Applicant Tracking Systems are used by busy recruiters to keep track of the applicants for various jobs they are working on. But should you use one as an employer? Let's have a look at what they can and can't do...
Job Management
Typically employers want to maximise their recruitment campaign by posting a job to more than one platform. For example, you might want to post a job to CV Library, LinkedIn and a specialist job board. Most of these job boards will have their own candidate management system, but that means you will have to log in to every single platform each time you want to review your candidates for just one job. Imagine if you had more than one vacancy open at once!!! A good ATS will allow you to post your jobs out to multiple platforms and collate all activity relating to that job in one place.
Candidate management
Ok so you've got your job posted out to multiple platforms for maximum exposure. Now what are you going to do with all those applications and CVs? If you don't have a centralised ATS, you're going to have to log in to every platform and review the candidates. You're probably going to have to download their CVs and save them to a file on your PC so that you can email the shortlisted candidates to the hiring manager to review them. It's going to be very administrative and difficult to keep the process consistent. But, with a good ATS, all your candidates will come through to one place and you should be able to shortlist candidates for the hiring manager with ease.
Interview management
Historically, this has involved email ping pong over the course of a week to arrange 3 interviews and will involve more emailing of attachments to the relevant managers. But what if you had an ATS that allowed candidates to book themselves into a pre-set interview slot with the click of a button and then sent the relevant managers calendar invites and copies of the CVs! It could literally save you hours.
Gathering recruitment insights
If you're advertising vacancies on different platforms, you're going to get different insights in different formats and it's going to be a pain in the 🍑to pull it all together into meaningful data that you can analyse. With a centralised ATS, all your data is in one place so you can accurately asses the success of a campaign within minutes.
Okay, we didn't really cover any disadvantages to using ATS because to be honest, we've struggled to find any! We LOVE when we find a system that makes us more efficient in supporting our clients, which is why we LOVE our hireful ATS.
To see how an ATS could help your business, book a free recruitment audit 👇