Eight clues to find out if you need Recruiting software (ATS)

The process of recruiting is one of the activities with the most impact in a company. However, despite being one of the most important factors for the growth of an organisation, it is often also one of the most complicated to manage.

In companies it is now common practice to use software to manage sales, accounting, project management or marketing. However, despite this, many recruiters still believe that it’s fine to manage their research and selection activities using a mix of email and Excel tables.

Recruiting software, also called ATS (Applicant Tracking System is the technical name for recruiting software), has been used since the nineties. Although many believe that an ATS is the preserve of big corporations, they are actually used by small and medium businesses that want to optimise their recruiting processes, and save time and money.
So using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is always the right choice? We’ve selected eight signs to figure out if the recruiter in the company could benefit from recruiting software.

1. You spend too much time publishing job ads on different Job Boards.
When you open a new job vacancy, it’s normal that the recruiter who runs it is interested to ensure maximum visibility.
There are many free Job Boards (Message Boards for jobs) and also better Job Boards for which you pay. Each has a different publishing system, and therefore publishing an ad can take a long time (even if you copy and paste). You need to have access to every single Job Board, authenticate your profile, fill out the forms – all of which differ from each other. Furthermore, consider the time required to manage the CVs received (some directly within the Job Board, and others in your mailbox) and compare them, since each Job Board may require different information.
The best Applicant Tracking System (ATS) saves a lot of time with innovative features that allow you to post a job ad in many Job Boards in one operation (multiposting or job posting). When publishing a vacancy to only one or two Job Boards the savings may be minimal, but when you publish to over 35 Job Boards (as with In-recruiting) the time savings become significant.

2. Your mailbox is clogged with irrelevant applications (every time you post a job vacancy).
The development of Job Boards had brought lots of visibility to job ads, but it’s also brought the attention of lots of candidates who aren’t quite right. If you’re a recruiter who knows what we mean: it may be that your email address is literally inundated with irrelevant CVs every time that you post an ad. And that means time wasted to view dozens of unnecessary CVs.

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) allows you to create a personalised form with questions for screening focused on the key search requirements: it’s possible, for example, to filter all of the candidates for a specific degree or for a specific number of years of experience in a sector. Simply insert a screening question to immediately highlight the most relevant candidates.

3. You would like a better career site but don’t have the resources (technical or economic) to create it.
The career site (the section for ‘work with us’ on your company’s site) is the principal showcase of the positions that you have open in your company and is the main place where you can share the reasons why a candidate would want to work in your company. The statistics say that two out of three candidates interested in a company go to visit the career page directly. For this reason the ‘work with us’ section should never be undervalued but put together with a lot of attention. To build and maintain an up to date career page, however, isn’t possible for all companies because you need to find economic and technical resources for the building and maintenance. Using a good ATS it is easy to create a personalised career page, without the need for any IT competencies, because the software has all the creative functions already integrated in the career page.
If you want to attract the best candidates it is important to do more than just insert your company logo on a page: for example, it is much more effective to talk about the corporate culture and present the team in which the candidate will work (maybe also with photos and videos).

4. You tracking information about the recruiting process in Excel, and using email to communicate with your team and the candidates. But data is becoming more and more disorganised.
Excel tables are a fantastic tool for many tasks, but they’re not a very effective tool for recruiting. If you’ve ever run searches using multiple Excel tabs or you’ve tried endlessly to find some specific information in a spreadsheet, then you know what we mean.

Recruiting software combines the functions of publishing and sharing jobs (multiposting) with the ability to track applications, build the shortlist, program interviews with the selected, and close searches. The best ATS should allow you to navigate between the profiles of the candidates, compare them and allow you to work with your recruiting team on one platform to keep track of all the notes, of the communication, of the feedback, of the programs and of the metrics, all in one place. It’s very difficult to return to Excel once you’ve started using an ATS.

5. Are you using an external recruiter to manage the search, but you’re spending too much.
External recruiters are very important to business recruiting. But it should be an external support tool when candidates are really complicated to find. Seeking the support of an external recruiter is a good choice, but definitely not an economical choice.

A company should be spending their important economic resources to search for medium-low roles. Also because the tools to search for this type of role are much more economically effective.
The most important element to manage this type of search is that the recruiting team have a structured recruitment process. Fortunately one of the principal benefits of a good ATS is that it easily allows you to organise a standard recruitment process, while also allowing you to personalise it in real-time depending on the needs of the company. Thanks to the features of an ATS it is possible to build a recruiting pipeline that provides a structure to effectively move candidates along the recruitment funnel, excluding those who aren’t appropriate.
A standard recruiting pipeline from In-recruiting could be for example:

Candidate applies to a vacancy > Meets requirements > Called > 1st interview > 2nd interview > Offer > Acceptance

In this way you don’t need to build a recruiting pipeline from nothing because the structure is already done and you should only need to make modifications. For a tiny fraction of the cost of an external recruiter it is possible to hugely improve the visibility of your company and effectively organise your recruiting process.

6. Your recruiting team are having problems in coordinating and giving feedback to the candidates.
When company recruitment is managed by a team it is possible that the communication multiplies (shared notes, feedback and evaluation of candidates, submitted CVs, multiple calendars) and this can easily lead to problems.
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) manages all of these activities in one place. Every note, feedback and evaluation of a candidate is saved in the same place, together with their CV, their application, and the history of the steps that you’ve taken. Furthermore with an ATS every new recruiter in the company will be able to orient themselves quickly on everything that has taken place before they came online. Without an Applicant Tracking System this is impossible or very complicated.

7. Did you notice the profile of an excellent candidate but it wasn’t quite right for the existing search. Now you want to find it again and you can’t find their CV or profile.
An effective process of talent acquisition not only aims to cover a vacancy but above all to great candidates for future positions.
To schedule an interview with a viable candidate, only to lose track of them or not be able to find their details amongst the many emails and CVs, is unhelpful if not damaging.
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) keeps track of the data of all the people that the recruiting team has met with in the past. Advanced ATS, like In-recruiting, allows you also to insert tags in the candidate profile or to import them from social networks, so as to quickly find them again through a simple search engine if and when the need arises (which will also identify key words in their attached CV).

8. You would like to improve your recruiting process but you don’t have significant data.
For many businesses, above all for the small and medium businesses, the recruitment needs come in waves. This is one of the reasons that the recruiting process is often very varied from one search to another. Standardising the recruiting process is often of vital importance to save time, but this isn’t possible if you don’t have the necessary data to analyse. With an Applicant Tracking System you can archive and recall all of the data relative to the recruiting process: and so it becomes possible to standardise, improve and take decisions based solely on your data, and not only on intuition.
An advanced ATS keeps track of the history of all the candidates, shows the amount of time taken to close a search and which are the channels that brought in the best candidates. It also allows you to export the data in CSV or Excel and to easily create a report with the most important metrics to present to your superiors.

These are the main signs to understand if you need an Applicant Tracking System. If you’ve found yourself in any of these situations or if you want to improve your recruiting process, we’d like to remind you that you can test our In-recruiting ATS on a free 14-day trial. Try In-recruiting today!