What is an Applicant Tracking System?

What is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)?

It’s the solution for lengthy, inefficient recruitment.  Businesses need effective recruitment, but manual methods are time-consuming and resource-intensive. An ATS makes a real difference, automating key tasks, boosting efficiency, and helping you find excellent candidates without compromising quality.

How do Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) work?

An ATS helps recruiters and businesses attract and hire top talent, streamlining the entire process.  It handles everything from finding candidates to onboarding new starters.  You won’t need multiple platforms or paperwork – an ATS integrates functions into one, easy-to-use system. This centralised system boosts efficiency and data management, giving you a single, reliable source of candidate information.

An ATS saves you time by managing the recruitment process, so you can focus on making decisions, not doing administration. Spend less time on admin and more on strategic hiring, leading to better, data-driven decisions.

Features and Benefits of an Applicant Tracking System

An Applicant Tracking System can transform your recruitment, regardless of whether you’re a small or large business. It offers significant benefits for all sizes of business: better efficiency, lower costs, and a better candidate experience. There are several key areas to consider with an ATS; the candidate experience and the user experience.

Candidate experience

Let’s start with the candidate experience. Why’s this so important? It covers every stage of the candidate journey, from their initial application to their onboarding. It’s not just about the application itself; it’s the whole experience.  A positive candidate experience attracts better candidates and improves your employer brand. It also reduces the chance of losing good candidates to your competitors.

Every part of your recruitment process matters.  Candidates often apply for several jobs at once, so a poor application experience can easily lead them to choose a competitor instead. An ATS ensures a consistent, positive experience from start to finish, increasing the number of completed applications and boosting your company’s image.

Later, we’ll see how an ATS gives you confidence that you’re providing a consistent, high-quality experience for every candidate.  This improved experience significantly improves your employer brand.

Recruitment significantly affects how people view your brand.  Candidates are often also your customers – you wouldn’t offer poor service to customers, so why offer a poor experience to potential employees? Your recruitment process reflects your brand, and studies show dissatisfied customers tell an average of ten people about their negative experience. A great candidate experience benefits your business in many ways. Positive word-of-mouth recommendations are extremely valuable, and a positive candidate experience directly affects your reputation.

User Experience

Now, let’s talk about you and your team.  An ATS is designed to make your day-to-day work easier.  It can manage lots of tasks, helping your team be more productive.  Features include:

• Customisable job adverts and email templates: Create professional, branded communications that maintain a consistent image.
• Candidate attraction: Reach more people through strategic job postings and targeted advertising.
• Task automation: Automate repetitive tasks, freeing up your time for more strategic work.
• Talent pools: Build a database of strong candidates for future opportunities.
• End-to-end reporting: Track key metrics to measure recruitment success and identify areas for improvement.
• Compliance: Ensure you’re meeting all data protection regulations.

What does this mean for you? You’ll have more time to focus on hiring great people because the ATS handles the time-consuming administrative tasks involved in recruitment.  This leads to significant cost savings and a higher return on investment.

We’ve been helping businesses with their recruitment needs for over 20 years, and we’ve used this experience to create a platform that people enjoy using and which improves their workflow. Our ATS is designed to be user-friendly and intuitive.

Attract top talent

Finding top talent is essential, but it can be difficult using old methods. An ATS helps you find and keep the best candidates by organising and storing candidate information in one place.  This allows the system to quickly identify and highlight the best matches for each role, reducing the chances of overlooking suitable candidates.

The candidate experience is key to getting top talent on board.  An ATS, integrated with a bespoke career site, provides a high-quality, smooth experience that reduces the chance of candidates abandoning their application. A positive candidate experience is vital to attracting and retaining top people.

A dedicated career site helps maintain a consistent brand image, giving candidates confidence and familiarity with your business. This helps build trust and strengthens your employer brand.

Making your job adverts visible to as many candidates as possible is vital. Although very effective, posting adverts on multiple job sites is time-consuming. An ATS simplifies this with job board integration.

With job board integration, posting jobs on multiple sites takes just a few clicks. You can relax knowing that your adverts will reach thousands of potential candidates.

Save Time and Improve Efficiency

Recruiting takes time, particularly when you’re dealing with many applications.  Our ATS combines unique decision prompts with automation of administrative tasks such as job posting, scheduling, onboarding, and email communication. This means you can hire the best candidates quickly, freeing up your time to concentrate on what really matters.

Talent Funnel’s dashboard and decision prompts give you a central overview of all recruitment activity. You can easily track progress, including the stage each application is at and how long it’s taken, ensuring that you never miss a great candidate.  You can gain valuable insights and identify any bottlenecks in your process.

Build your talent pool

It’s great to attract top talent and save time, but what if you could combine both?  That’s where a talent pool comes in.  Just because a candidate isn’t right for one role, doesn’t mean they aren’t perfect for another.

A talent pool is ideal for keeping hold of high-performing candidates who were unsuccessful in previous applications. The ATS securely stores their information, so you can match them to future opportunities.  This saves you time and resources because you already have suitable candidates available.

Focusing on candidate experience is extremely beneficial.  It greatly increases the likelihood of candidates from your talent pool accepting future offers because they have already had a positive experience with your company.

Provide a consistent user experience and maintain your branding

Consistency is key, it affects both users and candidates, from legal compliance to branding.  A consistent brand image makes a positive impression on candidates and helps strengthen your employer brand.

Unsure about data protection regulations like retention periods and the right to be forgotten? Data breaches are costly, so accuracy is vital. An ATS provides a secure platform that complies with GDPR and other data protection laws.  An ATS protects your business from legal and financial risks.

Our automated templates and systems will save you a great deal of time.  You can automate various actions like collecting references, managing onboarding requests and contracts, and much more. This makes your processes much more efficient.

Your recruitment communication is part of your brand, so treat it like a marketing campaign. An ATS provides branded job adverts and email templates, giving your communication a consistent, professional feel.  You can store templates within the ATS to save time, sending emails directly from the platform.

Need help crafting the perfect rejection email?  Our ATS provides templates to help you handle this sensitive communication professionally and consistently.

If a candidate progresses to the next stage, automated email templates keep communication flowing smoothly.  This saves time and keeps everything running efficiently.and send out emails automatically – allowing you to put your emails on autopilot and save you time.

Create a connected ecosystem with APIs and integrations

Make the most of all your applications and let them work together. An ATS makes this easier by bringing different applications together, integrating them into your recruitment process.  For example, you could link your payroll system with your ATS, transferring candidate information quickly and securely. This reduces the chance of errors.

Or you could integrate simple identification checks into your recruitment process, streamlining your Right to Work checks. Once you start using integration, you won’t want to go back.

Improve your return on investment

Many departments use data and reports to measure performance, so why not recruitment? An ATS gives you valuable insights, such as time-to-hire, source of hire, and where applications drop off.  This helps you to improve your processes and gain a better understanding of your recruitment activity.  You can choose specific dates and accounts to get an in-depth view of your recruitment.

Manage your interviews all in one place

Video calls are now commonplace, and video interviews are becoming increasingly popular. An ATS makes it easy to manage your interview schedule and access the relevant details.

There are many different video conferencing platforms, which can sometimes be difficult to manage. An ATS solves this by offering a simple integrated solution.

Our Talent Funnel ATS has a user-friendly video interviewing package.  You can easily make notes during the interview, ensuring that everything is stored in one secure, compliant location.  This greatly improves your remote hiring processes.

Our ATS and email templates help save you time by automating communications with candidates. You can easily send invitations and confirmation emails and texts. The system automatically updates schedules, helping to reduce your workload.

Don’t just take our word for it!

“Thanks to your team for making this such a stress-free project. The system is incredibly user-friendly, and we’re delighted with the results.” – Amanda, McMullen & Sons Ltd

Amanda

McMullen & Sons Ltd

“Thanks to your team for making it such a stress free project. The system is ridiculously user friendly and we’re really pleased with the end product.”