How Does an ATS Help With Recruitment?

ATS stands for Applicant Tracking System, a type of software for tracking candidates from the beginning of the recruiting process to the final hire. It helps recruiters and HR professionals to sort, screen, filter and analyse applicants in one centralised location. 

According to one report, nearly 99% of Fortune 500 companies use an ATS. Among large companies and smaller organisations, the use of an ATS stands at 66% and 35%, respectively.

No matter the size, industry or mission of an organisation, every single one needs to attract and hire the right candidates for open roles. This is no easy feat, with many applicants to sift through and a high volume of open jobs competing for the attention of talent. In the UK, for example, there were approximately 1.05 million job vacancies in May 2023, lower than the peak of 1.3 million one year ago, but still far higher than at any other point this century.

Using an ATS can give organisations the best chance of success and streamline the process of attracting, hiring and retaining top talent. Here are some of the most significant benefits of using an ATS:

Sourcing candidates that will fit a role is a major challenge on its own: Organisations may struggle to cast a wide enough net, lack brand awareness among potential applicants or don’t have the necessary data available. 

Using an ATS enables recruiters to address these challenges and source the right candidates quickly and efficiently from a large pool of applicants. Depending on the specific system, an ATS may be able to create ideal candidate profiles, screen resumes, match them to job descriptions, shortlist those who meet the experience and skills requirements, eliminate unqualified candidates and use all this data to improve for future hiring processes.

The recruiting and hiring process can quickly hit a bottleneck if scheduling interviews is done manually or with poor communication between stakeholders. This is a significant issue, since the war for talent is fierce and organisations need to fill job vacancies as quickly as possible.

An ATS helps teams automate those manual processes and seamlessly schedule interviews to keep candidates moving through the pipeline, also improving metrics like time to hire and cost per hire. With better transparency across teams, there’s more opportunity for open communication so the organisation can come away with the best-fit hires.

With a streamlined recruitment process, time and resources aren’t being wasted on manual tasks or redundancies. This brings down the cost per hire while also freeing up recruiters to focus on more strategic tasks and increase productivity.

As mentioned above, an ATS can improve various recruitment metrics, but also simply offers better visibility and analysis opportunities across HR KPIs. Without an ATS, you might be running recruitment and hiring processes manually, leaving plenty of valuable data uncaptured. The ATS captures candidate data for the whole end-to-end process so recruiters and other stakeholders can better understand the applicant pool, hiring trends and areas for improvement.

The technology of an ATS can scan all available information more quickly and thoroughly, ensuring no key insights are missed. Utilising screening and matching capabilities can help recruiters spot the best-qualified candidates and move them along through the process.

Organisations can’t rely solely on going out and finding the right candidates; it’s also crucial to be accessible and easy to find so the right people know about your job openings. An ATS allows recruiters to post vacancies on multiple job boards and social media platforms with ease, often just one click to cover all platforms and accounts. This process ensures that job postings reach a larger audience, increasing the chances of finding qualified candidates quickly.

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An applicant tracking system (ATS) is a type of software that makes it simple for organisations to manage the recruiting and hiring process by collecting information and documents from applicants, scheduling interviews, making offers and managing all the details.

An ATS system uses automated screening and matching technology to simplify the process of posting job vacancies to multiple job boards, sourcing and screening candidates and managing interviews. The system also collects data on the full process to enable better reporting and analytics for recruiters and other stakeholders.

Yes, recruiters use ATS. The majority of organisations use some sort of ATS to manage their recruiting and hiring processes. Considering how high the volume of job applications can be, and how busy recruiters are, these teams can save a lot of time and effort by using an ATS to manage and streamline the recruitment process.

An HR software like Personio can serve as a foundation for your applicant tracking: it’s a centralised platform to store and manage candidate information and applications, automate messaging, schedule interviews and store feedback. 

Increase the efficiency and productivity of your recruiting team with Personio. Set up a demo here.