Recruiting can be a lengthy and time-consuming process with your business relying heavily upon it. 

Your performance reflects the talent within your business, so you’ve formulated your recruitment to filter and source outstanding candidates – yet for years the manual nature of recruiting has left you allocating huge amounts of time and resources on it, wondering where you can cut corners without sacrificing quality. 

So much of your business is online or in the cloud, so why isn’t your recruiting? This is where an Applicant Tracking System comes in to help change the way you recruit.

How do Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) work?

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a piece of software used by recruiters and businesses to help attract and recruit top talent and streamline the recruitment process, and can cover everything from sourcing talent, right up to onboarding new hires and everything in between. It removes the need to use multiple platforms, or even paperwork, typically used in the recruitment process by integrating multiple functions together into a single piece of software. 

An ATS saves you time by taking control of managing your recruitment process, so you can focus on being a decision maker, not an administrator. 

Features and Benefits of an Applicant Tracking System

An Applicant Tracking System can revolutionize your recruitment process whether you are a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) or a large organisation. But exactly how can an ATS help your business? 

There are several features of an ATS, but the main two categories can be grouped into either the candidate experience or the user experience. 

Candidate experience

Starting off with the candidate experience. Why should you care? The candidate experience looks at every touch point of candidates throughout the entire application process, right from the initial application, to onboarding them. This means their experience doesn’t simply stop once they have hit the apply button on your career site. 

Every stage of your recruitment requires attention. Candidates will often apply for several positions at once, so it can be very easy for them to simply abandon your application if the experience is poor and head to a competitors’ careers site instead.

As we explore later, an ATS can give you the confidence that you are giving every candidate the consistent and quality experience you are aiming for.

It is also important to recognise that recruitment has an influence on the way people perceive your brand. In many scenarios, candidates applying for your roles are also your fans – you wouldn’t provide poor service to your customers, so why disregard the experience you’re giving to candidates? So be sure to understand that your recruitment can be an extension of your branding, after all, studies have shown that dissatisfied customers on average tell around 10 people about their poor experience. Offering a quality candidate experience could benefit your business in ways you didn’t know before.

User Experience

Now, the user experience – a.k.a. you or your team. Built around those who will be using the system day-in-day-out, an ATS strives to make the users’ life as easy as possible. An ATS can tackle a plethora of tasks with focus on improving the productivity of its users and can include:

• Task automation
• Customizable job advert and email templates
• Candidate attraction
• Talent pools
• End-to-end reporting
• Compliance

So what does this mean for you? Ultimately, this means you can spend more time focusing on getting quality candidates into your business, as an ATS is taking care of the time-consuming but crucial administrative tasks which are required in the recruitment process.

With over 20 years experience in recruitment, we have been able to listen to and understand the needs of our users to create a platform that people want to use and improve their workflow.

With over 20 years experience in recruitment, we have been able to listen to and understand the needs of our users to create a platform that people want to use and improve their workflow.

Let’s now explore each feature in more detail.

Attract top talent

Identifying top talent is every recruiter’s top priority, but it can be challenging if recruiting the old way.

An ATS allows you to identify top talent by organising and storing candidate’s information on a single platform, allowing the ATS to scan, identify and highlight the best candidates for a position, reducing any chances of top talent slipping through the net.

The experience you give candidates also plays a pivotal role in making sure top talent gets through the application process and enrolled into your business. An ATS can be integrated with a bespoke career site to create a quality and seamless experience for your candidates, reducing the chances of candidates abandoning the application process.

A bespoke career site also allows your business to maintain the consistent branding it aims for in every other business area and gives your candidates the confidence and familiarity of your business.

Having your job adverts visible to as many candidates as possible can be the difference between top talent discovering your vacancy and not doing so. Whilst hugely beneficial, posting job adverts to various job vacancy sites is a time consuming process which takes you away from other important tasks.

With job board integration, you can post jobs to multiple vacancy sites in just a matter of clicks from an ATS – meaning you can sit back and relax in confidence that your adverts may be seen by thousands.

Save time and improve efficiency with optimised workflow

Recruiting can be time consuming, especially when it involves sifting through large volumes of applications for multiple jobs.

By combining unique decision prompts and automation of admin tasks – such as job posting, scheduling, onboarding, and email communications – with Talent Funnel’s ATS you can hire the best candidates in just 6 clicks. Giving you more time to do the stuff that matters.

With Talent Funnel’s dashboard and decision prompts, you are provided with a central hub of activity, where you can easily track the progress of applications including their ‘status’ in a certain stage, time spent in that stage and more – allowing you to keep on top of applications but importantly, ensuring you never miss a top candidate.

Build your talent pool

We’ve mentioned getting top talent into your business and saving time and efficiency, but what about a way to roll both of those benefits into one? This is where we can introduce a talent pool. Sometimes just because a candidate isn’t suitable for one role, doesn’t mean they aren’t the perfect match for another. 

A talent pool is the perfect way of saving previous, high-performing candidates who have been unsuccessful in other roles, for later opportunities. An ATS provides the platform for you to securely store the candidates information – we explore this further later on – and to then be matched with relevant vacancies in the future which they may be better suited for. This could mean for some future vacancies, it removes the need to screen more candidates – as the perfect candidate is already within reach – saving you time.

This is why as we have mentioned, focusing on the candidate experience can be so beneficial. It increases the chances of any candidates in your talent pool accepting invitations for positions at a later date, because the experience you previously gave them maintains a positive perception of your business.

Provide a consistent user experience and maintain your branding

Consistency can be key in business – it affects both users and candidates, from following laws & regulations, to your business branding. 

Unsure about “retention periods”, “right to be forgotten” or questioning whether you are using a secure database to store data? Data breaches or failure to comply with complicated data protection can be costly, so there is little-to-no margin for error. An ATS puts you at ease with a platform which can utilise tools to adhere to GDPR and data privacy regulations, so you can rest assured that you remain in control.

Powerful templates and automation can further save you time with triggered actions, group actions, one-click reference collecting and onboarding requests, contracts and more…

Your recruitment and communication is also an extension of your businesses branding, so you should treat recruitment like a marketing campaign. A range of job advert and email templates can be provided within an ATS, giving your communication, branding and tone the consistency people are used to. Not only that, but save your templates within your ATS, and save time in the future and send emails directly from just the one platform – no need to type out your emails each and every time.

Unsure of the correct way to send the dreaded rejection email? Our ATS can take care of frequently sent emails with a range of templates to help your business recruit the right way. 

Moved a candidate to the next stage of the recruitment process? When paired with the automation of an ATS, your email templates can help your business go further 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

Unlock the full potential of the applications/programs you use and let them work together – an ATS can make life easier by bringing together different applications/programs and integrating them into your recruitment process. You could blur the lines between your hiring and onboarding process by integrating your payroll system with your ATS and bring over candidates’ information accurately and securely with just a matter of clicks; reducing the chances of any errors along the way. 

Or, integrate quick and simple identification checking into your recruitment – streamlining your Right To Work process and letting the software do the work for you. Once you’ve begun using integration, you won’t look back.

Improve your return on investment

Different areas of your business utilise data and reports to measure your performance in a range of departments, so why not add your recruitment to the list? An ATS can give you rich insights into the performance of your recruitment process – from your time to hire, source of hires, your process drop-off points and more – meaning you can focus on the areas that make a difference and continue to enhance your application process further. Choose from specific date ranges and accounts to gain vision over your recruitment in a way you never thought was possible.

Manage your interviews all in one place

In a time where video calls have become the new normal, video interviews are increasingly becoming more popular and it’s easy to see why. All under one roof, an ATS can help you to manage your interview schedule – with the relevant interviewees details just a click away.

Zoom? Google Meet? Skype? Webex? We’ve all been there on either end – going to set up a video call but not everyone is familiar with the same platform.

Not available on every ATS –  take the guesswork out of video interviewing for both interviewee and interviewer, and utilise native video interviewing within the ATS platform.

A simple to use video interviewing package, our Talent Funnel ATS goes one step further and allows you to write your interview notes within the platform – allowing you to not only improve your remote hiring process in one system, but storing everything in one, data protection compliant location – so no need to go sifting through piles of paperwork later.

What’s even better? Once again, automation within the ATS and email templates can help you save time and take care of your communication with candidates. Ready to invite a candidate to interview? Whether you wish to share your availability and give them the freedom to choose their slot, or offer them a particular slot, invitations and confirmation emails & texts are automatically sent and schedules updated all within the ATS platform, to help ease your workload and let you focus on being the decision maker you were hired to be.

Don’t just take our word for it!

“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.”

Amanda – McMullen & Sons Ltd

See if an ATS is right for you