10 reasons why it's important to invest in an ATS

What is an ATS?

An ATS or applicant tracking system is a piece of software designed to manage the entire hiring process. An ATS will attract, hire and manage talent all in one system and has a multitude of features to help streamline the recruiting process. 

Having an ATS can help save time and money as well as make the overall experience more user-friendly for both recruiters and candidates alike.

Why should you invest in an ATS?

Strengthen your employer brand

Now more than ever, it’s important to focus on your organization’s employer brand, as it could be the difference between your ideal candidate choosing you over a competitor. An ATS has multiple ways to ensure a strong employer brand. A lot of ATS’s will have a career site builder attached, which is one of the first places candidates will land when researching your company, so you can ensure it’s a true representation of your company. Having an ATS also helps you to maintain consistency across all your messaging, which your candidates will notice and appreciate.

Automate manual tasks

Recruiters have a lot of repetitive, manual tasks to deal with—things like moving candidates through the pipeline, sending emails and writing detailed job descriptions can be time consuming. With an ATS, you can automate almost all of your manual tasks to streamline your hiring process. Triggers can move candidates through the process based on predetermined criteria, templates can cut down the time you spend creating job ads and sending emails and the use of AI can help you draft messages and job descriptions.

Improve candidate experience

In today’s competitive landscape, recruitment has become marketing and treating your ƒcandidates as you would treat your customers is crucial in attracting top talent. Today, 75% of recruiters use an ATS to review applicants and strengthen the candidate experience. Making sure your candidates have a positive experience can also have other benefits to other parts of your hiring, such as your employer brand and quality of hire. An ATS can allow candidates to book their own time slots for interviews, it can give them a hub to keep track of their application and the automations mean quick responses, creating time for more personalised feedback as well as eliminating the risk of ghosting candidates. 

Target passive candidates

Some people wonder if it’s worth investing in an ATS if they’re not actively hiring at this moment in time. An ATS has become an essential part of the recruitment process, not just for active hiring. As we mentioned before, it can help you strengthen your employer brand, but just as importantly, you can use it to work on building your talent pool. Just because you’re not hiring right now, it doesn’t mean you won’t be in the future. Using an ATS can help nurture and build a healthy pipeline of talent for whenever you’re ready. This works on the candidate side as well with a feature like Connect, which allows your candidates to “subscribe” to new upcoming job roles at your company if they can’t find anything that suits them right now.

Improve collaboration

With an ATS, you can communicate with your team and other departments directly in the system, saving you time and stress with having to manually follow-up. Your team can write notes on candidates, tag each other, leave reviews and much more all within the system. This means not only can you quickly and efficiently communicate with the rest of your team, but everything is kept in one place so you don’t end up misplacing any important information.

By enhancing collaboration, you can significantly improve your organization’s hiring process. In fact, 94% of recruiters agree that their ATS has had a positive impact on their organization’s hiring processes.

Integrate with your favorite systems

Chances are you’re already using a multitude of different HR systems to get the job done— from background checks and assessments, to payroll and e-signing, being able to get all these systems to talk to each other is crucial. Most ATS’s will have a long list of systems that you’re probably already using which it can integrate with to help streamline your hiring process and make the overall experience smoother and easier to deal with.

Improve DEI

Unconscious bias is in everyone, but studies have shown that a more diverse workforce can lead to a more productive and positive work environment. Eliminating bias from your recruitment process is hugely beneficial for your organization—so how can we achieve this? Blind hiring will ensure that you’re hiring the right people for the job, for the right reasons. A feature like Anonymous Mode will mask candidates’ personal information in the initial steps of the process, so you can focus on the important things like experience and skills, rather than the less important things. 

Reduce cost per hire and time to hire

The age old saying ‘time is money’ has never been truer in this case, the automated elements of an ATS mean you’re saving a huge amount of time that you can redistribute into more strategic tasks. As well as that, being able to track certain insights such as where the bulk of your candidates are coming from, means you can eliminate needless expenses and focus on the areas which are working the most. Lastly, being able to connect with a lot of the systems you’re already using is also useful as there can sometimes be certain discounts or cost-saving opportunities for integrations.

An ATS not only helps to reduce the cost per hire but also significantly decreases the time to hire. By streamlining the recruitment process through automation, it saves time and enhances collaboration and communication with hiring managers. These improvements collectively lead to a shorter hiring timeline. In fact, over 86% of recruiters report that their ATS has reduced their time-to-hire.

Improve quality of hire

Finding the right candidates means they’re not just qualified for the job, but also align with your organization’s culture and long-term goals. With a career site, a candidate can get a feel for what your company is all about, meaning you’re more likely to get applicants who agree and resonate with your values. As well as this, a feature like ‘Job Match Score’ can be used to quickly identify if a candidate is right for the role or not by assigning weighted values to specific job criteria. Using this method of candidate scoring allows you to make more informed decisions on who you’re hiring and how well they will fit the role, improving your overall hiring quality.

Analytics

The ability to measure the effectiveness of your hiring decisions is crucial for all recruiters. Having an ATS means being able to track essential recruitment metrics so you can optimize your processes. Time to hire, conversion rates and NPS scoring are just a few of the data points you’d be able to start tracking, so you can see which areas of your recruitment you’re excelling at and which ones might need a little bit more attention.