What are the Benefits of an Applicant Tracking System?
An applicant tracking system (ATS) benefits businesses by automating the recruitment process. The best ATS systems help companies collect resumes, coordinate interviews, extend job offers, deliver insights through analytics and tracking metrics, and flag areas for improvement. This reduces the time to fill and can significantly improve recruitment ROI.
There are a range of different ATS products on the market, and ATS pricing varies depending on the features offered and the scale of hiring it’s intended to track. Free applicant tracking systems are also available and, while they are adequate solutions for some businesses, the benefits they offer may be reduced.
Below is a list of 20 key ATS benefits that you must be aware of when deciding the best applicant tracking software option for your company.
1. Empowered Hiring Managers
Recruitment is not a solo endeavor, it takes a team to successfully place a candidate in an open role. One of the most important collaborators in a recruiting process is the hiring manager, who is often the eventual manager of the incoming employee.
An ATS can allow the hiring manager and every other stakeholder to take an active role in the hiring process alongside the recruitment team. They may review and approve resumes independently, leave comments and feedback to ensure the recruiter understands the experience necessary for the role, and add candidates they found through their own outreach to the talent pool.
Recruiters typically manage multiple roles and internal responsibilities, so any tool that decreases their workload is a worthy investment. Empowering the hiring manager to actively help select top candidates alleviates pressure on a recruiting team and leads to high-quality hires. With recruitment software tools like an ATS, everyone can reliably add their input and be accountable for their contributions from application to onboarding.
2. Accurate Tracking of Recruitment Metrics
Recruitment can be a high-cost activity, and executives are rightly curious to understand the return on investment of those efforts. With an ATS in place, recruiters can proactively share reports and key hiring metrics on their progress with executives and the board of directors.
ATS systems, like Ashby, have pre-built reports with data relevant to your organization. Many allow custom reporting so you can create real-time dashboards relevant to your hiring goals. This data helps human resources make informed decisions about future job openings and retention strategies.
3. Access to a Large Pool of Qualified Candidates
In a competitive market, it’s important to post jobs in front of a wide audience. The best applicant tracking system vendors will automatically share your jobs with multiple job boards. This recruitment process automation allows your job posts to reach more eyes than they would on your company website alone, or if you had to manage posting manually.
With paid job ads, you can expand your candidate pool even further. Applicant conversion tracking pixels give a granular understanding of which sourcing expenditures are successfully reaching ideal applicants.
4. Standardized Data Collection
If you’re looking through job descriptions, it probably won’t take long for you to find one that proclaims the importance of data-driven recruitment in an organization. Most people would agree that who they hire is of incredible importance, and yet they may make these decisions with messy or inconsistent data in place.
Using an ATS can help standardize data collection for incoming candidates as well as interviewers throughout the recruitment process. With clean, consistent data, recruiters’ data analysis can gather relevant insights into where an organization may be spending too much time or money without a return in the form of hiring success.
5. Tracking of Candidate Opt-In and Consent
Compliance should be top of your list of ATS questions when you demo software. Consumers have privacy on their minds now more than ever before, and the same goes for job seekers. An ATS can help alleviate concerns about candidate data management, and compliance with privacy laws.
The system you choose should have clear privacy protection policies in regard to the candidate information you collect. If this is in place, your ATS can also help the organization inform candidates how their data will be used and get their consent in the process. Native compliance is a great help in setting candidates’ minds at ease about how their information is collected. In turn, therefore, transparency about employee data management boosts your candidate experience and employer brand.
6. Access to Communication Templates
Recruiters are often repeating the same messages over and over, and the time cost of drafting an individual response for each application adds up.
Creating templates for the entire recruitment process can not only save recruiters time, but ensure consistent communication. This gives employers certainty that candidates are offered equal support throughout every stage of hiring.
7. Automated Workflows
Administrative tasks and manual procedures slow down the recruitment process. AI ATS software supplies automation and workflows to streamline transitions through each stage of the recruitment funnel, from resume parsing to job posting and offer sending.
This functionality saves time for internal staff, allowing them space to focus on recruitment strategy instead of time-consuming activities. Integrations with LinkedIn and other social media platforms help lean teams advertise and interact with top talent and place the right candidates.
HRIS, HCM, or HRMS software integrations that feed directly from your ATS can facilitate a smooth onboarding process for new employees.
8. EEO Data Collection, and More
Beyond legally required data collection for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, recruiting teams may want to gain an expanded understanding of the candidates interviewing at their company.
Most ATS vendors have standard questions and dropdown answers companies can use to collect this data, along with customizable data collection forms.
9. Tracking and Understanding Diversity in Your Hiring Pipeline
A homogenous candidate pipeline will not result in a diverse workforce. Using an ATS with native diversity hiring tools helps companies confidentially collect data points on race, gender, disability, and other areas, and thereby, have more information to assess the reality of hiring bias in decision-making.
Strategic measures to support DEI in your hiring funnel are only possible if you know what your candidate pools look like. Perhaps there’s a lack of women applying for a specific role, prompting recruiters to use paid job postings and other outreach efforts to increase the representation of women in their pipeline. Or maybe Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) candidates are well-represented in applicants but aren’t well-represented in the offer stage, prompting an internal investigation into how candidates are being evaluated during the application process.
10. Clarified Roles and Permissions
Like I said earlier, recruitment takes a team. An ATS can help manage the contributions of different team members and ensure valuable input is captured in the hiring process.
With customized permission sets, interviewers will only be able to see the data they need to evaluate the candidates they’re in contact with. Hiring managers can benefit from better visibility into applicants and the overall pipeline. Staffing coordinators may be able to see candidate contact information, but not be able to access confidential notes about the candidate.
This customization allows the organization to protect candidates’ data appropriately and give employees making hiring decisions the insight they need.
11. Information on Best Practices for Interviewers
Job interviews can be rife with bias, unprofessionalism, and discrimination. This is why interview training and shadowing are important for companies to implement early on. By integrating an ATS with third-party video interview software, or using an ATS with built-in video interview features, you can highlight best practices at every stage, reminding interviewers of their responsibilities in representing the company.
12. Effective Note-Taking and Interview Records
Businesses are legally required to maintain records related to the recruitment and selection of employees, and an ATS can help store and manage those records for the sake of compliance.
With interview scorecards and automated reminders about submitting feedback in place within your ATS, you’ll be able to confidently follow a trail of documentation about hiring decisions when needed.
13. Selected Rubrics for Measurement
It’s easy to get distracted from the core competencies of a role in the assessment process, but rubrics can help center candidate evaluations on the established competencies of the role. Many ATS systems feature the ability to make custom rubrics, prompting interviewers to highlight which competencies the candidate excelled in or didn’t meet.
These data points can help mitigate bias in hiring decisions and highlight what each interviewer is expected to evaluate in the recruitment process.
14. Flagging Blocks in the Recruitment Process
Bottlenecks in the hiring process are frustrating for job seekers and hiring teams alike. These blockers can hurt the business long-term if needed positions aren’t being filled. The data from an ATS system is a goldmine for investigating these blocks and providing clues as to how to solve them, ultimately improving the recruitment process.
15. Channels to Receive Feedback on Candidate Experience
Anyone who interviews with your company possesses an outside perspective on what’s working well and what needs to be improved. An ATS can help capture that feedback with candidate feedback surveys.
With the automated workflows native to an ATS, you can send each candidate who interviews with your business a feedback survey. This gives you invaluable data on how the team’s communication and follow-through are being received by candidates and new hires. Some ATS systems, like Greenhouse, will even compare your results with other companies so you know how you stack up against the competition.
16. Ability to Identify Successful Sourcing Investments
Understanding where the best candidates are sourced from can point to areas you may want to continue investing in. With an ATS tracking applicants’ sources, recruiters can easily understand what sources will most like improve their quality of hire.
17. Smoother Interview Scheduling and Time Management
Calendar coordination and schedule snags aren’t usually accounted for in the projected time-to-fill for a role, but this area can quickly add days and weeks to an interview process. An ATS will help identify the necessary steps in the interview process, and sync with internal calendars to make scheduling less painful for everyone involved.
There’s also interview scheduling software that will integrate with an ATS to make it possible for your team to move quickly and efficiently.
18. Faster Time-to-Hire and Time-to-Fill
With these tools in place, your time-to-hire and time-to-fill metrics are likely to improve. Candidates can smoothly apply, recruiters can easily review applications, interviews are set with minimal back-and-forth communications, and interviews can quickly submit feedback, all contributing to a faster hiring process.
Smaller organizations and start-up companies can especially benefit from this streamlined process. These companies are usually spread thinner than enterprise organizations, and every role opened can have a major impact on the day-to-day operations and expansion of the business. The best applicant tracking systems for small businesses are specifically geared toward hiring for smaller teams where each addition to the workforce has a proportionately large impact.
19. Customizable Application Questions
Many recruiters are ditching cover letters and instead opting for custom application questions to help screen candidate profiles. These application questions are easy to set up in an ATS, allowing you to capture specific information from the candidate that’s relevant to the role.
20. Incorporated Employer Brand Strategy
Prospective hires may be interacting with your company for the first time via a job application, or be familiar with your brand and eager to jump on new opportunities. Every job posting, landing page, email message, and interaction with current employees they encounter contributes to your employer brand.
With an ATS in place, you can make sure recruiting operations are aligned with the company’s talent acquisition strategy. Email templates should reflect your brand’s voice, open job requisitions can be featured on a dynamic careers page, and company blog posts can highlight the experiences of employees across the organization to give a unique candidate experience.
ATS Benefits: Closing Thoughts
At its core, an ATS is simply a database to store candidate records and help automate processes much like a candidate relationship management (CRM) system would, although the two have their own differences. While AI is changing HR, it’s still a burgeoning field. In the end, your hiring success is dependent on a hiring team consisting of people, and an ATS can make them more successful at their job.
Implementing the ATS is crucial for recruitment efforts, and optimizing the system with the above benefits in mind will help your team hire the best talent quickly and confidently.
