The benefits of an ATS aren’t limited to organizations an ATS can also be beneficial to your candidates. In order to provide an effective and enjoyable experience for your candidates, you’ll want to take advantage of all the features that your ATS offers. In addition to features, there are additional tips you should consider when thinking about your candidate’s experience.
How Can an ATS Help Your Candidates’ Experience?
Here we’ll discuss some of the ways that your ATS can create a better experience for your applicants. Your ATS can’t do everything on its own, so it’ll be up to you to decide how to use the many tools and features your ATS offers to improve your candidates’ experiences.
Strong Job Posts
The first interaction your applicants will have with your company is via the job posting. You’ll want to be sure your job posting is strong enough that your candidates will have a clear understanding of the company’s mission, their job duties, and any other necessary information they may need before applying.
Your ATS has analytics that you can utilize to gather insights about your talent pool as you continue to craft your job posts. Additionally, your ATS can allow you to save and edit different templates and share them with other members of your department and hiring managers. This can make collaboration easier and overall help strengthen your job postings.
Analytics for Finding Ideal Candidates
We already know that your ATS has analytics capabilities that can help you gain insight into your talent pool. Your ATS builds reports that you can share with your hiring managers and team members to help explain your strategy and next steps.
Additionally, your ATS can be made accessible to hiring managers, team members, and even stakeholders. This allows for transparency within your department and can help with creating a successful hiring strategy. The ATS allows you to track ROI to see how your hiring strategy is working so you can change and update it if need be.
Integration That Streamlines Hiring Process
One of the biggest ways you can lose candidates is by having a hiring process that feels endless. If your hiring process is too long, many candidates will begin looking elsewhere for employment. Ultimately, this can waste the time of all parties involved.
Integration can help you streamline this process by allowing hiring managers, recruiters, and employees access to data and the ability to upload their own information. For instance, when it comes to scheduling an interview, instead of creating an endless email chain, you can upload your availability and have the applicant choose an available time that works for them. After the interview, your hiring managers can then upload feedback and interview notes to the ATS to be easily accessible to recruiters and other hiring managers.
Automation of Repetitive Tasks
Your ATS has the ability to automate many repetitive tasks that typically take up a lot of your workday. We already established that your ATS can make reports, allow collaboration, and can organize data to be easily accessible. This already frees up a lot of your time that would’ve been spent manually completing tasks yourself.
Why is automation and freeing up your time important? This is because more “free time” actually means more time towards developing meaningful relationships with your candidates. Applicants want to feel like their recruiters and hiring managers genuinely care about them rather than them just being another statistic in the database. Increasing the engagement between your team and your candidates is essential.
Tips for Creating an Effective Candidate Experience
Having an ATS can definitely increase your chances of creating an effective and enjoyable candidate experience, but most of the responsibility will fall to you to use these features . There are steps you can take in creating a better experience for your applicants throughout the hiring process.
Easy-To-Use ATS
In today’s technologically advanced world, it’s not enough to just have an ATS. You’ll want to be sure that your ATS is able to translate well to mobile devices. This allows for easier accessibility and doesn’t limit your applicant pool. There are many individuals who cannot access computers on short notice or who are constantly on the go. For these candidates, you’ll want to be sure your ATS works well with mobile devices. Without this feature, you could be missing out on a whole pool of qualified applicants.
Personalization
Have you ever applied for a job and ended up receiving an email that read, “DEAR [applicant name]” exactly like that? Your name is not inserted, there’s a very robotic tone, and you know that a computer made this email. This is something that immediately turns candidates away from the job and probably the company as a whole. Applicants want to feel personal care when it comes to the hiring process, so it’s important to make communication personal but professional. Address them directly, ask how their day was, and get to know your applicants. This can greatly improve their experience and encourage top talent to choose your company over their other options.
Fewer Screens
This goes along with making the hiring process long. When applicants have to repeatedly input work experience and educationalinformation, as well as go through multiple screenings, they’ll close the application before they even finish. It’s frustrating for a candidate to have to input the same information multiple times, especially if that information is already included on a resume that they’ve provided. Of course, some screening is necessary to get a feel for your candidate’s qualifications and abilities. However, long screens with over 50 questions can cause the application process to drag on, meaning that many applicants would opt to do a different application rather than finish yours.
Seamless Communication
With email applications on mobile devices, communication has become easier to establish between candidates and recruiters. However, you’ll want to be sure that you’re engaging with your applicants frequently to establish the relationship and also keep them in the loop about the process. You can always use email, especially if you and your candidate are quick to respond. If you’re looking for quicker communication though, we recommend using an ATS that allows for SMS integration. This can allow you to text your candidates through the ATS without using your personal device and phone number.
