Choosing the Right ATS for Small Businesses
Recruiting is one of the most demanding organizational processes. Recruiters are always busy collecting JDs, searching candidates, conducting interviews, and onboarding employees. In fact, these 4 recruiting compartments don’t justify the magnitude of work recruiters do every day. There is a lot more than what meets the eye.
And the struggle is worse for the small businesses who already have a lot hanging on their heads. Limited employees, budget constraints, and year on year profit pressure, to name a few.
Amid so much to cater, how should small businesses efficiently operate their recruitment processes and not put a strain on the company budget, employees, or productivity?
Here, Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is the way to go.
This tool automates a lot of mundane tasks which eliminates the need to hire more people in the recruiting team. Plus, it unites the distributed recruiting processes over a central platform and makes the information accessible to the recruiters. Over 98% of fortune 500 companies already use recruitment software.
But the real challenge is to pick the right ATS among the myriad of options available in the market. While there’s no definite guide chalked out to make this selection, we have jotted down six defining parameters to help you sieve out the right option.
1. Check Your Recruiting Needs
4. Quick and Quality Customer Support
6. Effective Reporting and Analytics
1. Check Your Recruiting Needs
You cannot make the right decision if you don’t know what you want. Same applies to the ATS. Before you start searching for ATS, you must know in and out of your recruiting procedure and what you are looking for in an ATS. It is easier to filter out the ATS options once you know what your processes demand and what tool can cater to it.
For instance, if your company’s recruiting process requires to send real-time notifications at every recruiting stage, then consider an ATS with SMS and mail integration.
Understanding your recruiting needs and charting them out in advance prevents you from any unnecessary spending. Otherwise, you can be easily lured into purchasing ATS that doesn’t add any value to your recruiting process.
2. Examine UI/UX of ATS
This is critical. You are employing an ATS to make your work easy, not difficult. You don’t want your team to spend more time figuring out the tool than in doing the actual work. Also, installing the ATS should be easy. The installation process should not demand any additional plugins just to start.
Therefore, thoroughly examine the intuitiveness and ease of use while weighing in all the ATS options. To start, evaluate the UX on the following parameters.
- How easily can the user learn to navigate the tool without training
- Features it offers and its placement in the ATS User Interface
- Language used on the buttons and labels
- No ambiguous features or options that can break the system
- Drag and drop features
3. Flexible to Scale
Check how adaptable and flexible is your ATS vendor if you plan to grow the number of ATS users or expand the work scope to meet specific needs in the future. An ideal ATS must be flexible to scale – storage and functionality – as your organization grows. It should be prepared for all the possible future expansion plans your company aspires for.
Opt for an ATS vendor who is far-sighted and is constantly upgrading its ATS features to meet the changing needs of the recruiting market.
4. Quick and Quality Customer Support
Quality of customer support is as important as any other deciding parameter. You are making a major investment while purchasing an ATS and therefore you require a reliable vendor who can answer and handle ATS related queries when asked.
To check the customer service quality, go through the online posted customer reviews in-depth, and understand the kind of issues other customers faced. Also, get in touch with old clients to gather feedback about the company and its services. Another way is to anonymously call on their customer service number and check how they respond to your queries.
Today, the quality of customer services is as important as the product itself.
5. Easy to Integrate
One tool cannot cater to all your recruiting necessities. Although ATS vendors are offering a lot of new features into a single tool, yet it is far from replacing the need for additional tools. Many organizations are picky about the tools they use and want to keep using it even if they plan to change their recruiting platforms.
If you are also amongst them, then go for an ATS that easily integrates with other applications. That allows you to seamlessly integrate into existing as well as probable tools you would need in the future. Good approach would be to look for API integration features or ask if they can build custom integrations for you on demand.
Integrating multiple tools into ATS also saves recruiters the hassle of switching between multiple apps and makes the process a lot more systematic and orderly.
Read More: Five Ways AI Will Ease the Life of Recruiters
6. Effective Reporting and Analytics
Reporting is essential for every business function today. So, how can recruiting be left far behind?
ATS collects a lot of candidates and recruiter’s data that if properly utilized can be used to analyze and improve the ongoing processes. It helps to understand the highs and lows of every involved touchpoint and provides perspective into what an organization is doing right or wrong.
The reporting capabilities give recruiters the bird-eye view of all the ongoing activities in real-time. Also, it provides the user with options to create custom reports for basic and important analytics. Many ATS vendors also offer high-end predictive and AI analytics. Depending on what your organization demands and what budget allows, you can go for these high-end analytics options as well.
On top of the above-mentioned parameters, you can also look into additional features an ATS provider is offering such as pre-screening questions, interview scheduling, and calendaring, email integration, and more.
ATS Vendors
Currently, the ATS market is hot. Every day a new player enters and tries to jostle its way into the crowded ATS market. To make the decision making easy, we bring you the list of the top 5 ATS providers of the market who perfectly cater to the needs of small businesses.