10 Things You Need to Know About Application Tracking Software

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Does this happen to you?  Your employees leave faster than you replace them because of the following:

  •  Intense competition

  •  Performance issues (termination)

  •  Job abandonment (voluntary quit)

  •  Job promotions

  •  Transfer out of position

If this sounds familiar, you are not alone.  Human Resource Managers and hiring professionals like you struggle to meet staffing needs every day.  A strong national economy and low unemployment has created a shortage of candidates. You must use all your resources to gain access to a candidate as soon he or she becomes available.  

Once you attract a candidate, your ability to move him or her seamlessly through your hiring process is critical.  If your hiring process is disorganized, it will disrupt your flow and you risk losing an applicant. 

You must have (2) key components to run a hiring process smoothly:

Application Process and Interview Process

The candidates ability to apply to a job, consists of the multiple steps to advance your applicant from outside candidate to the internal interview. The steps include the following:

  • Manage recruiting platforms

    • Collect applications and resumes

    • Organize applications by criteria (date submitted, job code, availability)

    • Manage application flow

    • Plan management meeting to discuss hiring needs

Interview Process—Includes all steps you complete once you make contact with the applicant. You must advance the next steps with minimum interruption to save time and money:

  • Set up phone interviews

    • Schedule in-person 1st Interviews

    • Schedule follow-up 2nd interviews

    • Purge interview rejections

    • Send offers and intents-to-hire

    • Set up new-hire paperwork

    • Schedule orientation 

    • Schedule On-Boarding

To manage the hiring process takes an enormous amount of time. For example, during the application process, you must spend time organizing applications and resumes. Then, plan staffing meetings once a week. Finally, you must connect with your job search sites regularly. 

Add to that, the interview process (which can take up to 40 hours per week alone) and you can quickly become overwhelmed. Once you become overwhelmed, you make mistakes that will cost you time, money, and worse a qualified candidate.

To prevent a time-consuming breakdown, you need to a tool that can manage both processes.  A tool that will complete all of your steps on one single software application. A software system the can organize, collect, and store candidate data. The same system that can allow you to track and monitor candidates through all stages of the hiring process.  You need an Application Tracking Software. So, you can save your most precious resource: Time. 

Let’s face it. The interview process is tough enough. Setting up an application tracking software should be a top priority, here’s why:

  • It Automates Your External and Internal Recruiting Efforts. 

1. Connects To Job Sites - Indeed, Monster, and CareerBuilder are power job search engines that reach thousands of applicants daily.  Your ATS (Applicant Tracking Software) gives you access to valuable candidates through your postings on the sites. Once you access the various talent pools, you have hundreds of applicants to select from.

2. Shares With Social Media Channels - Your ATS has social recruiting capabilities designed to meet applicants where they spend most of their online engagement.  Facebook, Twitter, and your website allows you to take a conversational approach to recruiting. You can attract attention by posting content that interests your candidates. This strategy makes the candidate feel like he or she “knows” you.

3. Leverages Employee Referral Programs - Do you have long-term employees who love working for you? Of course you do! Make your employees brand ambassadors by encouraging them to refer their friends. It’s a win-win!  You can reward your referrals and improve job satisfaction because employees love working with their friends.

  • An ATS Eliminates Communication gaps to maintain constant contact with your applicants.

4.  Organizes Interview Scheduling - Have you ever tried to schedule an applicant at the best time for both of you? How about a 2nd interview with another interviewer? Then you appreciate how hard finding the right time to do interviews. ATS selects the best time based on your schedule and theirs. Then, populates your interview space to fit your management schedule. You gain more time to focus on your interviewing quality. 

5.  Streamlines Interview Workflow - After every interview, you must complete tasks to keep the application process flowing. Tasks include, but are not limited to: advancing a candidate to a 2nd interview or declining a candidate with an email. Your ATS sends a customized, automated message to a candidate with the next step in the process.  It prevents you from having a bottleneck of applicants waiting for your decision.

6.  Customizes Candidate Searches - This ATS feature resembles the online shopping process.  When you shop online, you type a keyword to describe what you’re looking for.  After thousands of results, you narrow down the size, color, brand, and other features that fit exactly what you need. The same goes for candidate search feature on your ATS.  

You can filter your search through these parameters:

  • Job description

  • Skills and qualifications

  • Experience level

  • Availability (day or night)

  • Full-time or part-time

  • New hire or re-hire

A customized candidate search works best when you have a specific job available, but don’t need to look through hundreds of applicants for the right fit.  The trade-off is the more you customize, the less applicants you can select. 

  • An ATS consolidates the hiring process so you make adjustments to fit your needs. 

7.  Provides Manager Dashboard And Analytics - One of the most exciting parts of an ATS is the ability to receive performance reports. Through data and analytic tools you can measure the results of your recruiting efforts.  Questions such as: “which job search engine works best for me”?—can be answered based on the performance indicators you evaluate.  

Any step of the hiring process is measurable, which makes you accountable.  You have the ability to improve the most important metrics that will keep your hiring process flowing. 

8.  Integrates With Existing Workforce Tools - Once a candidate is hired through your ATS; you can to auto-populate his or her information directly into your back office system.  This also means your scheduling and employment verification apps populate the new hire as well. The ATS integration saves you from manually entering new hires across multiple systems. 

9.  Optimizes Onboarding - After you make an offer to a candidate and they accept; Congratulations! You have successfully converted a recruit to a new-hire! Your ATS can now be an on boarding tool. You can upload a new-hire packet that includes important information such as the following: benefit preview, company overview, and orientation schedule. As you can see, the applicant tracking software keeps you from searching for hiring forms. 

10. Drives Management Collaboration - It’s important for hiring managers like you to select the best candidates to advance after each interview.  However, no manager is a perfect interviewer. There are always applicants with great resumes and polished interview skills, that deceive the best interviewer. Your applicant tracking system lets multiple managers evaluate an applicants “hard and soft skills”, by giving your managers access to a candidate’s diagnostic reports. Your team can decide collectively whether a candidate is a fit. This will keep you a candidate from exploiting your interviewing blindspot.

The Advantage You Need to Succeed 

Your hiring process will always need maintaining to prevent interruptions within your applicant flow. An Applicant Tracking Software system can manage your entire hiring process fast and efficiently, leaving you time to solve problems that need your attention most.  Please, don’t waste your time trying to manage the hiring process without an ATS. You will lose time, applicants, and eventually your customers.