5 things to consider before investing in a new Applicant Tracking System

As you may know, over the past decade online recruitment (e-recruitment) has moved from simple job listings to a fully integrated end-to-end service that can deliver huge cost savings while improving quality and time to hire.

There are many e-recruitment options with varying degrees of capability available to in-house recruiters that fit a variety of needs.

In the annual survey by The Firm of their members, the top 3 recruitment priorities for in-house recruiters had been reshuffled this year and were cited as:

• EVP and employer brand (44%)
• Direct sourcing (43%)
• Building talent pools for future hires (38%)

There are also concerns surrounding gender diversity, coping with volume hires in a way that decreases the time to hire and keeping pace with technological change. So, lots to think about.

To help you in deploying a successful strategy and fit for purpose ATS/E-recruitment software solution, consider these 5 points before investing in a solution that will deliver a return on investment and address your existing and future recruitment challenges. You’ll also find a quick reference guide below with extra resources and e-books on related content.

1. The Heart of E-Recruitment

Understanding the relationship between time, cost and quality should be at the heart of your e-recruitment strategy. If your e-recruitment platform (or spreadsheets) cannot easily assist you with this challenge and deliver a return on investment, then chances are it needs replacing.

2. Talent Pool Strategy

Talent pools – a key part of any recruiting strategy but often under-utilised. How will you nurture and convert your passive talent pools into great new hires? Do you have the tools that will automatically convert a candidate’s CV into their candidate profile and tag them with relevant skills automatically gleaned from their information? What is your communication plan for nurturing candidates (which then leads to other considerations such as relevant communications, candidate consent as part of GDPR* and tracking candidate conversations).

3. Recruitment Stakeholders

How will you facilitate collaboration with key recruitment stakeholders such as hiring managers and external vendors? Make sure they can rapidly adopt a new system and are able to follow the recruitment process. A good starting point is to consider functional requirements for core users and other stakeholders – walkthrough the workflow process.

4. Recruitment Workflows

Recruitment Workflows dictate exactly where and what you can do to progress candidates and applicants towards filling your vacancies. From pre-screening and resourcing points, reviews or assessments to interviews, offers and inductions, at each stage having complete control over your recruitment and applications workflows are essential for modern recruiting. Check you can configure each workflow stage exactly to your way of working. Sometimes it’s easier to ask yourself ‘what problems do we encounter’ that can identify any inefficiencies to address.

5. Careers Website

Can your careers website seamlessly be integrated with your recruitment solution to support your recruitment and talent management initiative fully? Career websites should communicate your employer brand and be a solid platform for direct candidate sourcing, especially when combined with regular, valuable careers content (*see the 2017 UK Candidate Attraction Report for the detailed summary of these findings).

Consider the impact of using dynamic content to personalise a candidates experience based on visitor preferences that automatically adapts to user signals and makes the process of finding and applying for your jobs a breeze.

And finally, with all best intentions and careful planning what happens when things you have not considered are later discovered to be a key part of your strategy? Have a back-up plan and make sure your chosen online recruitment provider can work with you to deploy a successful strategy.

Check out our extra resources

See our resources area for whitepapers and ebooks on Planning & Deploying a E-recruitment Strategy and Candidate Attraction Reports.

There are bound to be many more priorities you have such as dashboard and analytics reporting, cloud-based requirements, data security, GDPR compliance and how to incorporate the latest responsive web design. Hopefully, this has given you some areas to think about, and the extra resources help to shape or revisit your in-house recruitment strategy.

If you have any specific questions about how to change the way you recruit then do get in touch.