Don’t rush when it comes time to choose a small company applicant tracking system, also called an ATS. There are many things to consider, so you’ll want to educate yourself and thoroughly examine your options. A rushed choice might get you an ATS that you can’t use, is only partially helpful so you’ll have to use two, or that costs too much so you’ll have to stop using it. Avoid those scenarios by reading this post.
How to Choose a Small Company Applicant Tracking System
Things to consider about your business
To choose a small company applicant tracking system that will actually solve problems for you, you need to pinpoint the specific problems your company needs to address.
What are your primary goals? Saving time and costs? Improving hiring processes to reduce turnover and improve your business? Reaching more candidates? Strengthening your employer branding? There are so many problems you might want to address with small company applicant tracking system and being clear about your primary goals can help you decide between applicant tracking systems and their many features.
An applicant tracking system can do such things as automatically respond to candidates, streamline the hiring process through sourcing to interviewing to onboarding, and provide smarter and easier ways for candidates to apply. Using these three things as an example, which area will best address your company’s problems?
What suits your business? If you run a mom and pop shop and don’t intend for it to be anything else in the foreseeable future, then you don’t really need an ATS that allows a ton of users. If your business is highly mobile, meaning you are rarely in an office, then you can’t do without features that allow you to use the ATS anywhere.
Consider your budget. How much can you spend? Are you taking into consideration the long term benefits from saving time and improving your hiring processes in that budget? You may be able to afford more than you originally thought when you realize how broad-reaching the benefits of an ATS can be. When done correctly, it saves you time, which saves you money, which also helps you focus on more efficient hiring practices, which reduces turnover and improves productivity. It’s a powerful investment with real money savings and profit generation.
All that exciting stuff aside, you do have to consider cost. If you rush to get the most feature-packed ATS , you may pay for more than you need and have to stop using it. So definitely weigh out the features you need versus the ones that sound nice but aren’t crucial to your operations versus the cost of the ATS.
Also, most of the time a contract is probably not in the best interest of a small company. You’ll want the flexibility of a month-by-month payment plan with options to upgrade or downgrade a plan without penalty. If you do decide you should go with a contract, research it carefully to ensure it will best serve your interests.
Selecting An ATS
Do lots of research.
Plan to compare many applicant tracking systems so you can determine the best combination of features, price, and service for your needs.
Educate yourself on what to look for, such as:
- The ability to use it anywhere
- Responsiveness(meaning it can be used effectively and enjoyably on all types of devices)
- The amount of resumes it can upload and handle
- Resume parsing and formatting
- Organizational capabilities and candidate associations
- Candidate search features
- Careers page features
- Job board features
- Customization
- Deduplication features
- Hiring process tracking and organizational functions
- Reporting and analytics
- Sourcing capabilities
- ATS training and demos
- Customer service policies
- Security policies
- Pricing plans
- Versatility(you can change plans as you need to without penalty)
You can explore this list further in our previous blog post, “What Makes a Good Small Company Applicant Tracking System?”
Search for best applicant tracking systems and small company applicant tracking systems and write down the names, features, and prices of each one. You may already feel able to weed out some of them at this point based on obvious differences between them and features missing from the list above.
Look at the features offered by each small company applicant tracking system on your list and prioritize which ones are most important to you and your small company’s unique needs.
Give particular weight to responsiveness, versatility, security, customization, and training. You can’t really do without these things. Even if you don’t need to use your ATS on a mobile device, your candidates almost certainly will. Versatility helps any business, but it is crucial to the changing needs of a small business. A hack or data loss could be devastating to a small business, so you can’t take any risks there. Without customization, features may not help you, or they may be frustrating. And training and customer service is crucial because the ATS can’t be a help to your business if you don’t know how to use it properly or something malfunctions.
Choose the ATS that offers the most resume functions, customization, unlimited capabilities, organization, candidate searching, sourcing, and reporting functions as possible within your budget. If the software is not within your budget, start whittling off the features that seem least necessary until you get to one that is affordable. It is very possible for an ATS to have more features than a small company really needs and cost them too much.
What you want to achieve is the sweet spot of