Your ATS is not your only recruitment tool
Once you begin working with your ATS, there is a real danger of coming to depend on it. Certainly, an ATS provides many advantages for your recruitment process. But many things can be done on your side to improve this process.
1. Enhance your job listings
Attracting top talents starts with a solid job description. Avoid listing employee tasks and focus more on highlighting the projects and objectives you feel your candidate can contribute to. Ensure that your candidate knows who he or she will be working with and in what way. Most importantly, emphasize what the future has in store for your candidate if he or she joins your company. The big picture is important for all parties involved.
2. Write a specific list of skills
Refine your search by being more specific. Greater precision in the definition of required skills for your jobs will help to restrict the number of applications you receive and enable your ATS to provide you with the best recommendations possible. Solutions like Manatal's recommendation system will sort your candidates based on this list and other core criteria and save you a great deal of time.
3. Search what you know first
To be efficient, start searching for candidates in your existing database. This way, you can begin with candidates you already know. In addition using techniques similar to affiliate marketing can greatly help you close a position faster. Your employees are your brand's best ambassadors and they know your company inside out so they are in a great position to refer top talents. If you still feel you need more, you can then open the position to external candidates under the guidelines outlined in the first two points.
4. Avoid multiplying interviews
You may prefer to have your candidate meet your team before making a final decision. However, interviews take time for all involved so you should try to limit the number of interviews required for each candidate and instead adapt the format of your interviews so that you aren't repeating interviews with different members of your team.
5. Discuss job conditions first
You may be familiar with the frustration of nearing a final decision only to discover that one of your top candidates is dissatisfied with some aspect of the job terms (salary, benefits, location, working hours, etc.). Avoid these surprises by discussing these terms during your first interaction. Therefore, you can be sure that your candidate approves of all of these aspects before concentrating his or her capabilities and goodness of fit.