15 Benefits of Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
According to a GetApp survey of 300 recruiters, 86.1% of users reported a significant acceleration in their hiring process by implementing an ATS. But speed isn’t the only perk – an impressive 78.3% attribute an enhancement in the overall quality of candidates through this transformative technology.
By leveraging an ATS, you can dedicate more time to your core responsibilities: sourcing and hiring exceptional candidates, enhancing the candidate experience, and effectively scaling your recruiting business—all while avoiding burnout. Below, we have compiled a comprehensive list of the top 15 benefits offered by an Applicant Tracking System.
What is an Applicant Tracking System?
Applicant tracking system or ATS is software that helps recruiters simplify the recruitment process by automating different tasks. It helps improve the entire recruitment process and alleviate some of the most significant pain points like shortlisting candidates and tracking them throughout the hiring process and talent acquisition activities.
Powerful Benefits of Applicant Tracking System for Recruiters
Let’s dive deep in and learn more about the benefits of the Applicant tracking system and why it is loved by all recruiters!
1. Saves time for more focused work
While a recruiter already has a long list of important tasks in a day, no recruiter wants to spend time on monotonous tasks that can be easily automated. Hence, this is where the Applicant Tracking System plays a crucial part in recruiters’ daily work lives. It saves a lot of time when compared to conventional application processing and hiring procedures. It increases the recruiter’s productivity and helps them to do their job easily and quickly.
By eliminating manual posting and posting on job boards, as well as filtering out irrelevant applications, you can accomplish the entire process in a matter of minutes instead of hours.
2. Provides Better and Faster Resume Parsing
Remember how you just press CTRL + F to find what you want in the ocean of words? Similarly, with an Applicant Tracking System, you just have to enter the right keywords that will lead you to your qualified candidate. This is the fastest way to scan resumes and cover letters. Plus, it reduces the chances of missing out on any important information and reduces biases.
3. Acts as a Single Source of Truth
Instead of scanning through various job portals, keeping track of all the applications, and all the other dozen things you do to make sure you find the right fit quickly, you can find everything related to your candidates and clients in one place. Want to know about the educational qualifications of a specific candidate or which round of hiring they get eliminated at? Just look into your ATS portal and find all your answers.
4. Makes Job Posting Easier and Faster
To find the best candidate, you need to be accessible to them and inform them about your open job positions, which can be quite time-consuming. Applicant Tracking System does this tedious task in a single click for you. Logging into different accounts and keeping track of the analytics is no longer needed manually.
5. Improves Cost Per Hire
Implementing an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can reduce the cost per hire thanks to its ability to streamline and simplify the candidate selection process. Finding the right talent is essential for business growth, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating with limited budgets. By automating various hiring tasks and minimizing manual efforts, an ATS optimizes the hiring journey and becomes a significant cost-saving advantage. SMEs can leverage this benefit to allocate resources wisely while ensuring effective recruitment processes.
6. Improves the Quality of Hire
Applicant Tracking System scans through the pool of information and makes sure not to miss out on any important information. Moreover, it offers integrations with pre-assessment tools so you can gain contextual clarity on who your top candidates are. This helps in bringing home the right talent more easily and quickly.
7. Accelerates the Hiring Process
Recruiters can reduce time to fill by streamlining their entire recruitment process using an ATS. This reduced time means you can get the right talent at the right time and shift your time and effort to other valuable tasks like reaching out to potential clients.
8. Facilitates Seamless Cross-Functional Collaboration
Another benefit of an ATS is that it gives a productive and collaborative portal where every piece of information can be passed on to multiple people while also assigning them their respective tasks. An ATS enables you to tag people, schedule automated emails, send reminders, and notifications in real-time, and more. This saves time required for communication and makes way for a more organized hiring process.
9. Promotes Collaborative Hiring
Applicant tracking software includes innovative features that make it simple to use collaboratively. Recruiters can exchange feedback and reviews with each candidate and lead a joint decision-making process in which each recruiter has a mic.
10. Improves Candidate Experience
One of the things a candidate is looking for is to hear back from the recruiter. Whether it be a positive or negative response, job seekers want to stay updated about their hiring process. One of the things a candidate is looking for is to hear back from the recruiter. Whether it be a positive or negative response, job seekers want to stay updated about their hiring process. Utilizing a resume builder can help candidates present their qualifications more effectively, increasing their chances of moving to the next stage. Applicant tracking software allows you to automate important tasks such as sending an email when a candidate is moved to a different stage, resulting in a better candidate experience.
11. Streamlines Recruitment Processes
Applicant Tracking System enables recruiting firms to work more quickly and efficiently by streamlining their recruiting process. The HR department can easily manage and review multiple applications in a few hours, which would otherwise take days, thanks to a streamlined development between successive tasks.
12. Makes Interview Scheduling Easier
Instead of reaching out to each potential candidate and working out a time for their interview round, an ATS will help you sync your calendars seamlessly. It saves you from going back and forth and makes interview scheduling a lot easier.
13. Gives Recruiters Access to a Large Talent Pool
By leveraging the capabilities of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), recruiters can effortlessly post job openings to multiple job portals with just a single click. This seamless distribution of job listings, coupled with efficient analytics tracking, unlocks the potential to tap into a significantly larger talent pool. The ATS expands your hiring horizons, allowing you to reach a diverse range of candidates from various platforms, ultimately enhancing your chances of finding the ideal talent for your organization.
14. Auto-Generates Reports and Help You Track Recruiting KPIs
Applicant Tracking System in, those endless spreadsheets out! It helps you manage your job posting KPIs and keeps track of all the useful analytics in one place. Using ATS will facilitate you in increasing the amount of time spent on the web page and, as a result, the number of applications.
15. A Powerful and Flexible System for Remote Recruitment Teams
The best part about Applicant Tracking Software is its flexibility. Earlier, remote working or collaborating with remote recruitment teams was not widely accepted, but it became a necessity after the pandemic.
ATS comes in handy to reduce chaos, increase efficiency, and provide a better collaboration experience. With the help of this tool, businesses can interact to bring the best out of each member’s effort.
How Does Applicant Tracking System Work?
The primary purpose of an applicant tracking system is to streamline your recruiting process so it’s easier to create job postings, publish them on multiple job boards, and job ads, screen, source candidates track application statuses, and so on.
Candidate Sourcing
An ATS helps recruiters source top candidates that match the criteria for specific job roles faster. It enables recruiters to:
- Create well-designed job applications and forms,
- Post job ads on various platforms and social networks,
Modern ATS even offers pre-designed job application templates that recruiters can quickly grab on the go, customize, and post on various platforms. Since ATS platforms are well integrated with most of the popular job boards and social media platforms, recruiters can cast a wider net and reach more candidates in a short period of time.
For more than a decade, people have been using social media to find new jobs. According to Glassdoor, 79% of job seekers utilize social media in their job search.
Once you post your job on various job boards, the applications are automatically funneled in through the ATS and stored in a central candidate database.
Candidate Management
If you’ve been jumping between emails, forms, spreadsheets, job boards, and social media trying to manage candidates, you’ll want to use an ATS that acts as a centralized database.
With well-organized, detailed candidate profiles that collate everything from resumes to emails, calls, SMS, last contact, or any previous communication, you can always stay on top of each candidate’s progress in your hiring pipeline.
As the candidate works their way through the recruitment process, you can add different tags and information to their profile to indicate their status and progress. Some powerful ATS even offers two-way email and calendar syncs, so all your emails and interviews are automatically updated in the candidate’s profile.
Screening Candidates
Once a profile is created, the ATS can automatically leverage keywords and Boolean search algorithms to scan resumes and cover letters for specific skills, experience, education, and more that you specify.
Modern ATS like Recruiterflow leverages AI and natural language processing to dig even deeper into talent information and produce a list of suitable candidates that match the recruiter’s exact requirements.
So instead of manually parsing through resumes, recruiters can automatically generate a list of top candidates that make a good fit for open job positions. This also reduces the likelihood of unintentional bias during screening and helps recruiters make a fair decision, faster.
Managing Interviews
Many ATS offer a two-way calendar sync, allowing you to schedule interviews and other events seamlessly. For instance, Recruiterflow helps recruiters send emails directly from its recruitment dashboard to candidates, clients, and team members.
Once the interview is done, recruiters can send out automated thank you emails, create customized scorecards and store the results of those interviews.
Each of these capabilities helps recruiters boost their hiring process’ efficiency by taking away the leg work out of mundane administrative tasks from the recruiter and introducing more flexibility and transparency to the entire hiring process.
Reporting and analytics
It’s difficult to measure important recruiting metrics like time to fill and cost per hire if you don’t have a robust analytics platform in place. As a recruiter, it’s important to figure out exactly where you spend your time, whether there is any way to optimize it further and ways to scale your recruiting business.
An ATS can generate automated recruiting reports and help you make more data-informed decisions. Whether it’s time to fill or job board ROI, a good ATS will deliver detailed, easy-to-understand recruiting reports and analytics.
Final Thoughts – Benefits of Applicant Tracking System
Today’s world is a huge fan of automation, things that can be put in a system and help to save time and effort without compromising the outcomes are automatically loved by its users. This is the reason why ATS is becoming a hit in the recruitment market.
Throughout this article, we have talked about how essential ATS is for new as well as experienced recruiters and what are the benefits of an ATS. It can inform recruiters about decision-making methods, provide justification for additional recruitment expenditures, and identify trends that will aid in the creation of unique action items for recruiters’ hiring efforts.
As they say, it is a great time to be in the Recruiting World!
If you’re looking for a powerful ATS that helps you not only streamline your hiring process but also automate recruitment, administrative, and repetitive tasks, sign up for a 14-free trial of Recruiterflow.
