Supercharge and Simplify Candidate Management with Technology

The obvious fact today is that the global workforce is becoming more cross-functional to support the expanding and maturing digital economy. New technical skills like software development and data analysis are in high demand as enterprises deploy new operating models and introduce new digital products and services. 

Hiring managers also actively look out for qualities and personality traits in candidates that help them do their job better and communicate successfully with colleagues and customers. These skills and attributes are allowing employers to build a workplace culture that supports and encourages employee development and well-being. 

Business and HR leaders also need to hire talent with the right combination of technical and interpersonal skills to help companies innovate and grow. This is how modern hiring tools, such as applicant tracking systems, can improve the efficiency - and ultimately the effectiveness - of talent acquisition. Acquiring the right talent mix can provide a significant advantage for companies competing for customers and market share. 

However, despite the obvious advantages of retaining happy employees and attracting potential high performers, recruiting and hiring top talent is a serious concern around the globe. C-suite executives and board members cited talent acquisition and retention as the second most significant global risk today and by 2031, according to a study by Protiviti and NC State University. This was only second to concerns about the impact of pandemic-related government regulations. By 2031, their chief concern would shift to the need to acquire the skills - through hiring or training existing employees - to use new digital technologies.

Why are business leaders so worried about their company’s long-term ability to attract and retain the right talent? The clues may lie in how they are responding to three workforce trends impacting every company today - regardless of its size or industry: labor shortages, changing employee expectations, and HR transformation.

Labor shortages and the Great Resignation: Over the last decade,high-skilled jobs have been in demand by employers. Despite this, there have not been enough professionals to fill the open positions, and this is a consistent challenge . The “Great Resignation” of the past year has only intensified the issue. People may be leaving their current jobs but may not have the qualifications to apply for positions in another industry. Others, many of them women, are dropping out of the workforce entirely to manage domestic and personal responsibilities.  

As the problem grows, industry analysts anticipate that this shortage will continue for several more years. This is because professionals with the skills employers need are not graduating in large enough numbers to fill the talent gap, or replace Boomers who are beginning to retire. Furthermore, re-skilling efforts are not far-reaching enough to drive noteworthy changes. In this scenario, innovation is seen as the way to overcome these challenges so that productivity does not suffer.

An example of a successful recruitment-focused public-private partnership (PPP) is Baanbrekend, which “supports short- and long-term unemployed people in getting back to work” in the Netherlands. The partnership between Dutch municipalities, Public Employment Services UWV, and Randstad Netherlands found that participants in the program were employed at four times the rate of an individual who was not in the program showing the value of the PPP collaboration. 

Shifting employee preferences: A profound shift is underway in the workforce as Boomers retire and Millennials and Gen Z populations comprise a larger share of full-time employees. Younger generations are not putting up with rigid policies, unhealthy work environments, or unsupportive management. 

Additionally, without pensions keeping employees at one company for an entire career - as was the case with Boomers - younger generations are prioritizing their desires for higher pay, more flexibility through remote or hybrid working options, to work for a purpose rather than a paycheck, and career development opportunities. Tactics that employers relied on in the past to retain employees are no longer relevant to these age groups.

In response, employers have had to rethink the selling points of working for their organization to attract and retain top talent. Some companies like Google have invested in redesigning their office spaces to encourage employees to spend time there. Others like Spotify and Reddit have announced that employees can work wherever they are most productive - whether that is at home or the office. 

Companies are also introducing policies to promote their employees’ well-being. Ford’s chief people and employee experiences officer summed up their approach commenting, “If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last 12 months, it is that a lot of our assumptions around work and what employees need has shifted.” 

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HR transformation: In-house and agency recruitment methods are also experiencing a transformation as the adoption of advanced hiring tools becomes ubiquitous and virtual hiring is established as a standard feature of recruitment activities. 

Virtual hiring truly took hold during the pandemic and neither job seekers nor recruiters seem interested in returning to the way things were before. Over 90% of employers expressed a desire to continue conducting virtual interviews in the future. A greater emphasis on data analytics has also allowed recruitment teams to better understand their performance as well as employee needs and changes in turnover rates.

In the face of these challenges, an effective talent acquisition process is vital for companies to hire successful, long-tenured employees. Companies’ abilities to retain high-performing talent is critically important to the viability of the enterprise going forward. If a company is unable to attract and retain the right employees on a consistent basis, strategic business plans can’t be realized and their competitiveness slips over time. 

For example, Virgin Media learned that in 2014 it was losing ​​GBP 4.4 million in revenue from applicants who turned down job offers with the company. The company calculated that this figure was almost as much as it spent on hiring that year, which was a wake-up call to focus on employer branding and the candidate experience during hiring.

Recruitment professionals have access to powerful hiring tools today like applicant tracking systems, or ATS, that allow them to have a positive impact on the candidate experience at each stage of the hiring process - from candidate sourcing to onboarding. This ensures that companies recruit better-qualified candidates and more employment offers are accepted.

What is an applicant tracking system?

Just as the name implies, an ATS is a recruitment industry software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that allows professionals to store and manage applicant profiles. Modern solutions like Manatal are cloud-based and feature a powerful AI engine that automates the time-consuming, tedious, and - let’s face it - error-prone tasks that are essential to sourcing candidates for job vacancies. 

SaaS solutions like an ATS or recruitment CRM are part of an exploding enterprise tech market. Analysts predicted that the global SaaS market will grow at a CAGR of 27.5% between 2021 and 2028 reaching a value of USD 716.52 billion by 2028. While recruitment technology is a small area of this market, it shows the amount of interest in these solutions for just about every job function.

An ATS is a step up from traditional tools such as spreadsheets because it not only stores candidate information, it also helps recruiters manage the hiring process - which includes screening, interviews, and communications - all the way to the onboarding stage. Software updates are pushed to the user via the internet instead of the user investing the company’s resources on a new on-premise deployment. 

READ MORE: How an ATS outperforms traditional spreadsheets.

ATS solutions also simplify and streamline how candidates are managed in a database, as well as when they are going through the interview process. Recruitment teams can see all of the activities associated with an open job in one place and collaborate with each other and clients to extend job offers to qualified candidates faster. 

These easy-to-deploy solutions go the extra mile toward improving job seekers’ average experiences with recruiters and companies. 

Common candidate management issues 

Saving time sourcing candidates and optimizing hiring activities are important ways that recruitment teams benefit from deploying an ATS, and allow them to direct their attention to improving the candidate experience. The candidate experience is determined by the impressions and takeaways from every interaction with hiring managers, employees, and managers at a company. The smallest slip-up could turn a candidate’s experience sour.

However, hiring processes today are not centered around the candidate experience, and it shows. In North America, a Talent Board survey found that candidate resentment actually rose 75% between 2020 and 2021. Allowing negative experiences to take place without reviewing the situations and making changes can make it more difficult to attract qualified candidates to job openings. Companies may also receive fewer hires from employee referrals, which are a powerful source of applicants. 

Over time this can negatively impact the company’s reputation, especially if candidates are sharing their negative experiences online and on social media. Getting the candidate experience right from the hiring stage is vital. Once they become employees, their perception of their employer has direct implications for how customers will be treated, and ultimately the bottom line.

Adopting a candidate-centric approach to hiring practices garners more positive candidate experiences, which is an essential aspect of successful recruiting efforts. Instead of an employer-centric approach, which is focused on meeting business KPIs and the needs of the company, the recruiters succeed by building long-term relationships with candidates. 

This means identifying what they need to ensure that they are attracting the most qualified applicants. Structuring hiring processes to cater to candidates’ needs is useful in the current environment where job seekers can be more selective about which jobs to apply to. 

It is no different than the customer-centric experiences that organizations have rebuilt business models around in recent years. Customers want to feel heard, appreciated, and valued. They prefer seamless processes, value quick action, and appreciate clear, consistent, and responsive communication. Sound familiar? Job seekers are looking for the same from prospective employers and are not afraid to keep searching until they find the right fit. 

Modern recruiting technologies make it possible to ensure that hiring processes remove the friction that can dampen candidate experiences. 

When considering the features of an applicant tracking system as a solution, four standouts help recruiting teams take their hiring processes to the next level. Let’s take a closer look at the ATS features you should look for to supercharge candidate management.

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Feature 1: Easy-to-use hiring pipeline

The most essential improvement on traditional spreadsheets is how ATS goes beyond simply storing candidate profiles to consolidate and automate the entire hiring process. With Manatal, recruitment teams can track the progress of a job listing - including all of the candidates, users, and departments - on one page. 

Agencies can also organize client information and projects in a simple dashboard. This allows recruitment teams to manage candidates from when they are sourced to the onboarding stage, which ensures lasting hires.

Feature 2: Mass email capabilities integrated with candidate sourcing

Send bulk emails and important updates to candidates faster. Manatal’s ATS allows users to integrate their email accounts with the platform to keep communications in one place. Communications activities can be standardized with templates that are accessible to all team members. 

Reminders to send updates to candidates throughout the hiring process can also be set to ensure that no applicant is lost during the process. Email marketing efforts can also be integrated into the platform allowing teams to export candidate contact details to applications like Mailchimp. 

These integrations are critical in developing candidate relationships and improving communications with candidates who have applied to job listings and expect to hear from a company early and often about their status. Recruitment leaders can also measure the effectiveness of these activities by analyzing open and response rates from the platform.

Feature 3: Team collaboration

An important aspect of enabling recruiting teams to work remotely is facilitating seamless collaboration with the right tools. Manatal’s collaboration features maximize efficiency at each stage of the hiring process. Recruitment leaders can enhance how their teams work together with team chat and assign roles and permissions to control which team members have access to certain information on the platform. 

Team members can be tagged in notes and assign colleagues to stay in the loop on activities related to job openings and candidate interactions. With candidate tags, users can simplify how they search for a particular profile for easy searching. Recruitment agencies can also customize external views to give clients access to information about the progress of job vacancies and communicate with them directly from the platform.

Feature 4: Candidate reports and analytics

With all of the data that companies have access to, thanks to digitalization, it is expected that they would try to analyze the data and glean insight to improve future hiring outcomes and recruiter performance. The potential upside of devoting time and resources to uncovering insights from data is huge in terms of improving efficiency, team productivity, and business growth. According to McKinsey, companies that are using data-driven B2B sales and growth engines report above-market growth and earnings increases between 15% and 25%.

Manatal makes it easy to customize and create reports in minutes to help recruiters modify their operations based on historical data and increase the number of successful hires by your team. Recruitment leaders can analyze every important metric, such as average time-to-hire, acceptances of job offers, and turnover data to understand the impact of their activities and gauge the success of hiring efforts. 

Users can also see which application channels, such as job boards, the organization’s career portal, and social media accounts, are delivering the best candidates. 

Manatal is an all-in-one solution

Successful technology deployments have two attributes in common. The first is how easy a solution is to implement and use by employees of all technical skill levels. The second is how well the technology streamlines or eliminates the need for other tools, which can increase the complexity of business processes.

 Recruitment firms looking to update their candidate management and improve hiring processes should look for these features when evaluating an ATS.

Manatal is a powerful all-in-one ATS solution for modern recruitment needs. It smooths the entire candidate management process by showing more efficient ways of doing business and reducing total hiring costs. This allows recruiters to spend less time on parsing resumes to find the right fit and leverage their soft skills, such as problem resolution, critical thinking, empathy, and adaptability, to develop strong relationships with candidates and speed up hiring.

Start a 14-day free trial here to see how you can make candidate management your organization’s competitive advantage.