As the speed of business continues to accelerate, recruiting the right talent has become more challenging than ever. Due to this competition, companies have resorted to use of Applicant Tracking Systems to help them in their hiring. The essentials of the best ATS platforms include automating tasks, tracking the candidates, and increasing efficiency in recruitment.
Whether you are a company with few employees or a big company, an ATS can revolutionize hiring by cutting time, enhancing the candidate experience, and offering key insights. This guide covers how an ATS works, why it’s important for your recruitment process, and the trends you can expect to see in recruitment technology.
Understanding the Functionality of Applicant Tracking Systems?
Before we begin discussing how applicant tracking systems work, it’s helpful to recall their primary purpose first. True to its name, applicant tracking systems monitor all the activities of your candidates. An ATS fully automates all stages of the hiring process, which would typically be done manually.
The best ATS can track every activity, from a candidate’s resume in an inbox to their final placement and beyond, allowing recruiters to focus on relationship building. This best applicant tracking system collects real-time data and also generates instant reports, facilitating continuous process improvements.
Four Core Features of Applicant Tracking Systems You Should Know
ATS is one of the most important tools for effective recruitment, and every ATS has its own specific advantages and functions. Below, we’ll cover how applicant tracking systems work throughout the recruitment process, including:
Candidate Onboarding
The first level of the applicant tracking process is how the candidates are introduced to the ATS. In fact, the best ATS platforms will allow this in one way or another, either through job boards or resume parsing. Integration with the job board enables you to transfer applicant data into the ATS without typing in the details manually.
Resume parsing incorporates the extraction of name, email, and phone number, among other searchable fields, into appropriate data fields without entering the resume data manually. This makes it possible to sort and view candidates easily based on selected criteria.
Data Search and Retrieval
As an ATS retains every piece of information about the candidates, its capacity to search and findings proves crucial. Almost all of them include search capabilities in which names, email addresses, or any details can be entered to find records of candidates, clients, or jobs.
You can then click either on the results or go for a more detailed data search into the results obtained. The best ATS categorizes the results according to relevance or date and also allows keyword search to facilitate fast finding.
Job Placement Process
The other facet of understanding how applicant tracking systems work is understanding how to get a candidate placed in a new job by utilizing the ATS.
Once the interviews are over, the applicant tracking system allows you to transfer the candidate through the process and collect all the needed information, check references, receive documents, and prepare the candidate for starting in the new position.
Key Metrics Reporting
The best ATS not only organizes candidate and client data but also tracks it in real time, allowing quick reporting on critical KPIs. As a central source of truth, the best ATS serves as the main hub for key business metrics.
In the same way, it contains such basic measures as gross margin down to fine-tuned metrics, including job coverage and win rates of candidates or clients, as well as your business in total. These metrics enable you to guide all your operations to achieve organizational goals in the best way possible.
How to Choose the Right ATS for Your Organization
It may be quite a challenge to choose the best ATS as there are many providers out there; however, some factors should be considered while searching for the right one. These are the ways you can employ to choose the best ATS system for your organization.
Scalability
The size of your organization is a key determinant in the decision-making process of selecting the best ATS. A small business requires fewer features than a large corporation will require. Still, the side you choose must be one that can expand as the case requires in future.
The best ATS must therefore be affordable and have provisions for carrying the increasing number of users, jobs, and the overall recruitment requirements in the expanding business.
Customization
Recruitment procedures differ from one organization to the other. The best ATS will be one that can be tailored with unique features that would suit the business’s recruitment processes.
This could range from redesigning workflows, jobs, adverts, or even messages that are sent out in organizations. Ensuring that such a system allows this flexibility ensures that your recruitment needs are well-supported to suit your individual needs.
Integration with Other Tools
Another consideration that goes into the best ATS is the compatibility of the software with your current tools. This may consist of your HR software, job boards, or email clients, among others.
Integration also minimizes errors and redundancy since data can easily move and be shared between your systems. This is important in ensuring efficiency in recruitment as well as the organization of the recruitment process.
User-Friendliness
Hire the best ATS that are easy to use. Coordinating the available platform is also an issue if the platform interfaces are complex or complicated to use. The process will take longer when searching for potential candidates. Select a system with a clear graphical user interface to ensure a client does not struggle when learning how to use the system.
Another attribute of the best ATS is that its application should not be complicated in such a way that the user will need to undertake a course before they can be familiar with it.
Candidate Experience
The best ATS should also work towards improving the candidate’s experience. The convenience of apps, mobile-friendly features, robot communication, and, of course, an easily completed application is essential.
The easier and more pleasant it is for candidates to interact with your ATS, the more likely they are to complete the application process and remain engaged throughout.
Security and Compliance
Last but not least, security and compliance are aspects that have to be looked into when choosing the best ATS. Recruitment comprises processing candidates’ personal information, which means that the system should be compliant with the GDPR, for example.
The best ATS should provide services such as encryptions and authentication of data provided by candidates to eliminate exposure of information about your company to the wrong individuals.
Optimizing Your Recruitment with Best ATS – RecruitBPM
After choosing the best ATS for your organization, such as RecruitBPM, the next step is to improve your recruitment process. Here are suggestions and tips for the best way to maximize the benefits of using RecruitBPM.
Refine Job Descriptions
Before posting a job, ensure the job description is clear, concise, and contains relevant keywords. RecruitBPM’s ATS helps match resumes based on these keywords. Including the right qualifications and skills in your job post improves the chances of attracting the best talent.
A well-structured description helps RecruitBPM’s system scan and rank resumes effectively, bringing you the most suitable candidates.
Leverage Resume Parsing
Resume parsing is one of the most important features of RecruitBPM. In this way, you capture candidate data in a standard to make certain that resumes are parsed accurately. Many steps are involved in this process, but RecruitBPM helps you to easily search for and filter resumes as well as review them.
Thus, the proper setup ensures that no significant information is left unnoticed, as well as the ability of the recruiters to locate potential candidates who meet the desired job description.
Automate Candidate Communication
Hiring involves communication in one way or the other. RecruitBPM can automate messages for every step in the procedure, from confirming receipts of applications to sending invitations for interviews.
By automating these tasks, the experience of the candidates is enhanced as they are updated on various steps upon their completion. Through the use of RecruitBPM’s automation, the time taken by recruiters to manage their activities can be reduced, and more time is spent interacting with top candidates.
Collaborate with Hiring Managers
Recruitment is a teamwork affair, and that is why RecruitBPM makes it easy for the recruitment team and hiring managers. RecruitBPM makes sure that all the parties involved remain on the same page through the sharing of candidate profiles and receiving feedback within the platform.
This makes the process of decision-making faster and, at the same time, ensures that only efficient and effective hirings take place.
What’s Next for ATS? Trends You Should Know
The best ATS systems also improve over time and keep updating, introducing more options to help recruiters with hiring processes. Here are some emerging trends featured within the future of Applicant Tracking Systems.
AI and Machine Learning Integration
AI and machine learning are significant features of the best ATS platforms. These technologies assist the conventional ATS systems in training on the data in order to enhance the matching, screening, and ranking of candidates.
This means that tasks are performed automatically, freeing up the recruiters’ time, and only the most qualified candidates are hired. Similar to training evaluations, AI can also forecast a candidate’s performance, thus shortening and enhancing the efficiency of the recruitment procedures.
Enhanced Candidate Experience
The best ATS will continue to emphasize the need to provide a great candidate experience. Some of the convenient options include the use of personalized messages, the availability of mobile applications, and intuitive interfaces of people’s flows.
Modern ATS platforms also employ chatbots to respond to candidates’ questions in an interactive manner. This enhances the completion rates among the applications, and such candidates will have the information that they applied for the position and are in process.
Advanced Analytics and Reporting
The best ATS solutions come equipped with reporting tools that help make dealing with data a lot simpler. These tools provide real-time metrics to the recruiters about the functioning of their recruitment process.
Measures such as time to hire, source effectiveness, and quality of candidates are employed. Hard skills data allows for evaluation, finding out something wrong, and finally ensuring the right employees are hired for organizations.
Seamless Integrations
At some point in the future, the best ATS software solutions will likely integrate even more smoothly and cohesively with other human capital management tools and systems.
This will enable firms to address the whole process of employment, from the recruitment process to onboarding, within a single platform. Connections will facilitate data transfer between the systems to improve upon the current situation where users transfer data manually across the system.
Increased Automation
As we have seen, automation is already integrated into the best ATS, and its use will only rise in the future. ATS platforms will have further advancements in the automation of resume sifting, interview scheduling, and interaction with candidates.
These will reduce the recruitment time and enable recruiters to engage more in such tasks as relationship-building and decision-making. The advancing level of automation shall enable it to perform more tasks, especially in recruitment, leading to higher output.
Focus on Diversity and Inclusion
The best ATS will continue to enable employment equity initiatives and other strategies for advancing inclusion in the hiring process. Such systems will greatly assist in eradicating bias from the hiring process as the AI system will be used to analyze the job descriptions and data on the candidates.
They will also give more details on the diversity of the applicants and the ability of organizations to attract candidates with certain characteristics for a certain period. This focus on diverse candidate selection will become one of the key aspects of future variations of the ATS platforms.
Final Thoughts
Powerful applicant tracking software like RecruitBPM will change the way businesses identify and acquire talent in today’s lightning-speed recruiting environment.
The automation of busywork, enhanced candidate tracking, and increased communication—from one ATS—enable high-level employees to refocus on what truly matters: building relationships with candidates.
The best ATS makes the recruitment process streamlined and, at its core, adds efficiencies by resume parsing, real-time reporting, and seamless collaboration while fitting candidates with ease. Thus, choosing the best ATS will make the recruitment process streamlined, data-oriented, and poised toward success.
FAQs
What is the ATS process flow?
ATS stands for Applicant Tracking System and the ATS workflow refers to the sequence in which an organization automates its recruitment and hiring processes. An ATS is staffing software that employers use to sort through resumes, track applicants’ data, and manage the flow of applications efficiently.
Why is ATS used?
An ATS helps recruiters align job openings with the most relevant websites and networking platforms for specific candidates. It also increases the awareness of internal job boards in an organization while at the same time reducing the challenges that prospective employees face.
By doing so, it helps to eliminate the possibility of losing candidates mid-progression thus helping the recruiters to track and manage the applicants. Some of the tasks can also be pre-structured in the system; for example, selection from the list of candidates or invitation for an interview. In addition, it enables the recruiters to channel their efforts toward interacting with the best potential candidates, thus achieving improved hiring results together with enhancing the candidate experience.
What is ATS in HR?
In HR an applicant tracking system (ATS) is a staffing software that helps manage the recruitment process. The system serves as a database for job applicants plus automates much of the hiring workflow.
By streamlining the process, an ATS helps recruiters and hiring managers sort through large numbers of resumes and focus their attention on the most qualified candidates.
