8 Strong Advantages Of Using An Applicant Tracking System
Who you recruit to work for you can impact your business’s success in many ways. This is why companies strive to hire the best and most qualified talent. Simply put, you need to choose the best fit for your company if you want to get the work done well.
Still, this is easier said than done, and we aren’t just saying it because of the endless applications businesses get these days. On average, 118 people apply for a single position that requires just one person. You can multiply this number several times if your company is popular and you are offering great benefits to the candidates.
Knowing this, how do you decide? Where do you search to find the best candidates? How do you narrow down your choices or manage their onboarding process?
The answer to this lies in applicant tracking systems or ATS.
Advantages you can enjoy with the best applicant tracking system
Not all ATS products work the same, of course. If you want to reap the benefits we’ll list below, you need to invest in a smart, safe, and feature-rich applicant tracking system. These days, the top-rated choice is Freshworks, a very affordable, yet high-quality solution for your hiring concerns.
If you decide to invest in an ATS, you can reap the many advantages that come with it. These include:
Lower employee turnover
It costs an average of $4,129 for an employee to fill an open position. On top of this, it takes 42 days to achieve this, including the onboarding process for the new worker. This is what a mistake in hiring will cost you – tons of money and valuable time.
If you don’t manage to attract and choose the right candidates, you’ll often have to pay the price for it. There are two solutions to such a problem – you can try to train them or replace them. Both come with unnecessary costs that can be avoided simply by using an ATS.
With the right applicant tracking system, you can easily screen applicants and find the gem in the crowd. This results in lower employee turnover.
Saves you valuable time spent on administrative tasks
First, you need to create a job description. Then you need to manually publish the listing on many job boards, one by one, all to get the information to more candidates. You also need to scour your network, look for some potential candidates manually, and send out follow-up emails.
This is followed by an endless process of organising and noting down the ones that you like. The administrative tasks never seem to end.
Well, you can forget about all of them if you use an applicant tracking system. The ATS will automate all of this and let you do it in a small portion of the time you needed before.
Faster resume screening
Recruiters spend around 15 seconds on each resume. This would make you think that it all goes fast, but what happens when you have hundreds of applicants? The reason why they spend so little time checking resumes is that this is challenging and time-consuming.
Honestly, can you really determine if a candidate is a good fit in just a few seconds? They’ve tried hard to create a resume, only to get seconds of the recruiter’s time. There are many candidates that never got the chance to work at a company they’d fit perfectly into because the recruiters were in a rush.
It would be a pity if this happened in your company. You wouldn’t want to miss out on the chance to hire a great candidate because this takes too long or you have too many applications. Doing this manually can take forever, and you can only interview a tiny portion of what you get.
An ATS will automate this process for you. It uses algorithms to check the resumes and match them against your job requirements. This will minimise the error margin, help you find good matches fast, and save you valuable time as a result.
Reaching the top talent in the market
The goal of every employer is to promote employee engagement for better performance. But, you can’t really do this unless the people you employ have what it takes to get the job done. No matter how many incentives you use or how great you manage your team, it all comes down to who you hire for the position.
Ideally, your business needs to find the best talent. This is not an easy endeavour. With the inbuilt JDs in applicant tracking systems, it’s much easier and far more effective. The ATS will allow your sourcing team to publish the description to social channels, career sites, and job boards on the Web. This will take minutes, not days of their time.
Smart interview scheduling
Let’s say that you went through the ordeal of filtering candidates and have already found a few solid choices. Now you need to choose the best of them. The ATS can help you with this, too. It will automatically check the availability of your hiring manager and schedule interviews. Interviewers can even collect the feedback and store it in the system to make hiring decisions with ease.
Improved candidate experiences
The candidate experience is key to success in the hiring process. This will determine if they will accept your job offer, as well as help you create a positive company culture for your team. How your recruiting process goes can determine whether or not the applicant will be engaged and productive, and what they’ll think of your brand.
After all, the job candidates are potential hires and potential brand ambassadors, so you definitely need to offer them a good experience.
An ATS can help you with this. Since it will automate everything, speed up the process, and help you with the onboarding process, it is bound to make candidates happy.
Faster recruitment cycle
Just imagine – everyone who applies for a position at your company and sends out a resume is added to the ATS. All this information is organised in a single platform, which gives the hiring managers easy access to it. The recruitment cycle is optimised because of it, and ATS allows recruiters to follow up on applications faster, and move candidates to the next stage of the process. In other words, recruiting candidates becomes easier and faster, which results in fewer costs.
Easy collaborative hiring
In many companies, especially big ones, there’s an entire HR team working to find the perfect candidate, assess them, and optimise their onboarding process. Thanks to an applicant tracking system, they can collaborate with ease. Teams can share notes, rate candidates, and enjoy a collective decision-making process.
A lot of the useful information slips away when there are many people responsible for hiring and onboarding new workers. There are issues such as miscommunication, and delayed responses, not to mention messy notes that not everyone can understand. Thanks to an ATS, this can all be managed and shared in one place and made easily accessible to all.
Should you invest in an applicant tracking system?
Using an ATS can help businesses tremendously, but not every company needs it. Naturally, you won’t need it if you are not hiring, but you probably won’t have much use for it if you have a small number of candidates that you can easily check.
However, if your business has one of the following challenges or more, then you definitely need an ATS:
- Looking to expand the business and hire more people in the near future
- Are hiring new people regularly, or are hiring more people simultaneously
- Need to reach and manage job candidates on different channels
- Need to store information about candidates and evaluate it in a single location
- Trying to juggle various systems for your recruiting needs such as career sites, calendars, job boards, social channels, etc
- Want to save candidate information for future hires
- You are experiencing gaps in communication, so candidates are slipping away as a result of it
- You don’t have the time to check the resumes or candidates’ background
An ATS is used by everyone involved in this process, including recruiters, TA managers, and HR teams. The features of such tools are so versatile that they can optimise the entire hiring process, not just scan or report on candidates.
As a matter of fact, even employees use such systems. Many of the ATS systems have a referral portal that job seekers can use to view available job openings, make referrals for their friends, or apply themselves.
Are you ready to simplify your hiring process?
The purpose of an applicant tracking system is to help recruiters and employees in finding the right fit. These tools are so advanced today that they can optimise the entire hiring process starting from the job postings to the resumes to the actual recruitment of the candidate. Consider the benefits it offers and, if you are looking to hire people now or in the future, this is a very smart investment for your business.
Author bio: Nadica Metuleva is a freelance writer who’s passionate about creating quality, original content. She holds a Master’s degree in English teaching and a Bachelor’s degree in translation. With 8 years of experience in the freelance writing industry, Nadica has become proficient in creating content that captivates the audience, drives growth, and educates. You can find her on LinkedIn.
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