Talent is the lifeblood of every company and organization.
That’s the take of CEOs interviewed in a recent HR survey run by the Harvard Business Review - 71 percent of the CEOs polled viewed human capital as the top factor contributing to sustainable economic value.
While a robust, healthy, stable workforce is a key driver of sustainable growth, a regular infusion of “fresh blood” is equally important.
Fresh, often “young blood” newcomers, bring diversity and the latest in ideas, skills, perspectives, and expertise to keep companies relevant, agile, and firmly focused on the future.
Make a good first impression
Accelerated modernization has been top-of-mind for most companies since the onset of the pandemic.
With companies forced to move a lot of business and operations online, many have sped up their transformation plans in the past two years, leading to a surge in demand for workers with digital skills and project management experience.
Digital transformation, coupled with the great resignation trend sweeping the world, has intensified the chase for talent, and job seekers with in-demand skills and expertise can now dictate terms like never before.
In fact, the roles have reversed for some on the recruitment front.
Making a good first impression was all on the job seeker in the past – the balance of power (interview-wise) was with the employer.
Nowadays, companies chasing skilled workers are the ones who have to make more of an effort in terms of profile and image, and it all begins with their online job application platform.
For example, if job hunters find their application platform to be clunky, hard to use, slow, cumbersome, and inaccessible by phone, they are very likely to look for other opportunities.
Worse still, they could share their negative views on the application page with friends, former colleagues, and other industry contacts on sites such as LinkedIn and other IT sector channels.
The Ultimate HR & Recruiter Toolbox: Browse our collection of email templates, job descriptions and more.
ATS platforms level the hiring playing field
While it used to be that only large companies had the resources, technology, and teams to provide the best applicant experience - this is no longer the case thanks to the arrival of innovative digital hiring tools such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS).
As ATS technologies evolved over time, they have become more diverse and affordable enabling companies of all sizes to enjoy recruitment technology, features, and benefits that were only available to the big corporate players before.
Benefits such as automated job advertising, resume sorting, candidate screening, interview scheduling, follow-up communications, and much more.
While these are the best-known features offered by ATS platforms, there are other productivity and efficiency “hacks” that corporate HR teams, staffing agencies, recruitment agencies, and SMEs can leverage from ATS solutions.
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5 ATS hacks to power up your recruitment
Here are five common recruitment challenges, and ATS features, that will help you “hack,” or transform your hiring processes, to find the best talent wherever they are.
1. Profile enrichment
Challenge - My shortlisted candidates are “on the money” in terms of skills, education, and experience, but I want to find out more about their personality and background, to see if they fit with our company culture?
With so much of life conducted online today, many of us have sizable digital footprints thanks to social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others.
Information shared on these sites can now be aggregated and analyzed using enrichment tools to provide a bigger, deeper, and clearer picture of candidates – a profile beyond their skills and employment history milestones and key stats.
How? When creating a new candidate profile using Manatal’s ATS, for example, the solution uses AI tools to search for data on more than 20 social media platforms. It enables recruiters to get to know the applicant from different perspectives and once integrated, the platform aggregates and displays the information on a single page.
The enrichment system also makes it easy to index relevant skills from LinkedIn profiles or resumes. This can be done by simply creating new candidates through LinkedIn - or uploading their CV – and the Manatal software will create an extensive and detailed candidate scorecard.
2. Recruitment CRM
Challenge – As a recruitment agency manager, I know the competition for talent is fierce amongst clients. Can I build a pipeline of current and prospective clients and maintain ongoing communication with them about candidates and progress?
Finding talent is more complex than ever before, given the many channels that recruiters have to be across and the need for speed in the hiring process. Therefore, as a recruitment agency manager responsible for client and candidate management, you need to be on top of updates and keep your clients on the same page as your progress.
Recruitment Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools offered by sophisticated ATS solutions manage and convert customer leads, and nurture relationships, with existing customers in a pipeline – a “one-stop” central solution to better organize and engage clients.
Key benefits include the ability to track candidates throughout their whole application lifecycle – from the moment contact is initiated with an applicant, their data is added to the system and updated until they complete their onboarding.
Storing this data creates a candidate network in a single searchable database with key details, notes, PICs, and more to view and update interactions from the past and present.
Recruitment CRM also makes it easy to communicate with current, former, and prospective customers via the email integration function - Our ATS solution users, for example, can send and receive messages using the recruiting software with their Gmail or Outlook/Office365 accounts. They can also sync activities such as presentations, calls, and meetings.
Measuring progress through in-depth analytics is the other important feature offered by a recruitment CRM. This enables recruiters to track key CRM metrics to find areas to improve such as the time it took for a customer to progress through each stage of the application pipeline, where they came from, success/fail rates and more.
3. Candidate sourcing
Challenge – To compete in the talent market, I want a faster, far-reaching, simple, and more efficient way to both identify ‘right-fit’ talent for current roles, and put forward other applicants in my database for new openings in the future.
Robust ATS platforms utilize AI-powered recommendation engines to source the most suitable jobs for candidates in your database (and vice-versa) in seconds.
They do this by scanning job descriptions to extract the core skills and requirements needed for the role. Once identified, the software cross-references the skills required with candidates in the talent pool to find the best matches for the role. On top of skills, other relevant pieces of information such as work experience and education can also be added to the filters used.
From the list of suggested candidates, the ATS recommendation system can drill down further to
compare their skills, location, positions, education, and more, against requirements set out in the job description to rank and score the candidates – the candidate with the highest score is the best match for the position.
The Boolean search capability - using a combination of keywords to organize and sift deeper through your searches – can also be used to find candidates with specific skill sets, qualifications, and unique experiences in their field.
4. Collaboration
Challenge – Recruiting is a team sport requiring close coordination and constant communication between hiring managers, HR and department leaders, and other stakeholders. In the age of remote working, where we no longer regularly see colleagues in the office, are there technical solutions to keep everyone on the same page?
Many ATS solutions include tools to improve teamwork and communication with internal and external parties allowing HR teams, hiring managers, and other stakeholders to connect to shortlist candidates and oversee their hiring journey.
An integrated chat system allows team members to connect either as a group, or one-on-one to discuss candidates. It also enables colleagues to tag others in a note to share information or seek feedback on an applicant. To ensure they don’t miss it, assigned colleagues will be alerted of sent messages to ensure everyone is in the loop.
All communication threads, and shared documents, are also saved in the chat system for future reference regarding specific candidates and new job openings.
The hassle of working on two platforms is also negated with an integrated email feature that enables colleagues and applicants to share a common inbox. Email templates can also be customized to serve specific needs.
Delegation is also possible thanks to the ability to assign team members with different levels of access (Administrator, Manager, Consultant, Recruiter) and visibility to avoid email overload. Consultants, for example, will see fewer emails than someone at the Manager level.
Candidate tags meanwhile, enable ATS users to manage and search for candidates in a faster, more efficient way – tags can be used to filter candidates in ‘Job Recommendations’, ‘Advanced Candidate Search’, and ‘Boolean Search’ categories, and others.
5. Analytics
The challenge - Optimizing recruiting resources and processes is one of my KPIs – but I need more data to make better-informed strategy decisions across a wide range of activities that impact a big cross-section of stakeholders. Can ATS platforms offer analytics support?
Time is money, and all business leaders want to do more for less.
Recruitment, for instance, is a time and resource-draining activity – according to Glassdoor data, most companies in the United States hire new employees on average for $4,000, typically taking 52 days to complete the process.
The process of fine tuning hiring programs begins with the collection and analysis of timely, quality data to determine where, and how, to make changes. ATS platforms can play an important role by providing in-depth analysis and hiring performance reports.
ATS platforms track hiring key indicators such as placements, team performance, time to placement, and more, and can display them in convenient dashboards to monitor individuals and teams.
Job reports, in particular, provide visibility around key metrics including the number of candidates in the pipeline for each job, the number of hired candidates, the performance of teams, departments, clients, or third parties.
ATS advanced reporting features will spotlight bottlenecks so upgrades can be made to improve KPIs like Time to Hire, Cost of Hire, Reasons for Rejection, Recruitment Performance Ratios, and more.
Leaderboard features also track who is performing best in terms of candidates created and owned, placements made, closing rates, and more.
Recruitment, headhunting, and staffing agencies can also use ATS platforms to identify bottlenecks to improve sales performance by monitoring sales funnels and the contribution of sales team members over time.
Whether it’s recruitment CRM, detailed analytics, or next-level collaboration tools, Manatal’s ATS offerings deliver these ‘hack’ benefits and more.
Optimize, optimize, optimize
Manatal’s robust and easy-to-use applicant tracking system, combined with recruitment CRM has helped clients get much more bang from their HR-budget bucks - this goes from providing innovative software to ensuring all-important customer support is available 7/7 via video, live chat, and other channels.
Support extends to protecting and managing data as well. This is facilitated by Manatal’s mass import function that transfers large files containing candidate, job, client/department, and contact information in minutes using CSV or JSON files. The import function supports all file types including Excel, Google, and more.
If you are considering an ATS platform for the first time or would like to upgrade from your current system, we invite you to discover how Manatal features and ‘hacks’ can transform your processes to achieve better results across all talent acquisition areas.
Start your 14-day Free Trial today to see, feel, and enjoy the difference they make.
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