Applicant tracking systems, or recruiting software, have been playing an indispensable role in finding and hiring quality candidates for small and medium scale businesses for more than a decade now. The ATSs are powered by artificial intelligence and they help hiring managers hire the right people who will stay with the company for a long time. In today’s fast-paced world, time is money and recruitment software is helping save the precious time of managers and recruiters by automating the recruitment processes.
Read More: What Is Recruitment Software?
Recruiting Challenges
There are a number of recruiting challenges faced by businesses when they deploy the use of traditional recruitment methods:
- Difficulty in searching perfect candidates having desired skills and characteristics.
- Have to send manual rejection, feedback, and notifications to candidates.
- The process of scheduling the interviews for individual candidates consumes a lot of time.
- Extensive use of emails and spreadsheets has to be made.
- Lethargic and hectic recruiting and selection process.
- No parameters for measuring the effectiveness of existing HR strategy
- Long time to hire results in high cost of hiring
- Slow and poor communication with candidates
- Quality of hire suffers greatly
Some Unknown Features of Small Business ATS
Here are the top 12 small but important things to observe in a small business applicant tracking system.
1. Easy to Configure and Customize
There is always a difference between the underlying recruitment processes of small companies and giant companies. An ideal ATS can easily be configured and customized as per the needs of the HR department. Some other features include pre-hire assessments, video interviewing, sourcing passive candidates, etc.
2. Integrates Career Site with Social Media and Job Boards
A small business ATS seamlessly integrates different online job boards and portals with the career page of the organization’s website. The latest recruiting software automatically posts the job opening to social media platforms.
3. A Bigger Candidate Pool
The ATSs available today are mobile friendly as well. This has directly increased the candidate pool by 40%. Also, using a mobile compatible ATS has significantly decreased the drop-off rate of the applicants. Filing applications on mobile or capturing mobile traffic results in higher application filing and also offers an impeccable candidate experience.
4. Automatic Filtering the Candidate Pool
By configuring the ATS, the recruiting managers can easily search and filter the candidates based on the set criteria such as years of experience, skills, cognitive assessments, and more.
5. One Database for all Hiring Needs
All the applications and resumes are directly fetched and uploaded in the ATS. This helps the recruiting manager to easily sort, share, rate, and contact the candidates. After the candidate is hired, the information is automatically updated in the employee database. The information of the remaining candidates gets saved automatically for future reference as well.
6. Reduce Time to Hire
An ATS helps the hiring managers and the recruiters sift through hundreds of resume within a fraction of time. The recruiting software automates social sharing and speeds up the email process by automating them. This helps by sending timely notification to the candidates regarding their application status, rejection, or further interview procedures.
7. Saves Cost to Hire
For a medium sized company, the average cost of hiring is $3K-$4K. By integrating ATS in the HR system, the company saves substantial money on marketing as well as the money spent on the recruiter/employee for spending time in sorting through the resumes and finding the best hire.
8. Decreases Attrition Rate
If the hired person doesn’t find the work interesting or challenging enough, he/she will quit the job. Also, a wrong candidate may get hired when decisions are made in a hurry. This also increases the chances of missing out on a good candidate. ATS boosts employee retention and helps to hire the perfect candidate best suited for the company, thereby increasing the employee satisfaction rate as well.
9. Improves Company’s Brand Value
A small business applicant tracking system can communicate fast and send quick notifications to the candidates regarding developments in every recruitment stage. These timely updates keep them interested in the company, thereby improving the candidate experience and company’s brand value. This is quite essential as far as the retention of high quality candidates is concerned.
Read More: Don’t Tell Yourself You Don’t Need an ATS for Small Business Recruiting
10. Reduces Paperwork to Zero
The biggest challenge faced by the recruitment industry is too much involvement of paperwork. The small business applicant tracking system enables the company to keep all the active and passive candidates in one single database or talent pool. This means that the sourced applicants from social media, website, job boards, referrals etc will all be placed in one single pool. ATS offers a more organized way to manage the talent pool.
11. Easy Resume Parsing and Screening
An ATS extracts the candidate information from the resume within seconds. All the information fetched such as candidate name, contact information, skills, work experience etc gets parsed and stored easily in the database. An ideal ATS helps to minimize the manual work and meet the biggest objectives of recruiting i.e. saving money and time. This incredible feature also enables the recruiters to connect with the prime candidates and put them into position quickly.
12. Automatic Interview Scheduling
The interviews can be scheduled directly by the software. The candidates can select the most appropriate slot for their interview round. The interview related information such as the structure and location will be shared with the candidates. Notification emails are triggered once the slot gets selected.
13. Streamlined Selection Workflow
Small company recruitment software automatically manages and monitors candidate progress and ensures that complete hiring process is streamlined. It strengthens candidate relationship management as well.
14. Team Collaboration
One of the main goals for every small business applicant tracking system is seamless communication and team coordination. The important insights related to the candidates along with the recruitment updates are shared with the team members of the hiring committee. A good ATS enables the administrators to assign different types of access and permissions to different members.
15. Powerful Analytics
An ATS provides the metrics and other data that helps the recruiters and the hiring managers improve their efforts and performance. Small company recruitment software helps the recruiters to track and measure each and every underlying process of the hiring drive. The data collected is transformed into easy comprehensible reports that provide interesting insights of the recruitment drive. An ATS can tell the recruiters:
- Which job posting attracted most of the candidates and from which geographical location?
- Which channels drove the maximum traffic website: career page, social media or job boards?
- Cost per hire
- Time to hire
Based on these insights necessary action can be taken to not only optimize but also improve the performance.
16. Boosts Candidate Experience
The major reason for a bad candidate experience is that they receive zero or untimely responses from the employers. By offering a seamless continuous communication with the candidates the candidate experience is significantly boosted. An ATS helps the small company to customize email templates and send bulk emails in one single click.
17. Ensures Legal Compliance
By integrating applicant tracking system with the small company HR system every single possibility of human error gets eliminated as all the processes are automated. An ATS ensures compliance of all legal rules and regulations pertaining to hiring and recruiting. The recruiting software provides information on hiring laws and other protocols which helps to keep HR professionals up to date with the industry. Even more, an ideal small company applicant tracking system provides reasons to the candidates as to why they were not hired.
18. On-boarding Aid
The next step after the selection process is to get the employee onboard seamlessly. The ATS has made the complete candidate onboarding process easy as all the desired information such as HR manuals, transfer forms, relocation details etc are provided in the ATS itself. This helps the hiring mangers to kick start the induction and training program.
19. Job Opening Announcement
It is very easy to post any new job opening with the help of an applicant tracking system. The recruiter or the hiring manager can post the job descriptions and other related information with the single click of a mouse. In case the ATS is linked internally with the job boards and social media platforms, all the jobs announcements will automatically be posted there as well.
Winding Up
These small yet incredible features of the small business applicant tracking systems help to optimize the hiring campaigns by saving the recruiters from extensive manual work. They even make the optimal utilization of time and delivery of quality hires possible.