Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is currently utilized in their businesses by 99% of Fortune 500 organizations, according to current statistics. The aim is to speed up, automate and streamline the recruitment process. However, many enterprises still do not clearly understand ATS. Here’s an overview of ATS to help you get started using the software more easily and learn how to shorten the time it takes to find the right candidate for a vacant position.

What is an Applicant Tracking System?

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is software that manages and tracks candidates throughout the entire recruitment process. This system is commonly used by recruiters and talent acquisition. With ATS we can accelerate the candidate management and significantly shortens the time to find the right candidate.

ATS have a variety of built-in features, from simple database functionality to a full-service suite of tools that help businesses of all sizes easily filter, manage, and analyze candidates. All recruitment and HR activities are automate such as sort resume, track candidate applications, facilitate communication, screen candidates and even monitor the cost per hire.

Read more: 6 common misunderstandings about ATS

Reasons why businesses should invest in Applicant Tracking System software

Talent plays an important role, because this is the factor that helps businesses grow strongly and increase competitiveness in the market. However, in reality, many businesses today are facing many difficulties in the process of finding and recruiting talented people.

For each open position, a company can quickly receive hundreds, even thousands of job applications from candidates. This becomes especially more difficult for large corporations. Because the organizational structure is much more complex, the number of employees they need to recruit also increases exponentially.

Many positions are posted at the same time, making it difficult for the human resources department to process all the job applications they receive and choose the most suitable people.

Using ATS will be the solution to this problem. An ATS can offer a variety capabilities that can help the entire recruitment process from find talent, evaluate potential, track the interview process, evaluate performance, create job offers and hire use. Instead of having to work with a mountain of paper resumes or a full email inbox, they use recruitment management software to store and organize their work effectively.

According to Recruitment strategies report: Invest in employee referrals and promote your brand better by Karen McCandless, 78% of recruiters using an ATS report that it has improved the quality of the candidates they hire. 99% of the fortune 500 companies used an ATS in their recruitment process.

The 6 most important features of an Applicant Tracking System

The candidate tracking system will help businesses optimize costs for the recruitment process, screen candidate resumes, and select the most suitable candidates. Here are the 6 most important features of ATS software:

• Resume parsing: This process is carried out with the purpose of extracting information from the candidate’s application resume. All information including contact details, employment experience, education level and skills will be scanned by the ATS.
• Candidate sourcing: Gathering candidates from various recruitment channels into a single source. This will help you easily manage all candidate profiles, search, and quickly reach out to candidates.
• Email templates: Providing email templates will help recruiters save time on drafting and maintain communication with candidates throughout the interview process.
• Resume’s candidate scoring: Most ATS software typically provides a feature to score candidates’ application resumes. This scoring is based on the candidate’s experience and skills compared to the requirements for the position. This ensures that candidate resumes are evaluated in a fair and and unbiased evaluations.
• Advanced analytics and provides visually intuitive reports. This feature allows recruiters to generate reports with various types of charts regarding recruitment timelines, effectiveness of recruitment sources and recruitment costs. These insights help recruiters in formulating effective strategies.
• Customized Career Pages. The option to generate personalized career pages is a must-have feature for your ATS. According to a LinkedIn survey, 61% of Talent Acquisition leaders believe that the company’s career page is the most effective tool for employer branding. A convenient ATS system will provide a feature for businesses to create their own career page.

How to select an Application Tracking System

With a wide range of ATS options available, finding the possible ATS is difficult. Choosing the wrong software can be detrimental to your brand, as well as a waste of time and money. This requires organizations to consider factors before deciding to use the ATS system for their business.

Understand the problems your business is facing

Choosing an ATS solution that is suitable for the problems your business is facing will help your organization solve these problems completely. With so many ATS options, it’s critical to isolate the true pain points the solution should target. 

For example, if the organization struggles to identify and recruit high-end talent, they should search for an applicant tracking system (ATS) that generates dynamic job descriptions, automates pre-interview skill evaluations, and leverages AI to build a strong skills profile if it has trouble finding and hiring top talent.

As a result, organizations must define the important features and functionalities required for their recruitment process. Consider candidate management, CV parsing, collaborative recruitment tools, reporting, and the ability to integrate the applicant tracking system with other HR systems.

Read more: How much does an Applicant Tracking System cost?

Match investment to the organization’s budget

Choosing a solution that fits your budget will help businesses balance operating costs. To do this, employers need to remember what the purpose needs to be solved. Can the proposed solution meet the needs of the business? And if so, is the budget appropriate and balanced?

Receive demos of recruitment software

All software providers (especially SaaS ones) allow you to experience the product before making a purchasing decision. You just need to make an appointment with them, then see what the pros and cons of their products are.

Highly recommend data security requirements

Data security is extremely important for every enterprise. Candidates believe their confidential application and resume data is secure and will only be utilized for recruiting when they submit their materials. Evaluating the security of the ATS solution will help minimize the risk of data leak.

Need to clearly discuss with the ATS solution provider about data access and control features. In case of data loss, how will the provider handle it? Confirm that the ATS provides data security in the cloud and complies with relevant data protection regulations.

Select a reputable and experienced supplier

Please carefully study the supplier’s capacity profile and the projects they have successfully implemented. Prioritize suppliers who have successfully implemented projects for needs similar to your business.

Before deciding, request a demo or take advantage of a free trial. It will help you get an overview of the tool’s details and functions as well as evaluate product quality. Call your HR solutions partner and schedule a demo or offline presentation right at your workplace.

Read more: Choosing the right ATS system for your business | Useful tips

SHiring – An Applicant Tracking System solution for recruitment success

Applicant tracking software is essential for recruitment success, regardless of company size. Understanding the difficult problems that businesses encounter in the recruitment process, SHiring ATS solution was born to solve all of those problems. 

SHiring’s features that help simplify the recruitment process, reduce costs and free up time, SHiring helps recruiters focus on important tasks such as establishing recruitment strategies and training. employees and build good relationships with candidates. Outstanding features that can be mentioned are:

Integrating effective candidate resume extraction technology

Automatically extract data from multiple candidate resume at the same time, with high speed and accuracy thanks to candidate resume Parser technology. Supports candidate resume extraction in many formats: PDF, DOC, DOCX.

Automatically screen candidate profiles

Employers can easily set up target candidate portrait criteria along with a description of job requirements. The system automatically scores, evaluates candidates and classifies them according to suitability for the position being recruited. This helps stop the situation of subjectively and emotionally evaluating candidates.

Centralized candidate resume management on an platform

With this feature, employers can quickly manage all candidate information. Instead of using a series of excel files for storage, now SHiring minimizes data loss or fragmentation.

All candidate resumes from various recruitment platforms will be centralized into one source, SHiring. After the system scans and extracts candidate information, resumes will automatically be categorized into the corresponding recruitment channels for the respective positions. Whenever needed, recruiters can quickly and easily search and query candidate information. Additionally, SHiring provides ample storage capacity for storing numerous candidate resumes.

Provide in-depth reporting and analysis of recruitment results

Instead of spending hours creating reports on recruitment effectiveness, with SHiring this process takes less than 30 seconds. The system provides available report templates with a variety of charts, so employers can evaluate and analyze recruitment campaigns in real time. From there, come up with more effective strategies.

Report templates include: recruitment efficiency report, summary of candidate resume sources and conversion rate of each source, recruitment cost statistics, TA performance… Besides, detailed statistics on the number of candidates corresponding to each recruitment round: Receive applications – Take test – Interview – Offer sent – Offer received – Successfully recruited.

Create job postings and career site for enterprise

Employers can easily create unlimited number of job postings with available job description templates or customize according to the recruitment needs of the business. This will help shorten the time for the recruitment process.

It only takes 30 minutes to build your professional company’s recruitment website based on many of SHiring’s available website templates.

A special feature is that the career site will be integrated with the company’s official domain. People can access from many different types of devices such as computers, laptops, phones, and tablets. For each position applied for, there will be an appropriate application form.

Explore SHiring’s ATS for yourself by requesting a demo or connecting with our team!