7 Recruitment Platform Features to Boost Your Metrics

Hiring.  It’s as old as business itself.  But even after all these years, attracting and hiring the right talent in the digital age continues to be a challenge for many professional recruiters and headhunters.  

As our society grows increasingly more digital, more organizations are embracing innovations in HR tech to get a leg up on the competition for the market’s best and brightest.  Today, having the right recruitment platform means being able to attract the best applicants in a minimal amount of time and the ability to provide a positive candidate experience – both crucial elements in being able to find the best talent. 

Fortunately, applicant tracking systems (ATS) have become very popular recruitment platforms because of their ability to carry a lot of the traditional workload that goes into the management of modern hiring. 

Close to 95% of all hiring professionals believe their ATS has positively impacted their hiring process and, frankly, ATS recruitment platforms are now capable of much more than serving as a repository for applicant data - they’re powerful workhorses capable of automating many of the activities that were once left to the HR professionals who had to juggle spreadsheets, schedules, and emails to coordinate all their hiring activities.

While ATS recruitment platforms offer a wide array of tools and features that can help organizations attract better talent, it’s the ability to tap into the crucial recruitment metrics that lay dormant in these software systems that makes an ATS such a strategic asset in modern talent acquisition strategies.

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What are Recruitment Metrics?

Today, it’s essential that HR professionals are aggressive in taking steps to improve their talent acquisition strategies, and that’s an area where recruitment metrics play a huge role. 

Over time, an ATS system can become an absolute “gold mine” that’s loaded with useful recruitment metrics as more and more applicants apply to an organization.  Using the tools within an ATS system, these metrics can be extracted and analyzed to determine what sourcing channels are yielding the best candidates and what steps in the hiring process may be unnecessarily slowing things down. 

The types of hiring metrics vary widely, but the following are undoubtedly a few of the most crucial:

Source of hire: Used to distribute resources to the most effective recruiting channels. 

Time to hire: Measures from the time a request to fill a new hire is submitted to the time the job offer is accepted.  In simple terms, shorter is better.

Qualified candidates per hire: This shows the effectiveness of sourcing channels and if the listed qualifications in job announcements are attracting the right candidates.

As more organizations lean on the HR software industry for solutions, it’s important to understand the role that SaaS plays in modern HR technologies.

The Benefits of Recruitment SaaS

Today, applicant tracking systems (ATS) are the most common recruitment platform used in the modern recruitment industry.

Most of them are sold-as-a-service (SaaS) ; the beauty of SaaS is that it is cloud-based - a form of technology accessible to anyone with a strong enough internet connection.  Making SaaS solutions even more attractive is that they’re often promoted as subscription-based models that are affordable, secure, and powerful.

With SaaS, organizations need not worry about investing in the technical infrastructure to warehouse and support an ATS system.  All hardware, software, and security measures are handled by the SaaS vendor hosting the HR software. 

Now that we've outlined the benefits of SaaS-based ATS recruitment platforms, here are the top 7 recruitment platform features that are sure to boost your organization’s recruitment metrics:

2. Job Board Multiposting

One of the most revealing metrics that HR professionals rely on is the source of hire metric - a metric that provides a clear understanding of which candidate sourcing channels are yielding the best talent and which aren’t.  

Consider for a moment that modern ATS recruitment platforms offer a powerful feature that simultaneously distributes a job announcement to thousands of job boards around the world, including the most popular sites like Indeed, LinkedIn, and Monster.   

Not only can a robust ATS platform provide access to all these job boards, but they also offer a way to track the efficacy of each sourcing channel.  This shows recruiters who are the best and which channels aren’t worth the investment.  That kind of information can be especially useful when it comes time to make budgeting decisions about your recruitment campaigns and deciding which sources offer the best chances at an attractive ROI.

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2. Career Page Builder

An organization’s career page is a candidate sourcing channel that’s located on its website, and its purpose is to display job vacancies to prospective candidates.  The important thing to remember is that it’s also often the first place where an organization will contact potential new employees.  In other words, it’s often where the “first impression” is made. 

A career page plays a vital role in capturing the attention of potential job candidates, and it must leave them with a positive impression.  Fortunately, modern ATS recruitment platforms offer features that allow you to create an engaging career page that perfectly reflects your “employer brand” and company identity to maximize the volume of incoming applications.

In fact, technology has evolved so rapidly that organizations can now design and publish their own uniquely designed career page without having to have any technical knowledge or web development experience.  Finally, ATS recruitment platforms often offer a career page builder compatible with many common web platforms.

3. Vendor Management System

One of the most powerful features of the ATS platforms on the market today, and one that’s capable of boosting those key hiring metrics is a vendor management system.  

Here’s why it’s such a marvelous feature:

For staffing agencies and headhunters, in particular, talent acquisition is a process that requires clear and fluid communications with job candidates and the clients that those agencies serve.  Fortunately, an ATS recruitment platform that offers the vendor management feature allows HR professionals to manage and organize all client communications within a single portal or interface.

Ultimately, the goal of a vendor management system is to maximize the efficiency of all communications and build strong client relationships using a single, cohesive interface.  It’s worth noting here that effective communication can increase the employee retention metric by 4.5 times compared to businesses that lack effective and data-driven communication with customers.

4. Integrations with productivity tools

The technology of ATS recruitment platforms has evolved so much over the past few years that recruiters can integrate their recruitment platforms with many other popular software systems with an astonishing level of ease.  

For example, ATS platforms allow recruiters to integrate with MailChimp, or other popular email marketing services to help you reach more candidates.  Plus, to help screen for those difficult-to-fill technical positions (like software developers), modern ATS systems can be integrated with Codility – a top-rated technical interview platform that tests the coding skills of developers.

Finally, ATS systems allow recruiters to integrate their calendars so they can easily manage all those appointments and interviewing activities from within a single portal.

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5. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just the stuff of science fiction novels.  With the widespread adoption of smart devices across the globe, AI is very much a part of our everyday lives (ever find yourself saying, “Hey, Google?”)

The next place where AI is playing an increasingly important role is within HR.  Today, almost 7 of every 10 CEOs believe that AI can drive significant value in the HR industry.  AI can boost your metrics in key categories, such as minimizing the time-to-hire metric or enhancing the quality of hire metric.  AI achieves this by stepping in to reliably handle the more repetitive screening tasks that once took up so much of a recruiter’s workday.  The fact is that AI-powered recruitment platforms allow HR professionals to find qualified candidates faster so they can dedicate their time to more resourceful activities.

Tasks such as parsing through resumes for specific skills or reliably gauging the effectiveness of the myriad sourcing channels an organization might be using can now be left to the AI capabilities of an ATS recruitment platform. 

6. Candidate Scorecards

This feature can be a marvelous tool for several reasons.  Chief among them is how these scorecards can support an organization’s diversity efforts.  Today, job seekers want to work for organizations that promote diversity and have a workforce that reflects the communities they live in.  Not only that, but candidate scorecards can take much of the bias out of hiring.

Ultimately, candidate scorecards can be used to enhance the diversity and quality of hires metric by allowing HR professionals to make hiring decisions that are more quantitative rather than being “based on a feeling.”  

In the simplest terms, the candidate scorecards feature gives HR professionals the means for standardizing candidate reviews amongst members of an interview panel, allowing them to compare the rankings and identify the strongest candidate based on the scorecards being used.

LEARN: Find out how Manatal’s candidate scorecards work.

7. Custom Job Pipelines

One of the flagship features of a modern ATS recruitment platform is the ability to create a visual representation of your recruitment pipelines – a feature that can dramatically accelerate an organization’s hiring timelines.  

With customizable pipelines, recruiters can track each candidate and update the status of their journey through their organization’s hiring processes on a per-job basis.  The best ATS recruitment platforms even let you customize your recruitment pipeline based on your process with a slick drag-and-drop interface.

Finally, ATS recruitment platforms make it possible to create unlimited recruitment pipelines with different stages, which can then be applied on a job-by-job basis. 

LEARN: Find out more about how this feature works.

Manatal | The Recruitment Platform for Tomorrow’s Hiring Challenges

For organizations that want a powerful SaaS recruitment platform that offers all the features above, the one clear choice is Manatal  helps organizations access a wide array of useful recruitment tools that serve their metrics and help fine-tune their hiring strategies. And, they can do so at an affordable price and rely on the blazing speed of a powerful platform.

To discover how the many features of Manatal’s ATS platform can help your organization attract and hire the market’s best talent, you can take advantage of the 14-Day free trial that Manatal is offering.