Tim Sackett has 20 years of combined Talent Acquisition and Executive HR experience, working for Fortune 500 companies in retail, healthcare, dining, and technology. He writes for Fistful of Talent and runs a popular HR blog — The Tim Sackett Project.
Tim on applicant tracking software says, “It is one of the most famous, affordable, and amazing recruitment technologies in the world. He believes that this piece of technology has made even the SMBs able to carry out enhanced recruiting & staffing processes.
“It is such an exciting time to be in talent acquisition considering the availability of world-class technology that is transforming how we all recruit on a daily basis. Also, ever since the introduction of the Applicant Tracking System in the market, the cost per hire has reduced tremendously,” he says.
2020 has caused a major stir in the employee and employer dynamics. The most affected department was and is the Human Resources. Not only did they have to take care of the well-being of their employees, but they also have to help them set up a remote working space. More importantly, there is a heavy influx of old employees leaving and new ones coming in.
This is because of the following reasons:
- Some businesses are laying off employees
- Some have started to hire more
- Employees are looking for a workplace with the least commute distance.
- Employees are choosing companies that offer work from home facilities.
All of this has left HR managers with a heap of resumes in their inboxes. Without automation as help, manually sifting through all these resumes is a hopeless task.
An applicant tracking software is, therefore, a savior all HRs need in 2021!
What is an Applicant Tracking Software?
An applicant tracking software is an application that enables automation in hiring and recruitment processes. An ATS can be deployed online by any business regardless of its size and type. It assigns a score to every resume or CV. Only the applicants with the highest score go from the database to the HR desk.
How does an applicant tracking software work?
First, it helps you create a job post. Then it posts the job post into multiple online job searching and social media sites of your choice.
Now starts the inflow of applicants.
The ATS then collects and organizes all applicants in a centralized database and creates a profile for every single applicant.
The ATS extracts the information and catalogs it in the same format for each candidate profile, removing the ambiguity of different resume formats.
In the profile template, there are categories for each relevant type of information.
There is a category for degrees earned, previous job titles, and skills. You can select categories and see all applicants according to your selection.
This kind of categorization makes finding the right candidate easy.
There is also resume filtering, which is the most important part of an ATS.
The software uses keywords from the job listing, or you can do customized searches to find the resumes containing those keywords. The best applicant software can help you parse thousands of resumes in seconds. It removes unqualified resumes automatically and leaves you with only a handful of the best ones.
Who needs Applicant Tracking Software?
If you are hiring people and looking at resumes. You need an applicant tracking system. It is this simple. The clients of an ATS software can be:
- Executive search firms
- Small and medium-sized businesses (SMB)
- Independent recruiters
- Staffing agencies
- Large enterprises
We have touched on a few things about ATS functions. Let’s take a deeper dive into the benefits of applicant tracking software and why it is a must-have in the year 2021.
Benefits that the best applicant tracking software can yield
Here is what you can expect from the best applicant tracking software:
1. Makes your brand attractive to candidates
Do you know that 69% of unemployed people will not apply to an organization with not so good brand image? The numbers in general in the real world are much higher since every candidate would want to work at a good workplace.
As a recruiter or hiring manager, you may already know the importance of having a good brand. The better the prospect talents perceive your brand, the better their chances of being willing to work in your company.
Brand reputation cannot be ignored during the hiring process.
And guess what, having ATS Software in place can position your company as one of the well-to-do, tech-savvy, and people-first companies in the market. This is because candidates know that ATS is used by major companies in the information technology field and that it also helps their CVs and resumes to be not missed out and unopened. ATS also sends an email when a candidate is rejected. This again ensures a better candidate experience and a better reputation for yourself.
2. Allows you to smartly allocate your time
Half of the resumes any average human resource manager receives are not in line with the job description or job requirement. The candidate might not have the right educational background, certifications, or skills.
It is, anyway, manually very time-consuming, if not completely impossible, for recruiters to go through each and every resume and then pick the relevant ones from them. Resume parser software also takes hours to do the same.
On the other hand, an automated applicant tracker software takes minutes to crawl through numerous resumes and CVs. It then lists out the exact things a recruiter is interested in from all the resumes in a simple, readable manner.
This saves users time for recruiters and helps them find the right candidate who fits the job description. With this saved time, recruiters can conduct more elaborate interviews and assessments.
Here’s what recruitcrm.io found out about the time consumed by recruiters while using applicant tracker software and otherwise.
Job posting/Resume Sourcing:
Without ATS: 15%
With ATS: 3%
Screening and shortlisting:
Without ATS: 40%
With ATS: 20%
Assessment/Interviews/Counselling:
Without ATS: 25%
With ATS: 67%
Pre-hiring Communication
Without ATS: 20%
With ATS: 10%
3. Better overview of applicants
As mentioned above, an applicant tracking software then lists out the exact things a recruiter is interested in from all the resumes in a simple, readable manner.
For instance, if you are looking for how skilled prospects are in WordPress and Power BI predominantly, applicant tracking software will do just that for you. It will list out this item from all the resumes and show it to you, removing the need of you manually finding the skills mentioned in all the resumes. Many ATS have a simple Kanban view, one of the simplest ways to view cataloged information.
Furthermore, an applicant tracking software can help you easily switch between different apps, compare candidates, select candidates, change candidate status, and scan candidates for specific details.
An ATS mitigates the risk of a resume or CV being missed or left on an HR office’s desk, allowing you to successfully view all applicants.
4. Easy Job Posting
An applicant tracking software allows you to go through numerals influx of resumes and CVs and helps you effectively post jobs to find the right talent for your company.
Moreover, you can add details like a job description, salary, job location, and other details while posting a job through applicant tracking software. If you upload the job openings on several platforms with a single click, it takes away the need for you as a recruiter to set up and manually log in to individual accounts from each social platform and post the job. This also keeps you from spending serious cash on job post-marketing efforts.
You also do not require to keep a tab on all these job posting platforms. The software crawls across each social media platform, and the results are generated from all the posts across all platforms.
The best applicant tracking software can help you integrate a careers site page on your website itself, allowing you to collect leads from your website as well.
5. Improved Cost Per Hire
Hiding a candidate not only takes up a lot of time but also costs you several dollars. The amount is certainly more than $100 to $200 per month/per user, which is an average cost of an applicant tracking software.
Even if a business can invest hundreds of dollars ongoing through the expensive screening process, it is not viable every time they have to hire fresh talent. And, also why should they when an ATS can cut costs massively?
No business can afford a bad hire due to an inefficient screening process, as this could cost them heavily afterward. An applicant tracking software significantly reduces the possibility of this happening.
Also, with applicant tracking software, you have the ability to store all the received resumes and CVs effectively in one place. You can go through these candidate profiles whenever needed in the future. This will save you time and effort along with money.
6. Improves the Quality of Hire
According to a recent survey by Hays, a recruitment firm, 92% of employers surveyed saw a shortage of skills that slowed their recruitment and hiring while negatively affecting their business.
While AI can’t magically give candidates skills to fill those gaps, it can help identify and automatically target more relevant candidates that are the closest fit. And that optimism is catching on; 80% of executives believe that AI recruiting can help make their hiring process more efficient.
Another reason why applicant tracking software can help you higher quality candidates is — speed.
ATS helps you speed up the recruitment process, so you can easily grab the talented candidates who could otherwise have been hired by your competitive businesses.