The job market is growing more diverse and complex in every industry. The great resignation has signalled a change in what people seek from an employer. Workers are more willing to change scenery if it means a career boost or a better quality of life.
What does this all mean for businesses like yours? It means higher turnover and more resumes to sort through with every job vacancy.
There’s a reason the applicant tracking system (ATS) market is predicted to grow to $3.65 billion in 2028. Applicant tracking systems enhance recruitment and acquisition efforts while saving time and money.
ATS was once a luxury for large enterprises and fortune 500 companies. Today, SMBs are increasingly jumping on board with ATS software. In this article, we’ll look at applicant tracking systems and uncover the vital features you need.
What Is An Applicant Tracking System?
An applicant tracking system organizes and manages all of your talent recruiting efforts. It provides a central database for tracking and monitoring the progress of applications. An ATS also lets you manage all of your job board postings and candidate communications.
The best application tracking tools use AI and automation. These advanced features eliminate mundane tasks and lower time spent on admin. An ATS is essential for any organization that deals with volume recruitment. Recruitment management software also helps businesses reduce the workloads on their team.
How Do Applicant Tracking Systems Work?
Applicant tracking systems provide a central recruitment hub. This empowers you to streamline all of your recruitment and hiring processes. They help you manage job listings, application tracking, automated screening, talent pool databases and much more!
The best ATS is customizable to fit your recruiting requirements. This includes integrating with other business systems. Some examples are a customer relationship management (CRM) platform or an employee experience app.
With an effective ATS, you can expect several benefits for your recruitment team:
- Reduced costs
- Faster time-to-hire
- Less time spent on admin
- Quicker onboarding
- Actionable insights from reporting
- Automated communications
- Greater efficiency for every process
- Easy candidate feedback for every touchpoint
11 ATS Features Your Recruitment Software Must Have
At first glance, the world of applicant tracking solutions is lush and green. On closer inspection, many options aren’t as viable as they first appear. Here are the must-have features for any talent acquisition software that you consider.
1. Job Board Integration
To attract top talent, your recruiters need to cast their nets on several job boards. If you’re utilizing an ATS, you expect to manage all job listings from one space. Otherwise, why use recruitment software?
With an application management system, you can post a job to multiple popular job boards like LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, and Monster. And this is done with just a few clicks. It’s not only easier to post listings but also to edit and update them.
2. Branded Job Search Portals
Job boards aren’t the only place to look for top talent. Many people interested in your organization will simply visit your website. Rather than use confusing blog posts or sub-par web pages, you want a solution that features branded job search portals.
Job search portals work for internal, external, and agency hiring (you can refer candidates to your central portal for job board listings). This gives candidates consistent job browsing and application experiences.
3. Dynamic Application Forms
Tired of using applications are a bit old hat? The best ATS service providers tailor application forms to each business.
With dynamic application forms, you can stop wasting time picking what form and questions you need to ask for your role. You can set your application form to dynamically ask candidates questions based on: job details like role type, department, business unit; as well as details that the candidate provides. This allows you to find out the right information about the candidate faster and more easily.
4. Resume/CV Parsing
The core of an ATS is its resume/CV parsing features. At a minimum, it should provide a resume database that is fully searchable with keywords, tags, and filters.
More advanced recruitment software comes with automated resume/CV parsing. Your recruiters can highlight and select the most important criteria. Once set up, the software will automatically filter out the weak candidates so you can focus on the strongest applicants.
With Oleeo’s Search & Match tool, you can take your parsing to the next level! When you create a job in Oleeo, the Search & Match tool will search the job description for skills that you are looking for, and compare that to the skills found in candidates’ resumes/CVs from your candidate bank. Search & Match will then present you with a ranked list of candidates that are suitable for your job.
5. Anonymous Screening
Research shows that diverse and inclusive companies are 36% more likely to outperform their competitors. Besides performance reasons, the majority of top talent wants organizations that promote diversity.
Building your company culture starts during the recruitment process. Oleeo’s Intelligent Talent Acquisition platform makes diversity and inclusion a priority. Anonymous screening helps eliminate unconscious bias from the early stages of the recruitment process. Oleeo’s parsing technology can also provide screeners with an anonymised version of candidates’ resumes/CVs.
The automated screening will ignore information such as name and gender and instead focus on the keywords most aligned with the role. With hidden bias vanquished, your company will grow its ranks with greater diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I).
6. Candidate Bank Management
A necessary feature of any ATS is a candidate bank. This capability provides a central database to store applications and manage candidate relationships. The first aspect is important for ease of accessibility to resumes and CVs for your team.
Candidate relationship management features help you build a good talent pipeline. Similar to a CRM, you can nurture desirable candidates that weren’t a good fit for a current vacancy. This is critical for maintaining contact with applicants who make it to final interviews.
A candidate bank streamlines communication with people who didn’t get the job. It also provides an opportunity to give them valuable feedback. Such communication helps build and maintain healthy relationships. And you never know; those applicants could be a perfect fit for something else further down the line.
As mentioned in the parsing section, Oleeo’s Search & Match tool can leverage your candidate bank so that whenever you create a new job, you will already have a ranked list of suitable candidates from your candidate bank that are ready to interview. Being able to go straight from job creation to inviting candidates for an interview on the same day massively cuts down on your Cost and Time to Hire!
7. Automated and Dynamic Workflows
AI and automation powers the best applicant tracking systems. These capabilities let you build customized workflows that simplify repetitive tasks during recruitment. Automated workflows can save your HR team from the pain of admin as well as reducing inevitable user error. They also improve the applicant experience.
Look for end-to-end intelligent automation capabilities that include:
- Pre-boarding forms and pre-employment communications, such as a welcome email
- Reference and background checks
- Bulk Processing of applications and resumes
- Scheduling of single, multiple, and panel interviews
8. Interview Management
We’ve established that perusing resumes and taking notes possess a strenuous mundanity. However, it’s interviews that typically require the most significant time investment. You want ATS software with plenty of interview management features to make the process as painless as possible.
A key feature to look for is calendar integrations that sync up schedules across your interviewing team. You also want a platform that integrates with your DE&I tools like anonymous screening.
Other key must-have capabilities include:
- Virtual Interview scheduling with shareable meeting links
- Self-scheduling- candidates can reschedule and cancel appointments as needed
- High volume interviews event and assessment center management
- Mobile interviews and automated collection of interview feedback
Top talent recruitment solutions come with dynamic and automated interview management tools. These work seamlessly with your talent pool and recruiting efforts. Interview scheduling better aligns with each job type and employee persona.
9. Secure, Electronic Signatures
Signatures might seem like a tiny thing, but they are the bane of HR departments around the world. Completed yet unsigned documents create delays. Electronic signatures have a significant impact on contracts and other pre-employment forms.
A comprehensive applicant tracking system is a hub for securely storing documents. These platforms also empower applicants to send signed, auditable electronic offers and contracts.
With an ATS, your HR team can rest knowing all hiring documents are secure and legally signed as well as finalize hires faster.
10. Dashboards and Reporting
One of the biggest ATS benefits is gaining insights into your recruiting process. It starts by collecting all data into one space. Any platform will have a semblance of reporting and analytics. You want recruitment software that lets you track vital metrics like time-to-hire and cost-per-hire.
Solutions like Oleeo Recruit provide you with at-a-glance reporting with customizable dashboards. That way, your hiring team proactively can adjust and improve the recruitment process.
Dashboard overviews also give managers a quick look at how each candidate is progressing. It can also highlight bottlenecks that may need addressing in order to improve Time to Hire and candidate experience.
You want rich reporting features that offer a variety of widgets, graphs, table lists, and quick links. This allows your team to tailor visuals and generate reports according to need. With Oleeo’s Report Hub tool, you can create detailed reports and schedule them to be emailed out at regular intervals to key stakeholders within your business. This allows you to keep stakeholders happy and informed while focusing on the recruitment at hand instead of wasting precious time building the same report every month.
11. Social Media Applications
The Pew Research Centre found that more than 81% of adults have at least one social media account. LinkedIn and even places like Instagram have become vital recruiting pipelines. There is ample opportunity for building touchpoints with social recruiting.
Many ATSs integrate social sharing with job posting features. This makes it easy for you to share links to your branded job portal or job board listings. You will also want to look for codeless social share button widgets that your team can add to job ads.
Oleeo Recruit goes beyond social media sharing with Social Apply. This feature empowers job seekers to complete application forms with their social media accounts. Remove friction from the application process and be rewarded with strong, diverse candidates.
Help Your Hiring Team With Unbeatable ATS Software
Businesses with volume recruiting need ATS software like humans need oxygen. Applicant tracking systems help your team work smarter and more effectively. Recruitment solutions also enhance the application process and boost candidate engagement.
At the end of the day, you want a candidate management tool that helps you bring in the best talent. That’s why Oleeo Recruit is the ATS software you need. Find out for yourself and book a consultation with our team today!
FAQs
What is the primary purpose of an applicant tracking system?
An applicant tracking system’s primary purpose is to streamline the recruitment and hiring processes. Businesses that use an ATS can manage and track candidates from a centralized hub. Applicant tracking systems also aim to improve the applicant experience.
ATS features include automated resume/CV screening, interview management, and dashboard reporting. Solutions like Oleeo automate mundane admin tasks so your recruiters can spend time finding top talent.
What are the benefits of an applicant tracking system?
Applicant tracking systems come with a long list of benefits. Volume recruitment software like Oleeo is driven by automation and AI. Our recruitment software is fully customizable for your business. Highly-tailored solutions like ours save you time by eliminating administrative tasks.
