What is an Applicant Tracking System? 15 Powerful Benefits of ATS

An applicant tracking system (ATS) can help you streamline your entire recruiting agency – from job advertising to candidate interviews – helping you find top candidates for your clients faster. Recruiters are increasingly leaving legacy infrastructure and tools to rely on modern recruiting agency software that comes with a sleek digital interface, robust analytics, automated features, and more powerful search capabilities than ever before. 

If you’ve never used an applicant tracking system before, understanding where exactly it fits in your recruiting process and the benefits of ATS can be overwhelming. So what do you really need to know about an applicant tracking system when making your decision?

First off, it’s important to acknowledge that with the emergence of new technology in recruiting and the world going remote, having a reliable ATS that does the heavy lifting for you is crucial for your recruiting business. 

Whether you’re a one-person team or an enterprise staffing agency, an ATS can help you collaborate more efficiently with candidates, clients, and your team. This way, you can focus on your core tasks – hire better candidates, improve candidate experience, and scale your recruiting business (without feeling burnt out!) 

We’ve prepared this guide to help you understand what is an ATS, how it works, and how you can leverage it to accelerate your hiring efforts and build your differentiator in the market. On top of that, we’ll also share the benefits of ATS and help you assess whether your existing ATS is the right one for your needs.

What Is an Applicant Tracking System?

ATS is an applicant tracking software for recruiting and staffing agencies that helps recruiters simplify the recruitment process by automating different tasks. It can 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.

According to LinkedIn, for each second, 55 job applications are made to LinkedIn. In such a case, it is important to include the right technology in your processes and invest in tools that can get things done. In fact, more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies are already using Applicant Tracking Systems.

The Great Reshuffle has led to talent migrating with employees leaving and joining companies faster. 

Source: The U.S. cities losing the most people are College Station-Bryan, TX; State College-DuBois, PA; and Tuscaloosa, AL. For every 10,000 LinkedIn members in College Station-Bryan, TX, 228 left in the past 12 months.

According to a Monster survey, 65% of respondents would be interested in learning about a new work opportunity. The challenge for recruiters now is to help companies hire top talent before they’re off the market. And this is realistically possible only when recruiters leverage technology like an applicant tracking system that offers powerful features including automated functionalities.  

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 offer two-way email and calendar sync, 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 keyword and Boolean search algorithms to scan resumes and cover letters for specific skills, experience, education, and more that you specify. 

Modern ATS like Recruiterflow leverage 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 two-way calendar sync, allowing you to schedule interviews and other events seamlessly. For instance, Recruiterflow helps recruiters send emails directly from its 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 where exactly you spend your time, is there 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. 

15 Powerful Benefits of ATS for Recruiters

Let’s dive deep in and know more about the benefits of ATS and why it is loved by all the 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 Applicant Tracking System plays a crucial part in recruiters’ daily work life. 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 the manual posting and posting on job boards, as well as filtering out the irrelevant applications, you can accomplish the entire process in a matter of minutes instead of hours. 

2. A Powerful and Flexible System for Remote Recruitment Teams

The best part about Applicants 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. 

3. 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 Applicants 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. 

4. Acts as a Single Source of Truth

Instead of scanning through various job portals, keeping a track of all the applications, and all the other dozen things you do to make sure to 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.

5. 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. Applicants Tracking System does this tedious task in a single click for you. Logging in to different accounts, and keeping a track of the analytics is no longer needed manually.

6. Improves Cost Per Hire

The cost per hire might reduce due to the introduction of the Applicants Tracking System as using this tool lessens the time and efforts of hiring candidates. Hiring the right talent is crucial to the growth of any Business. It is even more important for SMEs. since they are already tight on budgets and cannot afford to spend a lot on hiring processes. This is one of the major cost-reducing benefits of ATS and plays a significant part in their hiring journey.

7. Improves Quality of Hire

Applicants Tracking System scans through the pool of information and makes sure to not 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.

8. 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.  

9. 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 in communication and makes way for a more organized hiring process.

10. 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. 

11. Improves Candidate Experience

One of the things that a candidate looks for is hearing back from the recruiter. Whether it be a positive or negative response, job seekers want to stay updated about their hiring process. 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. 

12. Streamlines Recruitment Processes

Applicant Tracking System enables recruiting firms to work more quickly and efficiently by streaming 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.

13. 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 the back and forth and makes interview scheduling a lot easier.

14. Gives Recruiters Access to a Large Talent Pool

When you can post to several job portals in a single click and track all the analytics efficiently, you’ll be able to witness a larger talent pool. An Applicant Tracking System helps to expand your hiring horizons.

15. Auto-Generates Reports and Helps You Track Recruiting KPIs

Applicant Tracking System in, those endless spreadsheets out! It helps you manage your job posting KPIs and keeps a 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.

Final Thoughts – Benefits of ATS

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.