Talent Acquisition has changed forever. Rising volatility and competition have dramatically changed the way you source talent. Remote work has transformed the way you hire. The great resignation is reshaping how you manage and retain employees. Job openings have reached record heights, putting recruiters under pressure. Clearly, the first generation ATS hasn’t moved fast enough to meet the challenges of the day. What do you need to stay competitive in this new world?

Table of Contents

• A traditional ATS is no longer enough
• Compelling candidate experience
• Engaged hiring managers
• Productive recruiters
• Take our ATS Quiz!

A traditional ATS is no longer enough

An applicant tracking system, often referred to as an ATS, is a software application that automates the hiring process. Applicant Tracking Systems were originally designed to store job applications and track applicants through the process. Over time, their capabilities expanded to incorporate candidate sourcing and hiring, among other recruitment needs. The problem is that many of these newer functionalities were designed to be process-centric rather than candidate and engagement-centric. Because these new functionalities were bolted on to the legacy solution, and not developed as an integrated tool, the UX is often clunky and not easy for recruiters to use.

Today, organizations need to be agile and engagement-focused to attract, select and hire the best talent at scale. This is achieved when the 3 pillars of Hiring Success are aligned: candidates have a compelling experience, recruiters are productive, and hiring teams are engaged. If you’re struggling to achieve this with your ATS, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s explore some of the critical capabilities you should look for to achieve your hiring goals.  

Compelling candidate experience

Qualified candidates are a lot like prospective customers. They have bargaining power and lots of options. Their entire experience matters – from how candidates learn about your company, to how you interact with them, to the tools they use to apply. To find and engage them, recruiters need to think like marketers. An ATS that only addresses the bottom of the funnel (candidates trying to apply for jobs) will not position your team for hiring success. Instead, you need to look for a robust set of recruitment marketing features that will help you attract passive candidates and engage them towards conversion. 

A career site that’s geared for conversions

Most ATSs offer basic career sites – static job pages with long lists of open positions. This might have worked in the 90s, but in 2022, your career site needs to do a lot more. It should be part of  your recruitment marketing tool belt, and it should be used in a more strategic way. Think about this: about 70% of job seekers start their search on Google. They do some high-level research. They want to educate themselves about the market and their specific role, and possibly your company and your product before they decide to apply. A career site that contains high quality, personalized content that’s optimized for search helps you attract them. We have seen companies using this strategy increase the number of organic search conversions by 40%. 

The success of your career site will also be determined by its ease of use. Candidates want to be able to apply quickly and easily, on the device they choose. Long and drawn out application forms are things of the past. 

Besides an optimized career site, you need tools to build a digital marketing funnel. That’s where programmatic advertising comes in.  

Programmatic job advertising and sourcing 

Your talent acquisition team needs tools that will help them discover top talent, understand what they are looking for and attract them with targeted campaigns. A first generation ATS should help you post jobs to your job page. A second generation ATS should post automatically to job boards, LinkedIn and other channels. A third generation ATS goes further: it intelligently places ads on job boards that drive the highest conversion for each job type, and dynamically shifts budget to the highest priority roles. Modern ATSs need to have a sophisticated job advertising capability that is pipeline aware, automated, and dynamically allocates budget to the highest-converting job boards.

Obviously not everyone who lands on your job postings will be ready to apply. But that’s ok because you can invite them to subscribe to your newsletter or job alerts. Once candidates make it into this talent pool, you need candidate relationship management (CRM) capabilities to nurture them towards conversion. 

Candidate nurturing and talent relationship management

According to Fosway, “Applicant Tracking System vendors without a TRM-offering are at high risk of being replaced.” An ATS with CRM or TRM capabilities helps you nurture candidates and match them with the right roles. This critical functionality should also help you track all touchpoints and candidate journeys in one system, just like you track customers. 

These recruitment marketing capabilities help you find the right talent and engage them with a compelling experience, so you can ultimately convince them to apply. This brings us to the second pillar of hiring success. 

Engaged hiring managers

According to recent findings from Josh Bersin, collaboration between recruiting and hiring managers is the number one indicator of high performance talent acquisition. This is where effective applicant tracking, evaluation and collaboration play a critical role. 

Applicant tracking

The original ATS was designed to move a paper or email-based process to a computerized system so that recruiters could scale. A modern ATS is more like a system of record, a single source of truth across the entire talent acquisition process. It should make it easy for recruiters to work with many different candidates and spot an applicant’s status quickly, across multiple workflows. It should include advanced candidate search functionalities. It should also help you screen and evaluate candidates faster. 

Evaluation

Modern ATSs come with chatbots and automated Q&A or screening tools to help you speed up the evaluation process at the beginning. Some also include AI capabilities that help you screen hundreds of candidates down to dozens, and create a shortlist of potential matches. Once the recruitment team sources the right talent and makes the key connections, it’s up to the hiring team to close the YES candidates. With the right data at hand, the hiring team is better positioned to collaborate with their recruiting counterparts. 

Collaboration

Modern ATSs should foster collaboration with hiring managers so you can make better and more informed decisions. For example, it should enable you to assign focus areas to each interviewer. It should allow interviewers to collaborate on their findings, in a way that minimizes bias and groupthink. It should come with a central messaging engine and let you configure tasks and notifications to keep your team on track. 

Productive recruiters

As we discussed above, talent acquisition teams that are highly productive operate more like marketing and sales teams. We talked a lot about the importance of collaboration throughout the process. Recruiter productivity and hiring optimization are just as important, especially at a time when job openings are at an all-time high. 

Analytics and AI to improve decision-making

Great recruiting teams know “their numbers” and leverage them to not only prioritize tasks across the hiring spectrum, but also provide accurate hiring forecasts and achieve desired business outcomes. A legacy ATS is not positioned to support this. Legacy solutions don’t capture nearly enough data to assess hiring performance. Much less to measure if your hiring process is working for or against the bottom line.

An ATS with robust analytics provides deep insights through trend analyses on historical hiring decisions and dashboards on pipeline performances, with all the data stored in one place. Josh Bersin’s latest study on global TA teams reports that high-impact TA teams are 6x more likely to use AI and predictive analytics and see 30% greater profitability compared to those that don’t use these tools.

Internal mobility

The great resignation is keeping recruiters and HR teams up at night. But according to a recent Sapient Insights survey, only 22% of companies have an internal mobility program in place. Recruiters should be looking for talent internally and externally. The problem is that they don’t have the right tools. Companies are at risk of losing their talent to the competition if they don’t compete on an equal footing. 

A modern ATS should enable you to build an internal career site and build talent pools of team members who are interested in different career paths. Match people to jobs using AI matching and set up internal interviews the same way you do external interviews. 

Onboarding support

Successful recruitment teams also know that the first 3 months of employment are the most vulnerable period. In some industries, a poor onboarding experience can lead to a 22% turnover rate. That’s why many are looking for a comprehensive solution that will address this critical part of the journey as well. Your onboarding process should not just be about legal formalities, it should facilitate a smooth transition from applicant to employee. 

The final word & our ATS Quiz

As Fosway explains, “standalone ATSs that only cover the lower part of the recruitment funnel are a thing of the past.” Your ATS should go beyond workflow automation and candidate tracking. It should incorporate recruitment marketing for active and passive candidates, and career sites that boost your employer brand. It should also facilitate enhanced HR decision making based on your desired business results. Moreover, it should be built for today’s complex talent market, offering you a competitive advantage with internal mobility features and a great candidate experience that’s optimized down to the onboarding stage. 

Take our quiz to find out if you should replace your ATS. 

Don’t lose great talent to the competition because of bad recruiting software—here’s why your hiring team needs a TA solution that makes no compromises.

Recruiting is changing on a fundamental level. Today, 36 percent of the US workforce currently freelances, and reports project this figure will grow to over 50 percent within the next decade. Conversations about the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning replacing human jobs are at the forefront of our social consciousness, and recruiting is becoming exponentially more difficult in this economy.

Traditional sourcing channels are no longer yielding the quality candidates they used to, and truly exceptional talent is not actively seeking new work opportunities, though 82 percent admit they are open to them.

As a result, recruiting is shifting from a reactive function into a proactive one, with a greater focus on candidates. Attracting passive candidates requires your company brand to stand out from others, your job offers to be highly competitive, and your recruiting practices to be fast-moving and engaging. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is through feature-rich recruiting software.

The recruitment market is currently worth over $215 billion worldwide, and at a projected growth of 5.6 percent over the next few years, is estimated to be worth over $330 billion by 2025. Today’s market vendors offer talent acquisition suites and recruitment technology solutions to organizations at the enterprise, SMB, and startup level. With so many offerings available in the market—HCRM, ATS, CRM—it can be difficult to wade through the alphabet soup to decide which solution will work best for your organization.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) systems are top choices for recruiters; however, many believe that they don’t need CRM if they already have an ATS. In reality, top recruiters rely on a solution that offers both CRM and ATS in one platform, as each focuses a specific function within the hiring process.

But what’s the difference between an ATS and CRM? And why should you use both in order to source, attract, and hire the best talent?

What is an ATS?

An ATS is a type of recruiting software that facilitates and optimizes the hiring process. It acts as a repository where recruiters and hiring managers can create and post job openings, collect and organize applications, and screen, evaluate, select, and move candidates through every step of the hiring process in one platform.

What is CRM?

A CRM system is designed to strengthen relationships between potential candidates and recruiters so that recruiters can use these candidates for future job openings. In this way, CRMs are considered part of Recruitment Marketing strategy, allowing TA professionals to create talent communities and deliver targeted messaging that helps build and nurture relationships with passive talent. That way, when it comes time to fill a rec, recruiters already have a pool of vetted candidates from which to choose.

What’s the Difference Between an ATS and CRM?

CRM systems work to scale a recruiter’s sourcing efforts by attracting passive candidates ahead of demand. Meanwhile, ATSs are built to make selection and hiring as streamlined as possible by eliminating unnecessary administrative tasks and improving the three most important hiring metrics: hiring velocity, hiring budget, and net hiring score.

In other words, an ATS is a workflow and compliance tool for managing applicants, while a CRM system is a pool of all passive and active candidates, as well as previous applicants already in your system. A bad ATS does little more than execute repetitive functions, meaning recruiting teams waste time on non-value added tasks rather than focusing on strategic initiatives.
Here are some signs that your ATS is not fully optimized with CRM:

• Multiple entry fields that require manual input
• Candidates are categorized by their current jobs or work rather than their desired work.
• No way to evaluate the candidate-recruiter relationship (i.e. measuring the candidate’s level of activity or engagement)
• No ROI (time to hire, cost per hire, quality of hire are still low)
• ATS functionality is mostly administrative work
• Hard-to-fill positions remain open for months

Why Integrating CRM With an ATS Makes Sense

Today’s candidate-centric work economy means that companies need to be aware of candidate experience now more than ever, and technology solutions that prioritize this will be critical for the success of talent acquisition leaders. Between 70 and 80 percent of recruiting happens during the pre-applicant stage, so delivering the right messaging to the right people at the right time gives companies an advantage when attracting top talent in today’s ultra-competitive market.

This can only happen when hiring teams leverage a powerful and comprehensive TA suite that seamlessly integrates CRM with an ATS in one platform. Recruiters who maintain their talent pools with CRM systems can make better, data-driven hiring decisions. And because CRM nurtures strong relationships with past, current, and future candidates, speed and efficiency are built in when it’s time to hire, making the applicant’s journey through the ATS a better experience.

With the right tools for the job, all recruiters can make great hires that drive business growth. As future industry trends emerge, the technology solutions designed to meet these demands will evolve in response, and recruiters who stay on top of what today’s exceptional candidates value will be in prime position to hire them.

Hiring is all about predicting the future—is your applicant tracking system doing the same? Here’s a look at five features that aren’t just trends, but must haves for the new year.

Better Buys previously identified the top trends for the ATS solutions market as social media integration, greater emphasis on interviewing and assessment tools (i.e. video interviewing), and predictive analytics. In the two years since that report, recruiters and hiring managers have encountered challenges with reactive hiring, thinning talent pipelines, and a greater need for automated processes—all while fighting to secure great talent.

Looking ahead at 2019, these new demands are driving the future direction of applicant tracking systems across the industry. As companies continue to build out their ATS platforms to be more feature-rich and provide better solutions, here are some of the trends we can look forward to in the coming year.

1. Candidate Relationship Management

With job openings at a record high and unemployment at record low numbers, the competition for great talent is even more fierce. Companies are struggling to hire quality applicants, and many qualified potential candidates are not actively seeking work. Finding the right person for a role will require more robust sourcing tools, and Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) solutions will provide recruiters with stronger talent pools ahead of demand. CRM solutions will ultimately change the recruiting function from reactive to proactive, enhancing talent pipelines before companies post their open jobs.

2. AI

“Gut feeling” prediction of whether a candidate is a good fit for a role isn’t going to cut it in 2019. For example, candidates with impressive diplomas or certifications do not necessarily make great employees, and assessment tools struggle to test for traits like work ethic, a positive attitude, dependability, and working well under pressure.

Recruiters need to know which candidate is most likely to accept a job offer and stay with the team long enough to make an impact. Native AI solutions like SmartAssistant will offer recruiters measurable insights into a candidate’s skills, cultural fit, the likelihood of accepting an offer, and probable retention with greater efficiency, and less bias. AI will also help recruiters make better decisions with candidates who are moving between fields with comparable skills and promote more internal mobility within their organization.

3. Automation

Recruiters are constantly being pressured to fill more roles with the best talent at a faster, more cost-efficient rate, and this means that automation will continue to be a top priority among the best Applicant Tracking Systems. Automation will help optimize repetitive tasks like interview scheduling and applicant pre-screening, but ATS automation in 2019 will include targeted email campaigns and recruitment marketing platforms, allowing recruiters to deliver specific messaging to nurtured talent communities.

According to Rebecca Carr, VP of Product at SmartRecruiters, automating these processes will make “it faster and easier for businesses to build and convert their talent pipeline within one system.” Ultimately, automation and native AI solutions will work together to “challenge the old way of “tracking” candidates through a workflow.”

4. Collaboration and Communication

The future of recruiting is all about “the team” effort, where recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers work in tandem to source, attract, and hire the best talent for their organization. But there’s often a disconnect. If not everyone involved in the hiring process is using the ATS, then time is wasted relaying information and collecting feedback. An ATS should be intuitive and allow for greater communication between all team members, which directly affects an organization’s time to hire and overall candidate experience.

Features like different access levels within an ATS to ensure each person sees the right amount of information and more comprehensive dashboards that give candidates an overview of where they are in the hiring process will be highly valuable in the coming year.

5. Integration

Enterprises are no longer the sole entities in need of end-to-end recruiting solutions. Startups are just as eager to hire great talent for their teams, and are often much faster adopters of new technology. For these organizations, an ATS that offers open APIs and a large marketplace of third-party vendor integrations is highly attractive.

Martin Snyder, President of Main Sequence Technology Inc., argues that, “key drivers of market share changes for 2019 are not likely to be technically revolutionary, but rather more operational efficiency.” Meaning, an ATS that offers features like streamlined integration with email, calendar, and Slack—systems that teams are already using—along with “easier solutions to teach and learn, easier ways to get data in and out, and lower pricing” will become the top choices for enterprises and startups in 2019.

Don’t become the “boiled frog” of Talent Acquisition by sticking with an ATS that is slowing down your company’s hiring process. Here are the warning signs and what to look for instead.

A malady known as “boiled frog syndrome” frequently plagues the HR community. Like the frog who sits placidly in a pot of slowly heating water until it is eventually boiled alive, HR tends to ignore the warning signs that their ATS has begun to hinder—instead of help—the hiring process. At a certain point, it’s time to stop creating workarounds and find something that works.

Why does it matter? Because at the end of the day hiring success is business success. The competitive edge of future businesses will be their ability to attract, select and hire the right talent on demand and on a budget. Modern businesses all leverage powerful and innovative software to optimize their workflow, with recruiters, hiring managers, and staffing firms among the earliest adopters within many organizations, especially when facing demands to source and hire great talent. Of the recruiting software applications designed to enhance recruiting workflow, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) offer many HR teams the flexibility and features necessary to make smarter hiring decisions that are scalable.

How Does an ATS Work?

Applicant Tracking Systems are a type of software that facilitates and optimizes the hiring process. HR teams create and post job openings within the ATS and push them out to the company career page or an external job board. The ATS then monitors the applications that are submitted, screens candidate resumes and CVs, and scores them based on criteria that demonstrate a candidate’s qualifications and fit for the role. After compiling candidate profiles into an ATS, the software monitors the status of all job applications and candidates along every step of the hiring process—from application submission to the job offer.

Not all ATSs Are Created Equal

While the basic idea remains constant across systems, the quality of execution varies greatly. And though changing systems can be onerous, if you are experiencing any of the following, it’s time to find a new ATS before your boiled frog syndrome affects your company’s bottom line.

1. Unable to Automate Annoying Administrative Tasks

Hiring managers and recruiters spend an average of eight hours per week on manual, repetitive tasks that could easily be automated. In addition to the obvious productivity cost, these tasks are a common source of ire for many recruiters. Automating administrative tasks like generating pre-screening questions, drafting interview requests, leaving candidate feedback, and source tracking applications with an ATS can save recruiters and hiring managers precious time and resources to spend on interviewing and sourcing candidates.

Optimization is a main attraction of an ATS, but if your existing software is not capable of replicating your current recruiting workflow or cannot handle the demands placed on it then it’s time to switch.

2. Creates Bottlenecks, Increasing Time to Hire

Recruiters are familiar with the frustrations of bottlenecks in the hiring process, whether it’s a flood of applicants clogging your candidate pipeline or applications waiting in limbo for review by hiring managers. Hiring at a steady cadence is good for your company and its brand, as it decreases overall time to hire, minimizes cost to hire, and creates a better candidate experience (not to mention makes for happier recruiters and hiring managers).

Your ATS should be able to usher candidates through each stage of the hiring process quickly and smoothly, allowing your entire hiring team to make smarter decisions along the way. This means that a quality ATS should offer reports telling you how long a candidate spent at each stage of the hiring process, detailed feedback from hiring managers, and data-driven evaluations of job applicants. If simple candidate decisions are taking too long to execute, then your ATS is not performing one of its key functions.

3. Outdated Keyword-Matching Technology Makes You Miss Candidates with the Actual Skills

Modern ATS systems rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to sort through a huge volume of candidate resumes and CVs by scanning them for specific keywords. This process is simple and effective but can be problematic, especially as the process relies on candidates using exact keywords in their application. As a result, eligible and skilled candidates may be excluded from the hiring process if their resumes don’t contain the right keywords.

In response, the next wave of applicant tracking systems leverage smarter AI tools and natural language processing (NLP) to score candidates and their resumes based on the job requirements and descriptions rather than keywords. These innovations are also important in eliminating recruiter bias from the hiring process.

4. Tracking Falls Short, Leaving You Unable to Replicate Hiring Successes

Finding out where your best candidates come from can help focus your future recruiting efforts, but if your ATS is unable to track various candidate sources—job boards, social media, or recruiting agencies—then you may be spending resources on channels that offer a poor return on your investment.

A good ATS should clearly track candidate sources and give insight into how to build personalized talent communities, enabling hiring teams to manage high-quality talent ahead of demand. Knowing the best channels for candidate sourcing allows recruiters to target passive and active candidates both inside and outside the company network.

5. Prevents You From Scaling Your Hiring Practices

Company growth is good, but what if your ATS can’t keep up? HR should be driving business expansion, not holding it back. To pace the demands of an expanding enterprise—from a startup to a multinational firm—an effective ATS can handle sourcing from multiple channels, support an engaging company career page, and drive more candidate traffic to your recruiting pipeline—all without inflating your hiring budget.

Know When to Make the Call

Legacy recruiting software and applicant tracking systems often fall short when faced with the demands of the modern hiring process. In an era where accessibility to jobs is greater than ever before, the best recruiting software anticipates the needs of modern businesses and candidates who use them. Find out more about how SmartRecruiters revolutionizes applicant tracking system functionality. Already have a legacy system in place? SmartRecruiters also makes it easy to replace an existing ATS.