How to choose an ATS

Choosing an Applicant Tracking is an important decision for a company to make. The market is saturated with options and recruitment is more candidate-driven than ever before. The right ATS will transform and determine the success of your hiring strategy.

In our latest guide, “How to choose an ATS”, we’ve broken down the process of narrowing down the right system that works best for you and your organization’s goals. If you’re unsure where to begin or just want to understand more about how an ATS can help your hiring, our guide is the perfect solution!

We’ve summarized some of the key takeaways below to help you get started.

Why is the choice so important?

Your ATS is the heart of your recruitment. It’s not just a luxury but a necessity, covering everything from candidate attraction and job posting to how your team collaborates and, in some cases, even onboarding. A strong ATS will offer a seamless experience for not just recruiters and hiring managers, but more importantly for candidates.

Choosing the right ATS for you will eliminate bottlenecks, can help boost your employer brand and create a user-friendly, collaborative environment for your team. That’s why making an informed decision is so important and why this guide can help!

Define Your Needs and Pain Points

Before you start to shop around, you need to have a clear understanding of your current challenges, so you can understand your needs. What are your dealbreakers and what are your just nice-to-have’s? What’s slowing you down and which areas need improvement?

Without this information, choosing the right ATS can be an overwhelming task, as they can all differ when it comes to key features. You want to go into your demos with an idea already of what you need and what your priorities are.

Within our guide, we have a useful checklist you can use to identify what’s important to you and prioritize your needs.

Key features to look out for

Once you’ve defined your needs, you should have a clear list of the key features you want to be looking out for, as well as ones that maybe aren’t as important to you.

These could include but aren’t limited to:

Your list should be as specific as possible and ready to hand whenever you start to research different solutions. 

Scalability and success going forwards

Your hiring won’t remain stagnant. You need an ATS that is able to grow and scale with you. 

Make sure you’re looking for a platform that is built to evolve and expand as you do. This involves looking at the level of support offered from your chosen platform.

As well as just looking at the features, make sure to assess how available their support team is to you. How long is the response time? Is it available 24 hours a day? Are there additional resources like webinars or articles available if not?

As well as support, it’s important to take a look at the implementation of the system. Would it be easy to implement and train your team how to use? These things may seem simple, but can make a huge difference and are often key factors that are overlooked in the demo process.