As a recruiter consistently making placements is linked to your ability to source quality candidates. To help boost your recruiting efficiency, you must have come across a number of solutions that include an ATS, but what does it mean? How does an ATS help boost productivity and most importantly how does it work? This post will talk you through everything you need to know about an ATS.

What is an ATS in recruitment?

An ATS is an applicant tracking system, ATS ’s technology solutions that automate a vast array of recruitment processes and simultaneously exists as a central archive for candidate data. ATS’s house and store candidate data – including pipeline history, CVs and various job applications. ATS’s are engineered to provide visible pipelines across the recruiting process – from sourcing to placement. With candidate data housed in a central database, teams with the right ATS transform their productivity, increase business growth and drive margins.

How does an applicant tracking system work?

The main component of an ATS functionality allows recruiters to track and manage all candidate information within their databases in a centralised system. Depending on the recruitment software functions or the provider that you use for your recruitment processes, your ATS system should allow you to

Post jobs on multiple boards
Candidate email marketing
CV importing
CV parsing to the ATS system
Candidate pipeline management
Candidate tracking

ATS’s can be purchased as standalone solutions or as an integrated feature within a more extensive solution. Our solution EVA combines an ATS, CRM and AI bot in one easy-to-use web platform.

Using EVA, recruiters are able to accelerate their work, easily managing applicant volumes 10x greater than with a conventional ATS. EVA increases:

Placement rates
Speed of selection
Candidate satisfaction

How to know if you need an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)?

A good applicant tracking system is designed to help solve a large number of the most prevalent recruiting challenges and pain-points that a recruiter faces in their day to day roles.

Do any of these sound familiar to you?

Are you struggling to find quality candidates in the current competitive landscape?
Do you find it difficult to aggregate multiple candidate sources of data and spreadsheets?
Lack of time to engage with candidates?
You find it difficult sending personalised responses to all candidates
Do you want to increase the number of candidates that apply to your company?
Do you spend hours posting jobs on multiple career sites and job boards?
Does manual CV screening and formatting take up a large chunk of your time?
Would you like to automate and speed up your interview process?
Would you like a transparent communication workflow for every member of your team?
Do you want visible recruiting metrics and be able to visualise your data?

What features you should look for in an ATS

If you answered Yes to one or more of the questions above, then here are some features you should make sure your ATS software can deliver before your next recruitment software purchase decision.

Candidate sourcing

An ATS (Applicant Tracking System) should be able to help you source candidates for vacancies based on candidate profiles that exist within your system. EVA uses machine learning algorithms to recommend the most relevant candidates for a vacancy, allowing you to consistently place quality hires over a long period of time.

Job boards integration

A good Applicant Tracking System (ATS) will save time and effort, by allowing you to post job ads across multiple job boards in a single click.

Centralised candidate database

An ATS should provide a single and central location, that make managing candidates relationships seamless. The ATS should house all candidate information and make it easy to search and find candidate profiles.

Rich candidates profiles

When a candidate sends over a CV, an ATS should automatically parse the information within a CV directly to the database. The Applicant Tracking System should save all information including cover letters, contact information, previous work history etc – to form a detailed candidate profile that becomes searchable and relevant. Discover how EVA uses candidate data here

Interview scheduling

A good ATS should automate the process of scheduling across the stakeholder communication process. Whether it’s via SMS, email or even via ChatBot, your ATS should be able to sync calendars and set up interview dates.

Real-time analytics

An ATS should provide real-time tracking and analysis that cover the most valuable metrics against your recruitment activities. It should be able to aggregate all sources of data to allow you to make data-driven decisions.

Transparent Processes

An ATS should make communication seamless across a recruitment team. Different tiers of access should be available within the system, as well as different roles assigned across the recruitment process.

The Benefits of an ATS

The benefits of a good ATS are simple – productivity, better processes, communication transparency and much more.

Discover how EVA puts a spin on the traditional ATS by booking a demo

Why you need an intelligent recruitment CRM

The shift in recruitment dynamics depicts a candidate driven market and emphasises the growing importance of delivering a seamless candidate experience.

The lines between candidate and consumer journeys continue to blur, the rapid advancements in technology and social networking depicts that candidates expect process transparency, communication personalisation, and frictionless omnichannel journeys.

As competition for quality candidates continue to soar, recruiters should start focusing on realigning their processes to align with candidate expectations. Developing and nurturing longterm candidate relationships is the key to sustaining a competitive advantage.

What is a recruitment CRM?

Generally, customer relationship management (CRM) is a tool used to manage relationships between a company and their existing and potential customers.

Within recruitment, a CRM translates to Candidate Relationship Management. Recruiters and HR teams employ CRMs to facilitate stakeholder relationship management, CRM technology is often either a built on-site system or a cloud-based software package.

A CRM is a centralised record management system that synchronises and stores information from every candidate interaction including telephone calls, emails, SMS, social media interaction or anything a recruiter would jot down somewhere.

Why is a CRM important?

Simply put, having access to candidate data in a central hub drives productivity.

From a candidates perspective, a point of friction whilst working with recruiters is getting multiple contacts from different recruiters within the same team. Shifting perspective from candidate to customer, it would be unspeakable for multiple salespeople to contact the same consumer to upsell or cross-sell products – the same ideology now applies to recruiters.

Unfortunately, in high-demand industries such as IT, Media-Comms, Healthcare or Pharmaceuticals where recruiters often target passive candidates this is often the norm. Uncoordinated and fragmented communication presents your company as disorganised and unprofessional and is a certified way to ruin candidate relationships.

With the right CRM recruiters can manage, track and nurture candidate relationships within visible pipelines to ensure that you are consistently delivering on candidate experience. Your team are not stepping on each other’s toes and your deliver process transparency for your candidates.

The three types of recruitment CRM

Generally there are three types of CRM. A lot of recruitment technology companies advertise their CRM as a combination of all three, which is most often than not, not the case. The three types of CRM available are:

1. Operational CRM

Operational CRM systems focus on improving the candidate experience, by providing sales and marketing automation tools to help deal with candidates within your database. Operational systems are advantageous when your recruitment strategy is focused on generating and nurturing high-quality leads.

Benefits of an operational CRM

Allows for message sequencing that can be automated within a cycle.

2. Collaborative CRM

The collaborative CRM system is engineered within different deliverable principles than an operational CRM. At the heart of its processes, is the function is to ensure a frictionless integration across all functions of a recruitment team with the ideology that a single but central working system improves business-candidate relationships.

Benefits of a collaborative CRM

Operating within a single view, allows recruiters to pick up conversations at drop-off points, facilitating a seamless multi-channel candidate experience.

3. Analytical CRM

Analytical system draws upon data from processes within your organisation and presents you with an insight into multiple pipelines that influence candidate acquisition and your business growth.

Benefits of an analytical CRM

The main benefit of the analytical CRM is that it allows for data-driven decisions to be made across the organisation.

EVA the single cohesive solution

EVA is recruitment technology redefined, our product combines the core functionalities of an operational CRM with both the collaborative and analytical within groundbreaking technology that powers productivity from sourcing to placement.

EVA combines an ATS, CRM and AI bot in one easy-to-use web platform.By analysing resumes, profiles, and information from multiple sources including agents, candidates, clients and social media, EVA uncovers the hidden insights behind every candidate.

Using EVA, recruiters are able to accelerate their work, easily managing applicant volumes 10x greater than with a conventional CRM.

Build candidate lists, foster transparent processes, automate communication sequences, use our chatbot to manage conversations across multiple channels, predict the most relevant candidates for a vacancy.

EVA increases:

Candidate experience
Process transparence
Placement rates
Speed of selection

Check out our blog post that breaks down what you should look for when you’re considering implementing a new CRM here

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Why having an ATS matters