Every Feature an End to End Applicant Tracking System Must Have

The entirety of the recruitment process consists of various steps and requirements. These steps require a different approach to handle them. Managing them all without any tools could be a nightmare. Running recruitment stages poorly does not yield good results and can affect the candidate’s experience. Keeping all this in mind, recruiters use an applicant tracking system to ease the recruitment process.

An applicant tracking system offers various features to make the recruiter’s life easier. According to Capterra, 94% of the recruiters and hiring managers assure that an ATS has positively impacted their recruitment process. To ensure your organisation provides a positive candidate experience, it is necessary to use tools right from the first recruitment phase.

There are so many applicant tracking systems to choose from, the options can get quite overwhelming. It is better to decide before using an ATS for your recruitment needs. The following are the necessary features an applicant tracking system must have to manage your hiring process.

Necessary Features of an Applicant Tracking System

Job Distribution

The first part of candidate attraction is the recruiters’ job adverts on various platforms. These platforms include their career page, free and paid job boards, and social media platforms.

The candidate goes through job boards or other platforms that have the job advert. The candidate may only apply for the job if they feel confident enough. Many pitfalls might cause the candidate to drop off before applying for the job.

An organisation can spend a considerable chunk of money posting job adverts for various job boards. The applicant tracking system has a feature that allows it to post job adverts on various job boards, including the website career page of the company.

Posting jobs on social media is also a feature that is necessary for a time when social media recruitment is the norm of the recruitment market. Job distribution is a feature that is necessary for an applicant tracking system, and it should offer some flexibility for the organisation’s changing requirements.

An Extensive Search Feature

The main feature of an applicant tracking system is to keep track of candidates and source them based on the organisation’s requirements. There are multiple job databases available for the recruiter to search for candidates. With so many databases, the ATS must offer an extensive search feature to provide the most accurate results for the search query.

The search function must offer various filter options such as experience, skills, tags, area code, and the custom fields needed to search for the best candidate possible.

The ATS must offer features to sort those result lists and add more filters to the existing results to get better outputs.

Reports and Analytics

In the recruitment process, not every strategy yields good results. There might be some problems that were previously unknown to recruiters. Repeating the same mistakes without learning anything new from them can make all your past experiences futile.

In that regard, looking at the data on how well your job advert has done can provide you with valuable insights for developing your future recruitment strategy. But rather than representing the data in mere numbers, having a visual report of such analytics can offer more readability.

Typically in the recruitment process, a lot of numbers are involved. To keep the data straightforward, a visual representation can help everyone in the organisation to quickly interpret the required information.

The applicant tracking system should offer valuable insights based on the operations that take place during the various stages of the recruitment process.

Screening Assessments

After posting a job advert across various job boards, candidates may apply for the open role. Spending money on the job advert gets more candidates to apply for your jobs, but it is not possible to let everyone into your recruitment funnel.

The time and money constraints alone make it hard to call all the candidates for the next stage of the recruitment process. Sending all the candidates for the next step can be inefficient to your hiring process. To counter this, introduce a simple screening process.

Using an applicant tracking system to make the application process more manageable, and a simple screening assessment can ensure that the first stage of the recruitment process filters out a few of the candidates and selects only those qualified for the next step.

Resume Parsing

After the application process is done, candidates will send their resumes to the recruiters. These resumes will contain the details of the candidates, their experience, and their skills and highlights. As a recruiter, you receive numerous resumes for a single job posting.

Going through all the resumes manually is a labour-intensive task that consumes time. Recruiters cannot spend their valuable time sorting through the resumes they receive.

The applicant tracking system can help the recruiter to parse through these resumes. The applicant tracking system must offer support for various file formats to offer more extensive support.

The applicant tracking system should filter the resumes and sort them based on the requirements of the recruiters. Each role requires a different set of skills and experience. The recruiter should be able to customise the search phrases to filter the proper candidates through their resumes.

Interview Scheduling

Once the candidate successfully journeys through the recruitment funnel, the recruiter will need to schedule a time to talk. This might be a face-to-face interview, a video call, or an assessment call. In the case of interviews, a panel of interviewers can have multiple people involved in the meeting.

Setting up meetings and scheduling interviews is not a problem with a limited number of candidates. But when it comes to multiple interviews, scheduling them without overlaps with other candidates can be a brain wrecking task. Spending time on this can prove to be problematic for the recruiter.

Applicant tracking systems must come with a scheduling program that helps the recruiter access the calendars of the interview panel and assign them candidates based on their availability. With such a feature, handling multiple candidates should not be a problem. The ATS must also send invites automatically through the mail to ease access.

Employee Collaboration

In an interview process, hiring a candidate should not be a task limited to just recruiters and hiring managers. It is better to involve every significant stakeholder in making the final decisions.

Hiring a new candidate is a costly decision. Recruiters must take proper care to ensure that candidates are the right fit for the organisation and align well with their shared goals. To that end, collaborative hiring is the only way to ensure that the candidate is a proper cultural fit.

Using an applicant tracking system, the recruiter should be able to share the necessary details of a candidate with all the stakeholders. Easily sharing candidate details and their assessment score can help the recruiter develop a better decision in including new employees in the organisation.

Communication Automation

The recruitment process typically consists of many stages that vary based on the organisation and role the candidate has applied for. Through each of these stages, candidates might move on to the next round or be rejected.

It is essential to maintain timely communication with the candidate, no matter the result. If the candidate moves to the next round, recruiters must inform them about this along with the details of the next stage. If rejected, recruiters must inform the candidate with a well-crafted message to encourage them to try them again.

Regardless of the results, the candidate will be waiting for a response from the organisation about their performance. Keeping them waiting for a long time can contribute to poor candidate experience. To stay on top of the candidate experience, recruiters should adopt automated communication. As long as everything is in place for the communication, there is no way the recruiter can miss out.

Talent Pool Management

Sometimes you might meet the right candidate at the wrong time. Even at the right time, hiring managers might not hire the candidate with the most talent due to various other reasons. In such instances, you should not forget to keep the candidate in a talent pool and maintain a healthy relationship with them.

Maintaining a proper relationship with candidates and adding them to the database can help you find suitable candidates when the appropriate requirement arises. The ATS must come with a candidate relationship management functionality to properly nurture your talent pool.

End-to-end applicant tracking systems should come with such functions so that you can rely on the database to source future candidates.

Pre Screening Function

Even after the candidate has been chosen for the organisation. There are specific processes to conduct before the candidate joins the organisation as a full-fledged employee. The final verification process of the candidate is called the pre-screening process.

In this stage, the recruiter needs to check the candidate’s references and other necessary information required from them by the organisation. The candidate should let the employer know of any health conditions they might have.

The candidate might have a criminal record, which could be a red flag for the employees. Such verification is also handled at this stage. Candidates from different regions must check their right to work.

The applicant tracking system you use should offer you a section to do all the necessary pre-screening processes in one place. An end-to-end ATS must have such a feature to support every stage of the recruitment process.

Onboarding Program

After the candidate becomes an employee, there will still be some contracts for the employee to sign. The onboarding process will involve a lot of training materials for the new employee. New employees might need to understand the company policies. The onboarding process might go on for the first few weeks of the employment to get into the organisation’s routine workstyle.

An applicant tracking system can pass the training materials to the employees based on their designation. ATS should be able to handle all the onboarding requirements so that the candidate can get prepared for their new career.

Choosing Your Applicant Tracking System

The features mentioned above are requirements for an end-to-end applicant tracking system to offer extensive support for all your recruitment needs. Each step needs complete assistance from the ATS to facilitate a smooth transition from the candidate attraction stage to the onboarding stage.

The applicant tracking system you choose for your organisation can help with your recruitment needs. To make sure that it is suitable for your organisation, you should be aware of these features to make an informed decision.

Logicmelon is an ATS that offers detailed support for all the features needed for your end-to-end recruitment solution. You can learn more about these features and how it integrates with your organisation over a free demo call. To stay competitive in these demanding times, it is essential to focus on your recruitment without compromising your candidate experience.

Final Thoughts

As a recruiter, you should equip yourself with the best tools available to ensure that your recruitment needs are handled well. It is crucial to improve the candidate experience to improve your employee branding. This will make your candidate attraction process easier, and using an applicant tracking system can help you achieve that.

LogicMelon

Award-winning recruitment software that will find, attract, hire and analyse the way you want to work. At LogicMelon, we have experienced software recruitment marketing specialists to help you build effective recruitment solutions supported by the best customer service you’ll find anywhere!

Email: sales@logicmelon.com or call LogicMelon (UK) +44 (0) 203 553 3667 (USA) +1 860 269 3089