focus on their key goals of attracting, engaging and recruiting the right people at the right time.
If the legacy ATS was good at streamlining the process of managing candidates through their application for a specific job, an end-to-end recruitment platform lets recruiters get maximum value from candidates – identifying other jobs immediately or in the future and intelligently alerting them. This allows you to be far more ‘agency-like’ in the way you create and nurture long-term relationships with your candidates, helping ensure your talent pool is well-stocked, easy to search and engage with.
Plus it goes without saying that your chosen system should be web-based, socially connected and accessible on any smart device – but that’s ‘now’ rather than the future, at least it is at Eploy.
