Applicant Tracking System: A Great Way To Deal With Recruitment & Selection Mystery

Either you use it or lose it in this competitive world

Mr. Abdur Rahman is working as the Talent Acquisition Manager for a large battery manufacturing company. He and his team have to manage a large number recruitment and selection processes for the company because of recent business expansion. Mr. Rahman was struggling to manage the entire talent acquisition process as their company decided to open a new manufacturing plant and wanted to hire a large number of employees to start this newly established plant. 

The standard timeline was set 35 days to fill every vacant position after receiving the employee reacquisition form but the talent acquisition teams were consistently failing to meet that target for processing the recruitment and selection process manually. It used to take lots of time in tracking requisitions for new employees, screening resumes and inviting candidates for the interview which were the key reasons for which they were unable to meet their targeted timeline. The HR Director asked Mr. Rahman to redesign the talent acquisition process to reduce the time to fill vacant position. 

Mr. Rahman was wondering what changes they could bring in their present recruitment and selection processes to improve the situation. He identified few areas which require special attention to improve the processes: 
 

Mr. Rahman was consulting with his internal IT department to explore the feasibility to automate some of the key processes of talent acquisition function which would enable them to reduce the time and cost to fill vacant positions. The IT team suggested him to implement an applicant tracking system (ATS) which will help to resolve all of his problems. An ATS, also called a candidate management system, is a software application designed to help an enterprise to recruit employees more efficiently. An ATS can be used to post job openings on a corporate Web site or job board, screen resumes, and generate interview requests to potential candidates by e-mail. Other features may include individual applicant tracking, requisition tracking, automated resume ranking, customized input forms, pre-screening questions and response tracking, and multilingual capabilities. It is estimated that roughly 50 percent of all midsized companies and almost all large corporations use some type of applicant tracking system.

The IT department advised Mr. Rahman to create Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for each process which he wanted to manage automatically. Based on the discussion with the IT department, Mr. Rahman and his team created the SOPs for each processes with process map to share with the IT department. They have handed over SOPs and process maps for those key processes starting from employee requisition form template with SOPs and process maps, standard CV template which will be filled out by the applicants, CV shortlisting criteria, pre-screening questionnaires and standard email communication to invite candidate for face to face interview (have option to customize it for different positions. 

The IT team finally developed an ATS with the support from Mr. Rahman team and made the system live which would make the entire talent acquisition system automated. The new system has the following advantages: 
 

After implementing ATS, Mr. Rahman found that they have more time now to do more strategical activities which they could not do previously for being engaged heavily in more transactional activities. ATS is a great tool to bring more discipline in your recruitment and selection processes. HR professionals can get their many recruitment and selection related activities done using automatic system which will reduce the man hour and cost. Before implementing any ATS for your organization, it is important to understand your needs very specifically and develop standard operating procedure to design the system accurately.