Applicant tracking system adoption could be the difference between a smooth or difficult recruitment process. When a company decides to integrate ATS software into its technologies, they are taking the next step to improve workflows such as candidate management and enhanced communication. Let’s evaluate what ATS does and 5 tips for adopting it into your business.
What Is An Applicant Tracking System?
ATS software is a centralized location where your recruitment team can refer to candidate applications, analyze cover letters and resumes, job postings management, and other aspects of hiring and onboarding. This pivotal tool helps keep human resources teams organized and efficient with candidate tracking through the entire recruitment to onboarding process.
Cadient’s applicant tracking system adoption helps companies build and maintain a refined applicant pool for when open positions come while integrating with popular job boards for enhanced candidate sourcing. Effective screening features take Cadient’s ATS to the next level of modern recruitment. The ATS’s advanced algorithms can screen each candidate and categorize them accordingly to fit their needs. Cadient also offers a branded career site, a hiring management console, an employee activity data feed, and other features in its ATS software
1. Asses Your Needs And Objectives
One of the core ATS implementation tips is to assess your company’s needs and objectives that will drive the transition. Identifying primary recruitment challenges and the features of ATS software that will help your company the most can get you started on the needs and objectives assessment.
What Are Your Primary Recruitment Challenges?
Primary recruitment challenges for most growing companies are difficulty handling large volumes of applications, bottlenecks with tracking candidate progress, or lacking communication between HR and hiring managers. Whatever the specific issues that are affecting your company, it’s best to identify them to select the best ATS software to get on the right route to success.
What Features Are Most Important To Your Team?
Maximizing ATS usage once the adoption is finalized means knowing what features are most important for your team. Resume parsing is a feature that automates relevant information retrieval from applicants’ submitted resumes, which would be best if your company has issues finding quality candidates.
If your company suffers from having to do manual data entry often, then customizable workflows could help. Automated communications such as sending mass emails for a hiring campaign or scheduling follow-up communications with candidates via text or email with scripted text can streamline recruitment while enhancing candidate engagement.
Maybe your company’s hiring metrics need a boost. The reporting and analytics ATS feature shows what’s working best for your business from the recruitment channels (i.e. social media and job board integration) to if referral sources yield higher retention rates.
2. Involve Key Stakeholders
All key stakeholders should be involved in the applicant tracking system adoption process. This includes human resources, IT professionals, hiring managers, finance, executives, and leadership teams. The hiring managers and human resources teams will be the main individuals utilizing ATS software, so they must be properly trained to maximize ATS usage and efficiency.
The IT professionals will help integrate the ATS into the applications and other software the company already utilizes. Involving the finance department will ensure that integrating ATS solutions will not go over the recruitment budget. Executives and leadership teams need to be briefed on the benefits of the ATS software and how it will advance the company to further success.
3. Provide Comprehensive Training
A comprehensive training program for stakeholders, primarily human resources and hiring managers, should include a demo of the ATS software to understand its full capabilities. For example, the head of recruitment in your company can put together an on-screen presentation showing how the new ATS software works.
Define the training objectives. Train the recruitment team to learn how to use the ATS software and all its features for a smoother hiring process. Learning best practices for using the system can also enhance efficiency. If any bottlenecks happen while using the ATS, you should inform users of the main ways to conduct troubleshooting
While the recruitment team can create virtual modules for users to watch, if the ATS software company already has tutorials published on their website, these can help with training, too. From there, you can schedule a time that works best for everyone using the ATS to learn everything before it launches into integration.
Training sessions should be no more than one hour at a time to decrease the likelihood of information overload. Splitting training sessions into 3 to 4 meetings would be best for information retention and a gradual learning process.
4. Conduct Implementation Gradually
They say slow and steady wins the race. With any new system adoption within your company, start integrating it slowly into daily practices. For example, you can start by using one of the ATS features for one week before introducing another one for the team to begin utilizing. Introducing each feature gradually will ensure that users can learn all pertinent details without being rushed into it.
The gradual implementation should involve pilot testing among a set group of users and then introducing the ATS to one department at a time. Monitoring the progression of the implementation process in each department will guide the adoption process accordingly.
Ensure the ATS is compatible with other systems already in your organization. Conducting integration and data migration tests can ensure that information is delivered timely and efficiently to its source i.e. transferring data from the applicant tracking system to HRIS when an applicant becomes a new hire.
5. Leverage Data Analytics
An important avenue to improve ATS adoption is leveraging the generated data to help future hiring campaigns be more successful. The Cadient Analytics Portal can become your go-to for analyzing all hiring metrics to give you insights on what recruitment processes should be improved for faster, more efficient onboarding. Metrics like time-to-fill, time-to-hire, and cost-per-hire are presented in a general report to help you make data-driven decisions for improving your recruitment strategy.
This portal allows you to review internal and external data and keep up with compliance-related reports. There are also general reporting perks where you can choose when the reports are generated. For example, if you want to see how your hiring metrics changed in the past month, you can have a report generated on October 1st and November 1st.
Conclusion
Implementing ATS software into your business will initiate benefits like automating recruitment tasks and enhancing candidate quality with AI-driven keyword searches when evaluating applications and resumes. Consider Cadient’s applicant tracking system for all your recruitment needs.
