Recruitment or hiring is an unavoidable activity for any organization as everyone is always on an expedition to maximize results and reduce costs. Among the many hiring solutions available in the market, small company Applicant Tracking Systems might appear to be a big upfront investment. But having the right software and features actually increases the organization’s ROI and is undoubtedly worth it.
An ATS is much more than just software that tracks and stores candidate information. ATS serves as a solution for the recruiter’s proactive recruiting efforts that allows him/her to reach out to potential candidates through social media platforms as well. This new HR technology serves as an innovative tool to help HR managers source best candidates, build relationships, and ultimately turn passive applicants into employees. An ATS boosts the reputation and presence of every small company that deploys the use of it and, even more, adds to the employer’s brand value.
The world today is holding an indisputable talent war that intensifies with each passing day. An ATS boosts the speed of attracting, identifying, and hiring the best candidates. This article unveils some of the interesting facts that are probably unknown about small company applicant tracking system. So, let’s begin.
1. Streamlines and Automates the Recruitment Process
ATS offers a powerful user interface that helps manage recruitment processes, thereby ensuring best practices. The initial round of every hiring process involves a lot of paperwork, sifting through hundreds of resumes, etc which reduces the overall efficiency of the recruiter. An ATS automates all the monotonous work and consolidates all the information in a single database.
2. Assists in Finding the Best Candidates
Small company applicant tracking systems leverages the existing traffic by integrating it with online job boards and other social media platforms. Screening the resumes is definitely a long and arduous journey which does not guarantee the finding of a best hire. Applicant tracking systems read and parse the resumes and make efficient candidacy decisions.
3. 24/7 Availability
Using online ATS or a cloud based ATS makes it instantly available everywhere and at all times. In-house software needs a lot of infrastructure to operate and is still not fully secure. Moving to cloud based platforms makes everything fall in budget as well as easy going.
4. Mobile Interface
Mobile traffic now days holds equal importance with users of a desktop. Around 78% of the candidates use mobile interface to apply for jobs , search jobs, and social media interaction. So, a mobile friendly ATS helps to drive and tap this traffic.
5. Talent Database
An ATS helps the hiring team build an updated talent database by offering easy access to the quality resumes collected by it. These resumes can be drawn anytime in the future. The database is centralized so employers can easily search, filter, and screen resumes according to their preferences and requirements.
6. Improves Underlying Costs
An ATS calls for a major investment in the beginning but in the long run it turns out to be most cost efficient and a worthy investment. It improves the cost per hire as well as increases ROI. As the process of sorting and screening the candidates is completely automated, the time to hire is significantly reduced.
7. Positive Candidate Experience
This HR tool gives a new dimension to candidate experience by offering a positive hiring experience to the candidates. As the notifications are sent to candidates at every stage of recruitment, the candidate experience gets boosted.
8. Redefines Employment Metrics
An ATS offers real time analytics which are helpful in offering valuable insights into recruiting processes. Recruitment is not just about finding and hiring applicants. Most companies spend huge amounts of money on marketing as well. A company spends approximately $170+ per new hire. The main objective of any HR team is to bring this figure down and the best way to do this is by optimizing job advertisement methodology.
An ideal ATS offers actionable data related to the effectiveness of a job posting. It tells where the maximum traffic is coming from, what type of candidates are attracted by the job posting, how many of them clear the initial stages, and more. All this helps the organizations make better and more informed decisions that will improve their bottom line.
9. Eliminates the Data Entry Errors
The data is automatically collected by the ATS which requires zero human intervention. As there is no human intervention, any probability of data entry error is eliminated.
10. Automates Communication
Small company applicant tracking systems allows recruiters to create customized email templates by which they can promptly respond or notify the candidates regarding the recruitment decisions.
11. Improves Team Collaboration
Team collaboration is enhanced by the ATs by allocating different roles and responsibilities to the team members. Every team member can review the candidate and share his or her feedback as well.
12. Benefits for the Applicants
An ATS is designed to help recruiters and benefit candidates as well. ATS offers an easy online platform for the candidates to apply and submit their resumes. The complete process is fair, easy, fast and straightforward. The ATS offers an interface where the candidates can easily track their application status and other notifications. In today’s competitive world, having recruiting software will enable the employers to reach and appeal to the maximum number of qualified candidates.
13. Publishing the Jobs
With just few clicks, an employer can post a job advertisement across various third party job boards and social media platforms such as Google Jobs, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, CarrerBuilder, Facebook, etc. An ATS helps to have consistent and branded job postings across all job boards as well as on the company’s own website.
14. No to spreadsheets
Small company applicant tracking systems helps manage all the candidates in one single database. An ATS helps the HR Manager customize the entire workflow to match the existing processes. All the activities which initially used spreadsheets have been redesigned to work with the recruiting software. The routine tasks such as sending notifications to the candidates, gathering interview feedback, scheduling interviews, rating the candidates, etc are automated by ATS.
15. Streamline Employee Onboarding
The software automatically moves the candidate throughout the onboarding process, after he or she has accepted the offer. Small company applicant tracking systems ensures completion of paperwork, setting up of IT services, scheduling initial meetings, etc. In short, an ATS acts as a new hire’s virtual assistant.
Enjoy a 15 day free trial of our cloud based ATS.
Now, let’s step on some interesting and unknown facts about ATS…
Fact #1: As per Capaterra, 75% of hiring professionals and recruiters in SMBs are using a recruitment software or applicant tracking system.
Fact #2: An ATS eliminates approximately 70% of the resumes that do not match the employer’s criteria and reduces the recruiter’s workload significantly.
Fact #3: For a candidate to be ranked well by an ATS the secret weapon is not amount of keywords, it’s actually high-quality keywords. These keywords are often mentioned in the job description or the job post.
Fact #4: Length of resume does not matter as the recruitment software is not programmed to filter on the basis of length. But the ultimate goal of any resume is to reach a human eye. The moment a lengthy resume reaches the recruiter, it will be thrown out without being read.
Fact #5: The ATS are not programmed to read abbreviations. In case the candidate is interested in using acronyms or abbreviations, he or she should spell them out in parenthesis afterward. This ensures that the information is read and ranked properly.
Fact #6: Almost all ATS can read and parse PDF and Word files. But the recruiting software is unable to read and interpret graphics, images, columns, or text boxes.
Fact #7: ATS actually saves a lot of money, effort, and time for a small company. In fact, an ATS can save about $10k for a small company having just 8-10 employees.
Overformatting the resume such as using headers, footers, bold, italics, underline, many fonts, etc can be corrected by using a resume formatting service which comes as an additional feature in most of the ATS.
Read More: Why a Resume Formatting Service Is needed ?
Winding Up
While it’s true that software cannot completely replace human experience as the hiring process needs a seasoned HR professional for conducting interviews and judging the character of the candidate, it certainly can help. With this emerging technology, the HR Manager can arrive at the end results much more quickly by simply automating some of the recruitment processes such as resume filtering, scheduling interviews, sending notifications to the candidates, and more. This helps the HR team make better use of the candidate’s and the company’s time.
Free Small Company Applicant Tracking Systems
Using the right online recruiting software for your business can save you lots of time and money! Thankfully, Recruiteze is here to help you!
Recruiteze is one of the best free small company applicant tracking systems that allows candidates to easily apply to be added to your database immediately. End-users can access candidate resumes online and make changes quickly. This is only the beginning and our cloud-based recruiting systems offer so much more. Give Recruiteze a try and start hiring smarter!