It is a good sign for your business, if you are looking for an Online Applicant Tracking System for your Small Business. Either you are growing or getting your operations more efficient. If are deciding how to determine what is the best option for you, this article will clear things up for you.
You should also read these other articles in this buyer education series on all things to consider, before selecting the right online ATS for your small business.
For most small businesses, here are the most important features to manage your hiring and communication efficiently, which will provide a very professional view of your company to the Candidates.
- Career Portal – If you have a website, you should be able to integrate or link to the career portal provided by your online ATS. Even if you do not have a website, you should be able to send a link for the career portal, to the candidates to see your list of active jobs and apply for the ones that suits them. This is really important, since it does a few things
- It shows the professionalism and efficiency of how you are running your small business. With all the recent available small business ATS’s, having a career portal is not the domain only of Enterprise’s anymore, most Small Businesses can afford a decent system without breaking the bank.
- The resume will be emailed to you, once the candidate posts the resume.
- The resume will be parsed and added to your candidate database. This will help you manage all the candidates that have applied to your company.
- The candidate will get a nice professional email, stating that your company has received the resume and someone will get back with them.
- Custom Job Application – You should be able to design the job application for your career portal. This will help you capture any additional fields that is specific to your business from the candidate. This will help you immensely in your hiring process, to shortlist the candidates that are most valuable for your business.
- Resume Parsing – This is another really important feature, you do not want to spend adding candidate name and contact information manually for each candidate. This is time consuming and it defeats the purpose of an online ATS. The reason you are looking for an online applicant tracking system is to make your life easier by saving time and do things more efficiently. Yes, you may have to add/edit some candidates manually, but for at least 80% of the resumes, the system should be capable of parsing and adding the candidate to your candidate database.
- Resume Forwarding – You should be able to forward the resumes you receive in your email to your online ATS. This is another feature you will love it, since you are going to get resumes in emails, either from candidates directly or referrals. You should be able to forward this to your online applicant tracking system. This makes it real simple to manage all your candidates in one place. If you do not have this feature, you will not take the time to manually download the resume on to your hard disk, login to your ATS and upload it again.
- Notes Management – This is another important feature, since you would want to maintain all your Notes for the Candidate from all interview participants and Recruiters. This helps compliance and will help you avoid any discrimination lawsuits. Also it helps you to go back and refer to the notes, if you have any secondary candidates if the primary candidate does not accept your job offer.
- De-Duplication – This is another important feature, you do not want duplicate candidates in your candidate database. This will make your put your notes and history at different entries at different times.
- Email Templates – This is another important feature, which will save you a lot of time and standardize your communication. It will make your life easier to streamline and standardize your Hiring Workflow, so that you can train your employees better and put everyone on the same page.
- Candidate Search – This is another important feature, if you are paying for an online ATS and are using it, you will build a list of Candidates over a period of time. When you have a Job Opening, you can first look through your database to see if there is anyone who fits the Job Profile.
The set of 4 things listed above, makes a big difference on how you manage your candidates and hiring process.
If you have this set of features, you will be able to manage your Hiring very effectively and in a very professional manner. Depending on your personal situation, you may be looking for more features. Do not pay for features you do not need and will not use. When you go shopping for an online ATS, you will find all kinds of expensive options, which have a lot of bells and whistles. Trust me, it is like the 3D TV, where you rarely use the TV to watch a 3D movie, but mostly use it like any other TV.
Read these other articles, which will help you make an informed decision
What to look for in an Online Applicant Tracking System?
Online Applicant Tracking System vs On-Premise ATS
Recruiteze is the best Small Business Online Applicant Tracking System
Recruiteze is your perfect Small Business Recruiting Sytem for managing your Hiring. You have an easy to use and integrate Career Portal, has an advanced Resume Parser, manage your Jobs, Candidates and Notes using an easy to use modern, responsive Interface. With Recruiteze you can access your Online Applicant Tracking System from your home, office, tablet or smartphone as long as you have an internet connection. Try Recruiteze FREE today.