UK 
United States
Recruitment is crazy tough at the moment. The best organisations have streamlined and automated their process with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS).
This allows experienced staff more time to focus on the high value recruitment tasks that have high impact — like rewriting your advert copy (here is a handy free guide to help you do this).
How do you win support for a new ATS
Whether you are replacing an ATS or investing in your first system, you need to be able to point toward clear attainable results that this project will deliver.
The benefits of an ATS will deliver different benefits to different people. For instance, your DPO (Data Protection Officer) will be interested to know that an ATS will help centralise the storage of candidate data and greatly reduce the risk of data breaches. Your Finance Director, will likely be keen to reduce recruitment agency usage/spend.
Finally, your CEO will likely want to know how the system will help you save money, reduce risk and hire a new flock of uber talented superhumans!
The best place to start is with an audit of your current process.
Audit time
You can’t work out where to go if you don’t know where to start quote
It’s time to take a good hard look at how you recruit and the investment you make (money, time, etc) at each stage.
This process should be completed by someone with intimate knowledge of each stage of the process. It should start at the very beginning with how your organisation decides upon and approves a new vacancy and should follow on through to have you look to onboard your new hire.
The case for a business case
We are helpful folk here at hireful (the clue is in the name), so we’ve put together a business case template.
Based on feedback, we think it takes about 1-2 hours for someone with a good understanding of your recruitment process to complete this process.
Once completed you will be able to use this document to professionally present your case that this new ATS project is essential.
Below is a short video from our co-founder and chief helper, Adrian McDonagh who walks you through this document:
Calculating ROI
The business case document highlights the key benefits an ATS will bring to your organisation. These benefits include big wins like ‘improving your employer brand’ that are hard/impossible to draw a line from to a clear return on this investment. Just because you cannot quantify the value of this, does not mean you should not include it in your business case.
There are also other benefits such as the time saving on various recruitment admin tasks such as publishing jobs, screening applicants and booking interviews. The time and subsequent cost savings for each of these steps can be accurately estimated and included in your business case.
To help you understand how best to quantify some of these time and money savings we have created an ATS ROI calculator spreadsheet. Once again we need someone with good knowledge of your recruitment processes (or who can ask the right people the right questions) to fill in the numbers and reach the overall estimates for savings in each area.
Adrian has produced a short video to show you how this document works:
Building support
Once you’ve gathered your data you should look to win support from your key colleagues. Could this proposal be a joint production perhaps with the support of a key stakeholder who can see the benefit. You will likely know who best to consider but here are a few ideas:
- HR Director: Can they be convinced that this ATS is essential to allow everyone to step up and for recruitment to be more proactive?
Does the impact of technology and subsequent admin reduction mean you can avoid increasing the size of the HR/recruitment team?
- Finance Director: Can you convince them that this relatively small investment will see a quick and ongoing return on investment?
- Head of Data: This person would likely be keen to understand and be able to report on how recruitment is working from a data perspective. An ATS is essential for this unless you want to spend hours creating monthly reports from your spreadsheets.
The big ask
Now you’ve got your data, documented your case and built support, it’s time to ask the big question!
And remember if at first you don’t succeed don’t give up. Recruitment is not getting any easier, your competition is not slowing down, so don’t be afraid to dust down the old proposal and resubmit it!
hireful is on a mission to be the UK’s most helpful recruitment technology company. If you would like us to send you the Business Case template and the ATS ROI calculator documents, click on the link below.
