If you are hiring or planning to hire, and wondering how to manage your job applicants. This article will help you understand how an online applicant tracking system can help you with that.
With Recruiteze, our free online applicant tracking system, you can manage your job portal, jobs, applicants, notes and communication all in one place. You can access your hiring data from anywhere, if you have a browser and internet connection. No need for expensive hardware to host your applicant tracking system.
Based on several studies, a job posting results in an average of 250 applications. Being prepared to manage those applications in an efficient way should be your goal.
Based on this article, here are some statistics which should help you to understand why you need an efficient way to manage your applicants.
- 82% of candidates expect a response from a company, whether it is positive or negative.
- 32% of candidates say they would be less inclined to purchase from a company from which they do not hear.
Here are the main things that candidates have noticed in their search process
- 26% of candidates have had a bad experience with a company, due to lack of communication and follow through.
- 29% of the candidates said the company never acknowledged their application.
- 60% of candidates said have not been informed of their interview results.
- 43% of candidates have found that the job did not match the job description.
- 34% think that the company representative did not present a positive work experience.
- 30% of the candidates think that the company representative did not seem to be knowledgeable.
When you look at the survey results above, you can imagine why this happens. It is mainly due to the lack of an efficient way of managing your applicants. Let us look at the points above and see how you can streamline your job applicant management, using an applicant tracking system.
- Career portal – With an online applicant tracking system that supports a career portal, you will get a professional looking career portal to drive your careers page. You can ask your candidates to look for jobs online and apply online. You will not have stale jobs on your career’s page if you are using an online ATS. When you deactivate a job, it will automatically be removed from your career portal. This will also not require your web developer to update the careers page every time a job is posted or removed.
- Custom job application – With an online applicant tracking system, you can create a custom job application. This will greatly help you short list your candidates and quickly screen candidates.
- Application acknowledgement – If you are not using an online ATS, it is nearly impossible to send out an acknowledgement for each application, since you get so many. You may do this for the first few, but once you get inundated with applications, you will start ignoring them. An online applicant tracking system, can solve this problem very easily. As soon as the candidate applies for the position, they will receive an acknowledgement email. You should be able to tailor this email to your business needs. This will right away provide a professional experience to the candidate and increase your brand value with the candidate.
- Filtering candidates – Now that you have all the applications, how do you review and short list them? If you manually review and make notes in spreadsheets, it is not a scalable model. Read this article on why using applicant tracking spreadsheet is a thing of the past. Some of the good candidates might slip through the cracks. With an online applicant tracking system, the first thing you can filter is those candidates who match your job description. You can review the candidates and add notes that you can view later. This will also help with compliance and discrimination suits. By tracking your notes for each candidate, you will have a good record on why you did not short list a candidate.
- Communication – During the hiring process, there is a lot of communication between several players in the process; the recruiter, the hiring manager and the candidate. The recruiter must short list and send out an email to either reject or asking more information from candidate. The recruiter will also have to schedule the candidate interview with hiring team. There is communication between recruiter and hiring manager. There is communication between recruiter and candidate. All this communication, if it is done through email systems, will not give a holistic picture of the candidate selection process. Also, a lot of this communication can be simplified through custom email templates provided by our free online ATS.
- Interview notes tracking – When the hiring team interviews the candidate, they need to provide feedback as individuals and as a team to the recruiter. If all the feedback is available in emails, if the recruiter leaves and the email account is disabled. It is not easy to retrieve and review these feedback and notes. With an online ATS, the hiring team can enter their feedback notes. Once the notes are in, the hiring manager and HR can make the appropriate non-discriminatory hiring decision based on the feedback.
- Metrics – When the hiring process is in emails and spreadsheets, it is hard to get any type of reports out of it. With an online applicant tracking system, you can quickly run reports on how long it takes to fill the position, how many candidates were interviewed, how many candidates applied, and which regions they applied from. You can make smarter hiring decisions next time with the metrics from past.
- Employer brand – Your brand value goes up immensely by providing the right candidate experience, which will help your hiring efforts in the future.
Read these articles to help understand why employer brand and candidate experience is important
The HR professional’s complete guide to employer brand
Recruiteze is the best free online applicant tracking system for small business
With Recruiteze, our free online applicant tracking system, you can manage your jobs, careers page, applications, notes and communication in one easy to use interface. Recruiteze is available online, all you need is a browser and internet connection. Think of it, with about $20 per month, you will resolve all these hiring issues. Increase your brand value, provide a great candidate experience and track your hiring process. This will help you analyze your hiring process, candidate pipeline and allow you to improve your hiring process. Try Recruiteze FREE today!
If you are not sure, on which applicant tracking system to choose, read these articles in our buyer education series.
Online applicant tracking system vs On-premise ATS
Why you should use an online applicant tracking system?
Most useful features of an online applicant tracking system