5 Ways ATS Can Optimize Your Recruitment Process

The recruitment process is, in a way, a three-way collaboration between recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates. It takes smooth and seamless communication throughout the pipeline, along with other factors, to achieve the best results.

In the ever-competitive recruitment game such as today, the key factors in an effective recruitment process and successful talent acquisition is a well-structured strategy that puts hiring managers and recruiters on the same page.

Coupled with a progressive approach - where recruiters are focused on engaging prospective candidates from channels like online job postings, social media, or career sites, and seamless communication between recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates throughout the pipeline to ensure that the qualified candidates will not fall through the cracks during the process, and a tool that helps recruiters efficiently manage the recruitment process while easing their heavy workload.

Losing your focus on one of these critical factors, you might be unable to reach your goals of filling open jobs with the right fit. The consequence would be higher turnover rates and lower productivity. Not quite an ideal future for both your company and your customers.

So, to ensure an error-free process and the highest chance of filling empty positions with the perfect fit, let’s take a look at the recruitment game today and how you can optimize the recruitment process with an efficient tool like Applicant Tracking System or ATS.

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Recruitment Game Today

Businesses are now, more than ever, required to put the well-being of their workforce on top of the priority list while embracing hybrid and remote work methods as regular work modes.

Hybrid work has become a widespread trend amongst companies across the globe as it has proven to be an effective approach to continue business growth and stimulate productivity while allowing the workforce to accomplish their tasks from wherever they are. It is apparent that hybrid and remote work are here to stay for a while.

This trend has heavily affected the recruitment flow and, to some extent, placed strain on one of the most important parts of the recruitment process - relationship management.

As the tide has turned, forging bonds with talents is more difficult than ever because of distance and a lack of in-person interactions. Recruiters and HR professionals are forced to come up with a strategy to organize a smooth recruitment process while ensuring a strong connection with candidates.

A tool such as ATS has for some years now been in the game as an MVP that automates the recruitment process while allowing its users to seamlessly stride along the pipeline with minimum errors. The sharp increase in companies embracing the ATS and the versatility it offers a team, has made it among the most popular - even default - recruitment technology for companies across the world.

At the center of it all, the technology industry has become one of the fastest-growing business sectors. So far, it is soaring without any sign of slowing down in the near future. Effectively, new in-demand skills for jobs that the recruitment market has never seen before were created.

According to a report from CompTIA, every job in IT services and custom software development has conceived 4.8 additional job titles to, directly and indirectly, support the rising demand for the latest technologies in businesses across several industries.

At the same time, Jennifer Shappley, Head of Global Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn, has pointed out that more and more companies are now in search of relevant skills and see the worth of skill sets more than education degrees.

Shappley also addressed that there are currently 3.3 million open positions in the U.S. market that don’t ask for a four-year university degree. This number went up nearly 40% in 2020 compared to 2019.

This, in turn, has expanded the talent pool. Individuals who possess the relevant skills and could perform the jobs at their best capabilities have more chances of taking their spots in well-paid positions without having to worry about their degrees.

Candidates’ Needs 

Research from Gallup revealed that an increase in income and benefits had climbed their way to become one of the top needs candidates since 2015. Moreover, 64% of 13,085 U.S. employees put compensation and benefits as critical factors in accepting new positions. The reason is that employees and job seekers are aware they are in a job seeker's market now.

Wages are rising as a counteract to the rising intensity of competition for talents, and job seekers realize that there are opportunities for them to make more money. Being on higher ground in the current recruitment game gives them the confidence to be selective and seek jobs that offer higher compensation.

At the same time, candidates also desire work-life balance and well-being, as 53% of employees in Gallup’s questionnaire group addressed it as a very important part of the job. All the while, candidates also expect employers to provide them with care and put their well-being, both physically and mentally, as one of the top priorities, especially in the group of Millenial and Gen Z candidates.

Moreover, young talents also deem the desired employer as an organization that values the importance of diversity and provides an inclusive workplace for all types of people, regardless of who they are and where they come from.  

In addition to that, as the world has experienced the destruction that followed the pandemic, employees and job seekers desire a workplace that provides them with a COVID-19 vaccination policy.

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5 Ways ATS Can Boost Your Recruitment Process 

1. Reinforcing Employers’ Brand

Should you decide to embark on a mission to expand the coverage of your talent pool while gravitating high-quality talents your way, reinforcing your employer’s brand is a good start.

The first rule of branding is that it acts as the first gateway that introduces job seekers to the essence of your company, what it stands for, where it comes from, where it is going, and what it is all about.

With an ATS, recruiters and HR professionals will be able to fully focus on the strategy to reinforce their employers’ brands without having to be concerned about daunting tasks that are usually consuming most of their time.

With the power to automate the majority of the recruitment processes, ATS can navigate the hiring pipeline smoothly and stress-free from end to end. Not only will this provide candidates with a better experience, but it will help build up positive employer branding as well.

ATS like Manatal takes users to the next level of the branding game by granting them the ability to create a fully customizable career page. The sky's the limit as you will be able to express and promote your employer’s brand however you imagine.

Say goodbye to the good old days of following limited formats and color blocks. With Manatal, you will have the option to use specific colors and fonts that perfectly match your corporate look. Moreover, you can sample the essence of your brand or what it’s like to be part of your organization by uploading all types of files and content, from high-quality videos, images, and specially designed graphics to unique icons.

Manatal allows you to keep everything under the standard of your brand as the career page can be connected to your existing website and social media channels.

2. Widen Your Target Audience 

The foundation of solid recruitment comes from a coverage candidate pool that is filled with diverse talents who possess unique skill sets. Nowadays, there are many platforms that open a space for you to advertise open jobs and reach a large audience group, such as online job boards and social media channels. However, the more platforms and channels, the more work is descending on your desk.

Recruiting with a traditional method means you are forced to manually publish your job listings on each of these platforms. It goes without saying that you will be put in a tough spot, especially when you are hiring in bulk. Chances are you might be stuck on your working desk and forget what it feels like when the sunlight touches your skin.

With the help of an ATS, a huge amount of your time will be saved as it enables you to publish job advertisements across multiple channels within a few clicks. ATS like Manatal is packed with exceptional features that enable you to expand the scope of your audience base, ensuring that your job listings will reach a larger group of job seekers.

Imagine sharing job openings on 2,500+ free and premium channels, including local, global, and specialized job platforms such as Indeed, LinkedIn, Monster, CareerJet, JobStreet, and many more. With Manatal in your hands. All can be done in a single click. 

3. Ensuring a Strong Candidate List   

The success of the recruitment process lies within the quality of candidates. Following your natural instinct in the selection process for candidate shortlisting, you might end up looking at a weak shortlist.

Why? Because human error and unconscious bias can negatively affect the process and end up letting qualified applicants slip through the cracks.

Eventually, selected candidates might not even possess the skill sets best fit for the jobs. What comes after will likely be inefficient recruitment and a high turnover rate. Going back to square one, wasting time and resources to start the whole process over again is the inevitable outcome.

ATS comes in as a solution that helps you source candidates from multiple channels and effectively screen them in a matter of minutes to find the perfect matches. Manatal’s candidate enrichment feature helps you connect with candidates on a deeper level. You will be able to effectively determine talents and pick up the right fit in a blink of an eye.

Manatal’s AI recommendation feature scans job descriptions and extracts the core skills and requirements. Then, the results will be cross-referenced with your talent pool to identify candidates who are most fit for the jobs.

To further ensure a strong shortlist, Manatal browses the web and extracts candidates' information from their available social media profiles into a single platform to complete users’ candidate databases. After that, It compares candidates’ skills, location, positions, education, and more, to the requirements of any given job and ranks candidates based on the criteria you select.

4. Organizing Your Schedule 

A perfectly aligned schedule is one of the critical factors in generating efficiency in the recruitment process. In the event that recruiters and HR professionals are dealing with many projects and multiple recruitments, it is almost impossible to properly organize every appointment without issues.

Without a reliable tool, there’s a risk that your appointments overlap with one another, leaving candidates and hiring managers confused about their schedules. Providing a bad experience to all concerned parties throughout the pipeline would only hurt your brand.

Especially in an era where meetings and interviews are orchestrated through computer screens, this is a serious problem.

ATS can come into play in this scenario as an ultimate solution that eliminates confusion in the scheduling process by allowing users to manage appointments for each project effortlessly. ATS like Manatal comes with an activity calendar feature that allows you to easily add activities, tasks, and events like meetings, calls, tasks, and emails to your interface.

Keeping track of your appointments and ensuring zero overlapping interview milestones can be simply done by the touch of your fingertips. Further, to make your days even easier, Manatal’s schedule feature can also be integrated with your Outlook / Office365 or Google Suites mailbox within a few clicks.

5. Easing Your Workload While Managing the Sales Pipeline within a Few Clicks

Drowning in an ocean of daunting and repetitive tasks like documentation and backlogging doesn’t sound like a pleasant work day. This is what holds recruiters and HR professionals from pushing their recruitment process forward and placing the right talents into the right positions.

At the same time, it also takes away recruiters’ focus on one of the most important parts of the recruitment process; customer relationship management. Without proper communication or close relationship management throughout the pipeline, there is a slim chance of achieving the recruitment goal.

Not only does ATS like Manatal take the workload out of your hands by automating all of the documentation tasks, but it also comes with a recruitment CRM feature that allows recruiters to manage relationships with hiring managers effortlessly from end to end.

Manatal’s easy-to-use interphase consolidates every progress in the sales pipeline into a single dashboard, allowing users to track and manage customer relationship management within a few clicks. The platform ensures a smooth collaboration and seamless communication with its team chat feature that enables all stakeholders to connect 24/7 from anywhere on earth.

By implementing an ATS like Manatal, you will surely see an increase in productivity and smoother communication, as well as better recruitment results.

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Bring It All Together 

The job market today has gotten more competitive than ever. The evolving technology that generated new in-demand skills, the pandemic, the counteracts of industries around the globe to the health crisis which started the remote work strategy, and the shifting demands of employees and job seekers are all key factors in stimulating new challenges for recruiters and HR professionals.

As time is always the essence of recruitment, discovering talents, establishing relationships with them, and putting them in positions where they can perform best as quickly as possible means success over competitors.

 However, it’s easier said than done. As new trends always emerge and change the momentum of the game, recruiters and HR professionals must keep up with the latest movement in the recruitment industry and anticipate a new wave of trends to come in order to understand the conditions of the market and what candidates need.

Applicant Tracking System is a tool that can help recruiters and HR professionals point their focus on important factors that could help them generate growth and productivity. By automating the recruitment process, ATS users will be able to follow up with the trends without having to worry about daunting daily tasks. They can get to know candidates and learn what they are looking for while fully understanding the hiring needs of their customers.

ATS like Manatal comes with powerful features that could help elevate your recruitment process and get the best results without breaking a sweat. Features like a customizable career page allow you to fully express your brand and welcome candidates to your front door. At the same time, expanding a talent pool that is full of high-quality candidates can be done by publishing job advertisements across multiple channels in one click.

Social media enrichment and AI recommendations ensure that you will get to know candidates on a deeper level and create a shortlist filled with highly qualified talents.

Providing hiring managers and candidates with a smooth experience can be done through a calendar feature which helps you manage a clean schedule without overlapping appointments. Moreover, the recruitment CRM assures that you will turn prospects into customers effortlessly while guiding them through the sales pipeline smoothly and stress-free.

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