Whether you’re going through budget cuts or scaling up, you’re probably being asked to do more with less. To make money, your company needs people, and your ATS is essential to getting the right people in the right roles faster. 

The right applicant tracking system properly configured, can save money by increasing recruiter productivity, employee retention, compliance, and speed to hire. Let’s look at all the ways an enterprise-grade ATS can save your company money while making better hires.

1. Automate interview scheduling. Interview scheduling can take up a vast amount of time for recruiters and recruiting coordinators. With SmartRecruiters’ automated scheduling system, food delivery and grocery store business Wolt kept the same number of recruiting coordinators while scaling from 1000 to 6000 employees in just three years.
2. Automate candidate screening. Text messaging chatbots allow you to reach more candidates, screen them all quickly, and schedule interviews without even making a phone call. It can even be done on outdated phones: Anglo American, a mining company, processed 12,500 applications in less than an hour with a text messaging system built for non-internet-enabled phones.
3. Streamline hiring processes. Scorecard hiring brings transparency to the hiring process, allowing teams to make better hiring decisions with a consistent evaluation strategy that covers desired skills, behaviors, and competencies. Increasing retention by using a system that helps you make better hires saves your company money with reduced recruiting costs later on.
4. Improve reporting relevancy: How efficient are your processes? Where are you losing candidates? With role-level drillable dashboards and export to BI tools, you can pinpoint exactly where your hiring process is breaking down and take steps to mitigate roadblocks. Wolt kept its leaders up-to-date by integrating TA analytics into its business intelligence tool. Did we mention that smart volume hiring helped Wolt get acquired by DoorDash?
5. Streamline offers: Your ATS should allow you to make same-day offers that can be signed digitally. With easily configurable offer letters in SmartRecruiters, you won’t lose candidates before they get another offer — and you won’t waste resources looking for another person to fill the vacancy left by the one who got away.
6. Automate consent and candidate data retention. Non-compliance can be costly, so you must ensure that candidates consent to each type of interaction. Additionally, your system should be configured to automatically handle candidate data retention as required by law in your local jurisdiction to minimize the risk of non-compliance.
7. Empower internal mobility and referrals. An ATS with an internal jobs portal that simplifies employee job search and referrals improves your employee experience, increases retention, and boosts morale with referral bonuses. After just three months with SmartRecruiters Employee Portal, telecommunications company CityFibre filled 40% of its positions with referrals and internal hires. 
8. Advertise in the right places.  The old adage about advertising, “I know that half of my money is wasted, but I don’t know which half” is rendered obsolete with the automated ad spend adjustments in a modern ATS. With SmartJobs, you can manage all your job board contracts all in one view and optimize spending in real-time.  
9. Amplify your employer brand. Employer branding and a careers page may require some upfront investment, but this is the place where spending a little can save you a lot. Candidates can self-select and get inspired by your mission and growth opportunities. For Aspen Skiing Company, better job visibility on a central careers site resulted in a 24% reduction in recruitment marketing spend.
10. Streamline your recruiting tech stack. Fees add up and people waste time chasing reports from system to system. By bringing a CRM, recruiting, onboarding, internal mobility, and referrals all under one roof, you get analytics in one place and reduce the IT burden.
11. Integrate with time and money-saving tools. Perhaps your ATS can’t do everything, but it can make it easier for you by integrating with tools that bring you time and money savings. Background checks, reference checking, and AI-powered sourcing are just a few of the solutions in your recruiting tech stack that promote efficiency and time savings when integrated into your ATS.

As we’ve shown, an applicant tracking system impacts the amount of time recruiters, hiring managers, recruiting coordinators, legal, and IT staff spend on getting the right people in the door – and that time is money.

For a deep dive into how money in multiple ways across your talent acquisition function, download our Guide to Evaluating the Business Value of a Talent Acquisition Platform.

In addition to more details the 11 items listed here, you’ll get information on 5 business value drivers for talent acquisition and 2 checklists to help your organization prioritize its TA platform search. Get in touch with us today and see how we can help save your company time and money by creating a more efficient talent acquisition process. 

Local hiring managers are frequently tasked with making recruiting decisions at many global organizations, but are their decisions only as good as the technology behind them?

Decentralized hiring models are like beehives, with different company branches each managing their own roles to contribute to the organization’s overall success. This structure is common for many large and enterprise-level companies, which benefit from shifting staffing and recruitment responsibilities to local hiring managers in order to streamline processes, boost productivity, and provide a greater candidate experience.

In these situations, decentralized hiring systems are more effective when paired with an innovative, collaborative, and flexible Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that fits the unique needs of the business while maintaining consistent employer brand throughout. There are also a number of additional benefits to this type of recruitment model:

1. Greater Productivity. Decentralized hiring quickens the pace of decision making so that hiring managers can move at the speed of their market.

2. Localized Experience. Hiring managers can select candidates based on their knowledge of local markets and the individual needs of their branch.

3. Personal Touch. Communication between candidates and the hiring manager is more individualized, which positively impacts the candidate’s experience.

4. Empowerment. Hiring managers can operate independently without unnecessary involvement from corporate headquarters.

All of these benefits sound great in theory; however they become a bit more convoluted because—just like that ice cream stand in the middle of the desert—a successful decentralized hiring process may very well be a mirage for some companies. Depending on the company’s ATS, implementing a decentralized hiring model could have a negative impact on business.

For ill-equipped hiring managers, battling industry challenges like shortages of skilled local talent becomes exponentially more difficult with a subpar ATS. Outdated systems unable to handle high volumes of resumes, provide realistic follow-up times, or lack collaboration & transparency into the hiring process often leave managers feeling isolated and unsupported. Without the right tools to make great hires, managers of decentralized hiring models may also feel:

5. Lack of Consistency. Without a clear sense of the company’s best hiring practices, local managers can easily run into problems of inconsistent branding, poor candidate experience, and clunky workflows.

6. Reliance on Contractors. Many hiring managers don’t have the time to play recruiter. This often leads to contracting outside agencies to provide specialized services, causing further strain on limited hiring budgets.

7. Greater Industry Challenges. Resource-strapped departments might flounder in the face of obstacles unique to their industry. For example:

Retail:

• Challenge: Last year’s holiday sales accounted for nearly 20% of all retail industry sales. At the same time, approximately 1 in every 4 retailers are unable to hire enough temporary workers to meet the spikes in staffing needs during the holiday season.
• Effect: An academic study of a large US apparel chain found that 33% customers who had a poor experience cited not being able to locate sales help as the main offender, resulting in at least 6% loss of all possible sales.

Manufacturing:

• Challenge: Manufacturers report a moderate to severe shortage of skilled workers. Plus, a significant portion of the manufacturing workforce is nearing retirement age, and manufacturing careers not appeal to younger people entering the workforce.
• Effect: The US National Association of Manufacturers warns that 2.4 million manufacturing jobs could go unfilled between now and 2028, according to a recent joint study with Deloitte.

Technology:

• Challenge: Rapid growth and scale, along with fierce competition for top talent leaves many companies struggling to hire workers with specialized skills like: business intelligence, cyber security, and software development.
• Effect: Seventy percent of IT companies expect challenges in hiring mid-level tech talent in the next year, particularly for cyber security jobs.

The immediate impact of many of these challenges affects many organizations’ bottom lines and employer brand. Tied to this is the impact on a business’ hiring metrics, from hiring velocity to NPS score. Best-of-breed technology solutions can address these industry challenges with robust functionality:

• Source candidates through CRM and recruitment marketing campaigns
• Complete transparency backed by on-demand analytics
• Platform customization and global configurability across all locations
• Intuitive UX and mobile functionality
• Innovative service with continual improvements

End-to-end Talent Acquisition suites allow hiring teams to adapt processes to navigate each of these industry-specific challenges. This means that, in any situation, a hiring manager has the tools needed to attract, select, and hire the best talent on demand and on budget.

December saw 600 words added to the Oxford English Dictionary, here are four recruiting terms you should know, but won’t find in the latest annex.

Every quarter the Oxford English Dictionary adds new words to the recorded annals of the language. The latest update in December 2018 codified gems such as: crowd-surfer, Debbie Downer, sausage fest, and 597 other words we don’t know how we ever lived without. And, as impressive as this number is, we lament that many avant-garde recruiting terms still live outside the formal canon.

Maybe it’s the boom of human capital management innovation or the proclivity of talent acquisition (TA) practitioners to be active on social media, but there are scads of creative terms in the recruiting industry that deserve to be shared (at least as much as sausage fest).

Here are four terms we think will make a splash in 2019. We encourage you to add to our list by tagging us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

Degree Inflation

A phenomenon where a university degree is required for jobs that previously did not need one.  A report from Harvard Business school reveals this trend to be prevalent with middle-skill jobs like administrative assistants and production supervisors in the U.S.

Example: 16 percent of current production supervisors graduated from a four-year college, yet 67 percent of the openings for such positions list “bachelor’s degree” as a required skill.

According to researchers, the cause of this trend is two-fold: 1) The fast-changing nature of many middle-skills jobs. 2) Employers misperceptions of the economics of investing in quality talent at the non-graduate level.

The reality is that college graduates are more likely to possess the requisite hard skills, such as mastery of Microsoft suite, than their non-grad peers, while both groups tend to exhibit soft skill deficits such as poor written and verbal communication.

Researchers found that employers gradually began using ‘university degrees’ as a ‘proxy’ for a certain depth of competency, not realizing that the short-term benefit (technology know-how) would be overshadowed by hidden costs – higher salaries and turnover for college graduates in middle-skill positions when compared to their non-grad peers. All while both groups perform similarly in measures such as  “time to reach full productivity”, “time to promote”, “level of productivity”, or amount of oversight required.

Jobs that are associated with middle-class stability and upward mobility (supervisors, support specialists, sales representatives, inspectors and testers, clerks, and secretaries, and administrative assistants) are now out of reach for many Americans, even those with experience, as some automated tools weed them out regardless.

Ghosting

A millennial dating term for ignoring a former paramour until they get the hint has entered the HR lexicon, and no one is in love.

‘Ghosting’, in TA-world, is when a once enthused and reachable candidate becomes incommunicado without warning. This can happen at any stage of hiring, including between signing a contract and the starting day. Some HR folks have even reported that employees have begun ghosting in place of tendering a resignation.

Two important things to keep in mind about ghosting are…

1. 1. Employers/HR/Recruiters are definitely guilty of ghosting candidates. Now that it’s candidates market, applicants have little to no guilt about doing the same.

1. Employee ghosting can be a sign of culture problems or disconnect, so if there is a particular supervisor/department/location in which this happens frequently… it may be worth a look.

Note: ‘Ghost’ as a verb was added to most dictionaries in 2017 in reference to dating. We’re still waiting for an entry about leaving recruiters in the lurch.

Talent Acquisition Suite

As more software solutions enter the world of hiring, HR and IT struggle to maintain a clean flow of data within an organization. Enter the talent acquisition suite (TAS), or the next generation applicant tracking system (ATS). As opposed to legacy ATS, TAS supports deep integration through open APIs. Suites boost efficiency and compliance as recruiters no longer have to feed data through multiple systems.

Rebecca Carr Sr. VP of Success & Sales Engineering at SmartRecruiters shares her predictions for 2019, saying,

“Recruiting software is evolving to meet market demand for end-to-end talent acquisition platforms that help companies drive productivity… The trend towards native sourcing, automated screening, campaigning, and recruitment marketing platforms is on the rise, making it faster and easier for businesses to build and convert their talent pipeline within one system. Otherwise, open APIs that support “deep integrations” with best-of-breed products is needed in order to grow efficiently.”

Learning Quotient

Also known as LQ, learning quotient is a person’s ability and enthusiasm to learn new skills and adapt to new situations. And it’s the latest metric employers are eager to measure in future employees.

The fast-pace of digitization makes certain skills – like cloud computing, UX design, and data science – high-demand, thus dividing the workforce into the haves (those with right competencies) and the have-nots (lacking the right competencies). The latter is left scrambling to find work, while employers struggle to fill their need for the former.

In answer to this conundrum, organizations are ramping up their learning and development programs, and looking to hire candidates who will take advantage of these resources.

Jennifer Carpenter, VP of global TA at Delta Air Lines suggests creating virtual “learning lounges”, where corporate learning materials can be accessed by the public, and recruiters can contact frequent/high-performing users.

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.

The surest way to earn 3x revenue and 3x profit as your peers? Invest in recruiting.

The current global marketplace is highly dependent on technology, but when it comes to finding and hiring the best candidates, much of the tech deployed to do so is out of date. With power shifting from hiring teams to candidates themselves, coupled with forecasted talent shortages in the coming years, companies need to assure they have the best systems in place for candidates to apply quickly, easily, and on the go.

Recruitment systems, usually integrated into blanket enterprise resource planning (ERP) models are notoriously clunky. Tech reminiscent of the dot-com boom has no place in a world run from smartphones and social media. Management often misidentifies talent acquisition as weeding through resumes, and chooses an ERP with back-office HR functions in mind. That’s because most ERP models specialize in managing specific aspects of HR like payroll, benefits, and performance management. While settling for an ERP with a “good enough” Applicant Tracking System can seem like a simple solution, the Boston Consultant Group found that companies who make the investment to assure they’re recruiting the best talent earn three times the revenue and two times the profit of their peers.

With the world is moving at an ever-faster pace, candidates aren’t compelled to fill out long applications. With one-step-apply features on sites like LinkedIn, many expect to send their CV with the press of a button. A recent CareerBuilder study found “the more in-demand a skill set, the less likely a job seeker with that skill set will jump through hoops.”

Thus Recruiting has had to turn itself inside out, and put effort not only on intake, but acting more like a marketing department, attracting potential candidates to their organization before the usual process is underway. In a survey of SmartRecruiters’ Marketplace partners, 30 percent said recruiting marketing tools were what they were most likely to invest in this year.

While slow, some organizations are waking up to the problem more quickly than others. According to a recent IDC survey, 23 percent changed ATS solutions in the past 18 months —and another 22 percent plan to make a change in the next 18 months. But this doesn’t necessarily mean going for a complete overhaul.

Many still turn to a Recruiting Point Solution (RPS), specialized software that supplements the shortfalls of an organization’s blanket ATS. Many companies look to RPS to “plug holes” in their aging ERP package, and though this might seem like a quick fix, the problems associated with having an RPS and an ERP can be numerous. Instead of addressing fundamental problems in their HR software, companies end up doubling-up on recruiting programs, and overpaying. Additionally, many ERP’s operate as individual entities, making transferring data between a company’s ERP and its band-aid RPS an IT nightmare.

For companies willing to leave ERP behind, there’s best of breed (BoB) – systems organized like a digital lunch buffet. Companies pick and choose relevant software across all fields of HR – talent acquisition, talent management, and workforce management. This allows companies to ditch their expensive and overly configured ERPs for a conglomeration of sleek, targeted systems. Some BoBs, like SmartRecruiters, also offer a marketplace, an integrated collection of third-party technology that provides an easy platform for companies to continue to integrate into modern systems. Beginning with the SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite, an engine that gives hiring teams the newest tools for recruitment marketing, applicant tracking, and onboarding, companies can continue to acquire top-of-the-line HR software that encompasses functions like payroll and onboarding. The benefits of BoB don’t stop there.

The SmartRecruiters Marketplace is fully integrated within a single system, allowing data to be transferred seamlessly between programs as if it was a single ERP platform, with a range of third-party services organizations need to keep ahead of the curve in today’s war for talent. In the SmartRecruiters Marketplace survey of where this year’s big spends will occur, tools to address self-scheduling, onboarding, and analytics were only outranked by methods to address diversity hiring – essential to be seen as forward-thinking and inclusionary in 2018.

Additionally, the pick-and-choose aspect allows companies to slim down their HR systems to only what they need, saving resources that would have previously been wasted on an overpriced ERP.

BoB systems are a multi-faceted solution to a multi-faceted problem, providing a platform for companies to choose specialized HR software from industry leaders, all integrated into a single BoB system.

Recruiting Tech Options — ERP or BoB?

• ERP models are all-inclusive Human Resources packages, a blanket software aimed at integrating all of a company’s HR needs onto a single platform. Unfortunately, many of these behemoths base their programs on outdated technology; and, due to the production of all HR software being delegated to a single team, many features of ERP’s, especially those based around recruitment, lack the features present in a more specialized Talent Acquisition Suite.
• ERP models often specialize in managing specific aspects of HR like payroll, benefits, and performance management, while other features, mainly those centered around recruitment, feel tacked-on, in order to present a complete HR package to the market.
• Many companies look to Recruiting Point Solutions (RPS), in order to “plug holes” in their aging ERP package. The problems associated with this can be numerous. Instead of addressing fundamental problems in their HR software, companies end up doubling-up on recruiting programs, and subsequently overpaying. Additionally, many ERP’s operate as individual entities, making transferring data between a company’s ERP and its band-aid RPS difficult and time-consuming, creating a disconnect between the candidate and hiring team.
• Talent Acquisition Suites bring the integration of all-inclusive ERP’s and the modernity of RPS’ into a single package. Designed to target one specific aspect of the hiring process, TAS’ are at the forefront of technological innovation. TAS’ track job candidates from the moment they show interest in a position, through to the end of the hiring process.
• Due to its modernity, a TAS will be able to integrate with job-posting sites like Monster and LinkedIn, allowing a company to advertise positions, review applications, schedule interviews, and make hiring decisions seamlessly, all from a single platform.
• SmartRecruiters is constantly updating their software in order to stay cutting edge. “When you buy an off-the-shelf ATS, it’s out of date as soon as you buy it.” (Tracey Allison)
• Although ATS systems have become the industry standard for Talent Acquisition, Aptitude Research found that 51 percent of companies are employing multiple ATS systems, and only 20 percent of companies are satisfied with their current ATS.
• The SmartRecruiters Marketplace allows companies to pick-and-choose their HR software from industry leaders, all of which is fully integrated into the same same system.

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.

For this independent music distributor, staying relevant in a continually disrupted industry means taking a non-traditional approach to client needs and staffing.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, physical formats like CDs dominated the music industry, comprising over 99 percent of all worldwide revenue. The Big Six labels—Warner, EMI, Sony, BMG, Universal, and PolyGram—controlled nearly all music distribution rights and reaped all profits. By the mid-2000s, however, it was a different world. iPods replaced Discmans, iTunes replaced record stores, and digital services began to take hold as the new industry standard.

When Napster blew up the Big Six oligopoly in 2001, it took the bottom out of record-store revenues and opened the market for the kind of on-demand streaming we enjoy today. While the new consumer norm is to create networks on streaming platforms like Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube, industry profits have not recovered. Despite three years of consecutive growth, music industry revenues in 2017 were just 68 percent of what they were in 1999. As a whole, the industry raked in $17 billion last year, up 8 percent from the previous year, but those figures fall short compared to the $25 billion of 1999.

This mix-and-match, playlist-based behavior reflects the free-flowing nature of today’s digital economy – complete with the struggle to profit from subscription models and subsist on paltry ad sales. So how can an independent, digital music distributor navigate such an inhospitable industry and still turn a profit?

In a world where even the definition of “record label” is up for debate, Ingrooves Music Group walks the line between distribution company and marketing agency, liaising between artists/labels and third-party retailers like Spotify or Apple Music. The company also tracks the analytics, managing rights and royalties for its clients.

During the early years of conflict between analog and digital formats, Ingrooves Music Group was founded when entrepreneur Robb McDaniels saw a business opportunity in the nascent digital music scene of 2002: Music was quickly becoming accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and new bands, DJs, and other artists needed help promoting and distributing their music across the web. As part of his mission to create the “digital record label of the future”, McDaniels sought to bridge the gap between music artists and music retailers, offering a platform for more accessible music distribution and artist representation: An artist or label sends Ingrooves a song or album, which is then converted into the proper format and pushed out to iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, and 600 other digital retailers. When someone buys or streams the music, the artist’s royalties are passed along to ­Ingrooves, which pools them and then reimburses the artist. Ingrooves profits by taking a percentage (10%–30%) of an album’s wholesale cost (A typical album ­on iTunes retails for $10 and wholesales for $7).

In the midst of this race for digital domination, people remain a key element of the music industry, and Ingrooves understands that at the end of the day, it’s not algorithms, but people, that truly matter. “That’s just the core of HR, and our job is to take care of our clients,” says David Kroes, who had been heading Ingrooves’ hiring drives for technical and creative teams since January, 2016, captaining recruiters, hiring managers, and employees through the modern music industry.

With offices in Los Angeles, New York, London, Berlin, Oslo, and Victoria, BC, Ingrooves currently generates around $150 million in annual revenue and holds a two percent market share of recorded music in the US. To stay on top of competition within the industry, Ingrooves is pressured to manage a highly successful global team. A poor hire could cost the company, and in an industry feverishly scraping away at profits, that is one mistake Ingrooves cannot afford.

Hundreds of candidates flood Kroes’ inbox on a regular basis looking to break into the music scene. Unfortunately, the reality of pacing such an uncertain industry is that many employees become obsolete and burn out much faster than in other organizations. “The music industry is a lot like surfing” says Kroes. “People keep coming back even though it’s not the most forgiving environment, but their love for the industry is what keeps people loyal.”

The Ingrooves business model is a far cry from that of the brick-and-mortar retailers like Tower Records—the last of which shuttered in December 2006, more or less the final breath of the American record industry as we knew it—but as Ingrooves emerged, its practices were already forward-thinking, earning mainstream recognition as one of the first independent distribution companies to partner with iTunes. The music industry, however, is a fickle beast. In a few short years, on-demand streaming would incite another format revolution that, to this day, shows no signs of slowing.

Figures released by IFPI’s Global Music Trends 2018 report show that streaming accounts for 38 percent of total recorded music revenue, making it the industry’s single largest profit driver for the first time ever, with 176 million users of paid streaming services contributing to a 41 percent growth over last year.

With real money to be made from this new format ($5.6 billion in 2017) companies like Spotify, Apple, Google, and Amazon all currently offer dedicated, paid streaming platforms. Additionally, video streaming services like YouTube comprise more than half of on-demand stream time, attracting 1.3 billion total users in 2017, according to the IFPI report. How does Kroes plan on keeping Ingrooves ahead of upcoming changes within the industry while supporting the workforce powering a global music distribution and marketing company?

“At Ingrooves, we went through a situation where we were a teenager for a long time,” he says. “We were a startup and we never really outgrew the startup mode. After I joined the team we really started to realize our opportunity to become an adult.”

Pushing the company into the next phase wasn’t about changing out the old guard for fresh blood, it was about building a “culture of adults” that are adaptable and able to think on their feet. “The culture at Ingrooves is still evolving, and new talent is bringing it in,” says Kroes. “You always want to bring in new perspectives and balance that with experience. To me, experience is the best teacher.”

Kroes came onboard in the midst of company-wide restructuring that required a challenging personnel shift and revamp of its company brand. With a strong grasp on the analytics and reporting side of licensing, publishing, and distribution, Ingrooves doubled down on its high-impact marketing, PR, and promotion, working closer with artists and other industry organizations, to “help them understand and anticipate their needs” before they even knew what to ask for, a paradigm that Kroes carried over into his recruiting practices. Kroes leveraged his decade-plus of experience working in TA, as well as a strong background in philosophy, to reshape the organization’s approach to hiring.

“Media companies, whether TV, movies, or music, are very much people businesses,” he notes. “A lot of talent is not cookie-cutter.” In order to hire both technical and creative roles in tandem, Kroes needed a non-traditional approach, which, he says was made possible with tools like the SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite. “A good recruiter should be looking for ways to find talent that maybe other people haven’t, and SmartRecruiters allows you to experiment with a smart approach that pushes the limits of what the tool is designed to do,” says Kroes. “It gives you more insight into the state of things.”

While predicting what’s next to come in the music industry is far from science, Kroes is confident that Ingrooves Music Group will continue to adapt as the industry embraces on-demand streaming. Issues such as diminishing profit margins will be a challenge, but Ingrooves is ready to face the challenges like the now grown-up company that it is, one which, with Kroes at the helm, can finally have its HR Head say that the company, firmly, “knows the path forward.”