How to Hire Quality Candidates Using your Recruitment Tool

As the hiring market becomes increasingly competitive, top candidates are becoming pickier about which companies they choose to partner with. 

When deciding who to interview, recruiting teams can no longer depend on applicant volume and their "gut feeling.” They need to use every tool available to find the best talent.

Recruitment tools are valuable resources for recruiters because they can help them understand and manage their entire pool of candidates more thoroughly than ever before, as well as source faster and better all thanks to data-driven insights.

However, even the best applicant tracking software is useless without the right techniques. This article will explore some of the best practices for finding top candidates using an applicant tracking software.

Tips for Finding Quality Candidates Using an ATS

The various features included in today's Applicant Tracking Software are tools that recruiting teams must understand how to best utilize them to get the most out of their recruitment strategies.

Here are some tips to help you use your ATS to find the best candidates for roles in your company:

1. Develop Recruiting Goals and Policies

To make sure that your ATS will truly provide value, you need to create clear recruiting goals. 

Start by asking yourself what exactly do you want to achieve with your recruitment process? This can be hiring a specific number of employees or having a certain percentage of female applicants. Once you know what you are looking for, it's time to create actionable policies for your recruitment strategy to get there.

By having actionable goals and policies, you will be able to easily measure the success of your recruitment strategy.

3. Use Custom Application Forms for Each Job

Save yourself some time and pre-screen applications by preparing application forms tailored to each job. For example, you can make sure applicants have a specific certification or other criteria required for the job. This can be done in a few clicks only with an ATS like Manatal and will have an immediate positive impact on the applications that make it through to your recruiters.

4. Use Applicant Scorecards

A good way of ranking applicants and minimizing subjective opinions is to use scorecards. 

A score can be given manually by recruiters and hiring managers regarding specific key requirements for the job, but you can also choose to use an ATS that will automatically assign scores for each applicant based on different factors such as skills, education, past experiences, spoken languages, and more. This will make it a more efficient and accurate candidate comparison.

5. Use your ATS to Create a Candidate Database

Having all the information about each candidate in one place is key for fast and qualitative hiring. This is why we recommend leveraging an ATS to build a structured candidate database that can then be easily searched when the next opening needs to be filled. 

6. Use Built-In Reporting Tools

Using an ATS that allows you to generate reports will allow you to measure the success of your recruitment strategy. 

From being able to easily track metrics such as open positions or candidates submitted to generating custom reports with company and candidate information, this will allow you to better understand your hiring process and focus on the areas that need improvement.

7. Use ATS for Internal Collaboration

Collaborating with other team members is one of the key features of ATS software. This can greatly increase the hiring process efficiency and candidate experience. 

For example, Manatal allows users to schedule interviews, send emails, share feedback and notes, assign tasks, and much more. Each concerned user is then notified through the application or via email, ensuring that everyone is on the same page. 

8. Take Advantage of the Power of AI

Powerful Applicant Tracking Software solutions will integrate recommendation features powered by artificial intelligence. By quickly filtering databases of potential candidates, these features can help you to find the best applicants for a given role easily.

This way, your ATS will not only allow you to source and apply candidates efficiently but also choose the ones that are most likely to join your company.

How Artificial Intelligence Factors into ATS Solutions

AI is an integral part of modern ATS solutions, having a significant impact on the way recruiters manage their recruitment processes. 

By leveraging data about your company's current employees and your hiring needs, AI-driven recruitment solutions can help you find quality candidates faster.

AI offers a variety of benefits over traditional recruiting systems:

Faster Data Analysis: AI-powered recruitment solutions can make sense of big data faster, helping recruiters easily identify relevant candidates. For example, it can help you find a certain skill in a database of tens of thousands in a few seconds only.

Accuracy: Artificial Intelligence-based recruitment solutions are much better at automated candidate ranking and filtering tasks than humans. This allows recruiters to find quality candidates faster and more efficiently than they would be able to do by themselves.

Reduced Bias: When well configured, AI can help recruiters make better recruitment decisions by reducing any cognitive biases that might affect human recruiters’ judgment. With DEI becoming a top priority for many organizations, a tool that helps push hiring in that direction is critical.

With all these benefits, it's no wonder that more and more companies are adopting AI-powered ATS software to save time, increase accuracy, and hire top talents.

An Example Candidate Recruitment Workflow

Now that you know the top ways for finding the best candidates using your recruitment tool let's run through a simple recruitment workflow using an ATS. 

Every workflow will look different based on the particular company involved, but these steps will allow you to use the best features of an ATS to locate the best candidates.

Step 1: Set Up Your ATS

The most important thing to keep in mind before you start receiving candidates is preparing your ATS for what is to come.

What to customize will depend highly on what platform you are using but can include things like modifying the recruitment stages to match your company’s hiring process, what information do you want to see first when looking at a candidate’s profile, preparing your career page, and application forms and much more depending on your needs.

Step 2: Make Sure You're Using the Right Job Boards

Before you start sharing your jobs, make sure you have identified which channels work the best for your company and the openings you wish to advertise.

This is especially true when using paid job ads. Posting on job boards can be expensive, and it's not always clear which ones are the best options for your needs.

For example, if you expect a large number of applicants and the position is remote, choose a job board with a global reach and high traffic. If you are looking for staff to work at a specific location, a local job board will be a better fit.

Step 3: Use Social Media to Reach Passive Candidates

It can take months to find someone good for a role, so do not limit yourself to job boards and leverage all social media platforms to reach passive candidates (those that are not currently checking job boards).

Posting job ads on social media has a low cost and allows you to reach a large, diverse audience. If done correctly, this may help you discover great applicants who are not actively looking for a new role but would still jump at the opportunity to work with your company.

Linkedin, if considered a social media can also be a passive candidate goldmine depending on the position. Do not hesitate to reach out directly to good profiles and try to catch their interest in your role. Sourcing on Linkedin can be made very easy when using the right tools, there are for example some extensions that will allow you to automatically import a profile into your ATSs database right in the job they are interested in, cutting all need for manual input.

Step 4: Leverage Your Database

The best candidate for a specific position might already be in your database. As such it is important to have tools that allow you to easily find those candidates based on skills, education, location, past experiences, and other criteria.

Tools like these include advanced and boolean searches for example which allow you to easily browse through thousands of candidates in seconds only.

Other more powerful tools include Manatal’s AI-based Recommendation which will recommend the best candidates in your database based only on the job description. Candidates will then be ranked by suitability with that job making it extremely easy to find the best fit.

When done well, using your database as a sourcing tool can potentially uncover hidden gems and greatly reduce the time spent sourcing candidates.

Step 5: Screen Your Candidates

As a recruiter, time is of the essence, and as such having to review hundreds of applications one by one has proven to be extremely inefficient. To alleviate this, Manatal includes a feature that will automatically score candidates in each job according to their fit. This allows recruiters to focus on the top fits, and maximize the odds of finding the right candidate on short notice.

Step 6: Start Hiring Quality Candidates

After putting together your shortlist of candidates who are most likely to meet your hiring criteria, it's time to interview them! 

Your recruitment ATS should allow you to track and manage all candidates while providing a central place for all candidate details. 

All of this data can be accessed from any device, so you don't have to worry about going back and forth between different tools.

Step 7: Fast and Efficient Hiring Process

An efficient hiring process can be the difference between a candidate joining you or dropping out because they’ve been waiting for feedback or the next step too long. As such it is key to make full use of the collaboration features included in your recruitment tool.

For example, Manatal allows you to keep all interactions between recruiters, candidates, and hiring managers within the platform. Whether it is email communication, interview scheduling, sharing feedback with hiring managers, all is centralized under one roof and everyone is notified when it’s their turn to take action. This greatly reduces the hiring process and maximizes candidate experience by avoiding lost emails, feedback that never reaches the recruiters, and such hiccups.

Step 8: Know Your Candidates Better

Once you’ve found good candidates, it is important to get to know them better to make sure they will fit your organization.

That is exactly what Manatal's Social Media enrichment tool was designed for. The feature retrieves all publicly available social media accounts of a candidate and displays them all on one screen. By having this information at their fingertips, recruiters can dive deeper into the personality of each candidate to assess whether they would be a good fit or not for the company.

Step 9: Keep Your Applicant Data Organized

Last but not least, it's important to keep all applicant data in one central location. This way, you'll always know who applied for which job when they did so and what your responses were. 

It may also be necessary to store this information for future reference if the person is not hired or if they are rejected after an interview. This can save you time and effort over having to restart the search process when new opportunities come open within your company.

Find and Land Quality Candidates with Manatal Applicant Tracking Software

The benefits of applicant tracking software don't end with the hiring process. With the right solution, you can supercharge your entire recruitment operations from sourcing to onboarding.

Manatal's Applicant Tracking Software is designed for modern recruiting, allowing you to hire quality candidates faster than ever before. To put all the above into play, begin your 14-day free trial (no credit card required) and start recruiting using powerful AI features!