5 Recruitment Challenges Solved with an Applicant Tracking System

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are constantly evolving to suit the challenges and dynamics of the modern job market, and those dynamics are changing once again. After a year of strong economic growth and corporate spending that created a job market that offered more openings than there were candidates, companies are reigning in their spending and rescinding job offers as fears continue to spread that the world is headed into the next economic recession.

One of the most prudent steps that an organization can take on the front end of such an economic hardship is to do an assessment of the recruitment technologies they have in place to be sure they’re in the strongest position to navigate the HR challenges that often come up during a recession. From investing in the right technology to maximizing the value of your existing HR resources, having a modern ATS system at the center of your organization’s recruitment strategies will undoubtedly help you overcome the challenges of a recession while continuing to attract the best talent. 

What is an ATS

Recruiting the best talent needs to be a strategic priority for every organization that wants to remain competitive in the future, and ATS systems are playing a crucial role. Larger organizations routinely recruit for numerous job openings simultaneously, and they often receive hundreds of resumes for every opening. An ATS is a software that organizations use to not only warehouse all these resumes they also come with powerful tools that help recruiters immediately screen out the talent that’s most suited to the particular needs of their organization. 

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In fact, ATS systems have built such a remarkable reputation for helping organizations navigate modern recruitment challenges that one study shows that more than 9 out of every 10 Fortune 500 companies currently have an ATS at the center of their hiring efforts. If your organization receives more than a thousand resumes over the course of a year, then an ATS system will likely provide excellent returns on your investment.

In addition to an ATS’s ability to sort through thousands of applications almost instantaneously with remarkable precision, here are the top 5 recruitment challenges that an ATS can solve:

1. Stand Out from the Competition by Offering an Engaging Candidate Experience

In a society as digitally connected as ours, candidates all but demand the ability to apply for jobs using only their mobile phones. Yet many job seekers still report negative application experiences when looking for a job. The challenge for recruitment professionals today is that the best candidates won’t tolerate it.

For example, GenZ candidates are the youngest generation of our workforce and the largest generation on earth. If your application process appears outdated, half of your potential GenZ candidates won’t even bother to apply. Fortunately, a modern ATS system helps recruiters and HR professionals overcome this challenge by providing them with the required resources to offer applicants an engaging, positive online experience. 

In fact, over 70% of the people that are currently employed at organizations where they had a positive application experience will tell you their experience played a key role in their decision to accept their job offers.

2. An ATS Leverages Social Media to Connect with the Best Prospects

Nearly 80% of today’s job seekers are looking for their next position on social media, and you need to meet them there if you want to beat your competition. Today’s recruiters and HR professionals need to have the proper technological tools to successfully navigate the social media landscape for their talent acquisition purposes – these are challenges overcome with a modern ATS system.  

The best and brightest of today’s workforce often spend a lot of their time using social media, so it has understandably been gaining in terms of its popularity among professional recruiters. That’s hardly shocking considering that more than 70% of the employees aged 35 or younger located their most recent position on a popular social media site.

Investing in an ATS can not only enhance the effectiveness of your recruitment strategies by giving you the tools to promote your open positions to multiple job boards simultaneously with the click of a button, but an ATS also lets you easily promote your jobs on popular social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and other popular sites.

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3. An ATS Solves Your Productivity Challenges 

Retaining talented recruiters to oversee the process of building your future workforce is no less crucial than finding the best workers. Successful recruitment depends on providing your recruiters with the tools and technology they need to find the best talent. The market is presently contending with another challenge - the sense of “burnout” and stress that recruiters are feeling from having to quickly locate and hire the appropriate talent amidst a job market that, for the last year and a half, has been heavily tilted in favor of the job seeker.

Remember, professional recruiters serve as your organization’s sales agents, and their job is to promote your organization’s brand not only to active job seekers but passive ones as well. ATS systems are helping recruiters achieve this. Finally, an ATS provides recruiters with the technology to automate and accelerate many traditional HR processes that have historically “bogged them down” so they can focus their time and efforts on being more productive by connecting with the best candidates and making their recruitment efforts more personalized.  

4. ATS Systems Solves Financial Challenges

It’s a challenge facing every industry - how to achieve more with less? Technology continues to play an increasingly popular role in helping organizations do more with less, and the world of talent acquisition is no exception. Organizations that have made strategic investments in an ATS have reported up to a 40% improvement in productivity, and recruitment technologies are continuing to innovate so that recruiters can take advantage of the automated features that come embedded within the best ATS systems on the market today.

Understand that in our current job market, recruiters are under constant pressure to find the right talent. That kind of pressure leads to hiring the wrong person - a very costly mistake for any organization. An ATS system can be enormously effective at helping organizations avoid those costly mistakes. They help recruiters minimize the amount of time it takes to fill a position, and they also reduce the duration of time that position goes unfulfilled. 

Finally, ATS systems drastically reduce the likelihood of hiring the wrong person by using tools like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to precisely identify the best fit. Remember, a bad hire can be even more costly than leaving a position unfilled.

5. Overcome Hiring Challenges During the Looming Recession

A majority of the world’s leading economists expressed concerns recently that, after a year of solid growth, the American economy that’s historically driven growth and innovation in other parts of the world may be backsliding into recession territory. Whenever the world experiences an economic turndown, organizations tend to hit the reset button on their HR procedures – they stop spending, they institute hiring freezes, and their entire recruitment strategy can come under scrutiny as budgets get constrained. 

In these lean times, the number of applications flooding organizations is likely to increase, and organizations need to have the reliability of an ATS at the center of their talent acquisition efforts to successfully navigate the uncertainties of a looming recession. 

Ultimately, ATS technologies will continue to play an increasingly pivotal role in determining whether organizations can successfully navigate and overcome the challenges described above. 

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Conclusion

Organizational leaders who are still unwilling to embrace new innovations in recruitment technology are only crippling their own ability to retain the best talent, while those who’ve decided to invest in a modern ATS system will benefit from the many advantages these systems offer like cost savings over time and the increased levels of productivity.

With the global ATS market expected to go over $3 billion by 2027, many organizations are becoming privy to the advantages they can gain by investing in an ATS system. If you’ve decided that now is the time to install an ATS system at your organization, we’ve already done the research to determine the best fit for your company - Manatal.

Manatal is an industry leader in the design and development of the world’s most innovative and powerful ATS software system. The Manatal ATS platform offers organizations a wide array of tools and solutions to help organizations navigate the dynamics of what has become a very volatile job market. Having successfully integrated cutting-edge HR technologies that can reliably automate many traditional and often time-consuming HR tasks with a few simple clicks, Manatal has a stellar reputation for rapidly identifying the best candidate from thousands of resumes.

If your organization would like to know more, you can take advantage of the free trial that Manatal offers and discover how to overcome the talent acquisition challenges of today and tomorrow.

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