US companies have increased their talent acquisition spendings up to 7% as a shortage of critical skillsets drives active competition for talents. With this highly competitive environment, various HR-tools and systems proliferate and introduce great automation capabilities to streamline talent acquisition, track candidates’ recruitment journeys, and measure retention. Once you’re contemplating about adopting some hiring automation software, the most likely you’re looking for an applicant tracking system.

In a nutshell, ATS is a software that allows a recruiter to unify all data about candidates and lead applicants from sourcing and screening to job offers within a sole environment, which is a tedious management mission if you use Excel, docs, and yellow sticky notes.

What are the options?

The market is very saturated with a wide array of HR solutions. Before you even start researching available software, it’s better to articulate the things you want to automate in your recruiting workflow, define hiring scope, and consider further scaling.



There are basically three types of software you can use:

On-premises software (Standalone). The system is deployed on internal servers and devices of a company, which pays for the license. With the ubiquitous use of cloud solutions standalone software looses its popularity due to maintenance issues and slow updates from vendors.

Cloud solutions (SaaS). Cloud ATS have proven their reliability and show a lot better customer support from vendors. Usually, cloud solutions work on a subscription basis and provide a bigger range of functional modules to choose from. And if you use the system already, your vendor may provide some scaling options. Perhaps, opting for SaaS is the best fit for companies with a standard recruiting workflow.

Custom development. Custom developed ATS are way more expensive and put a really high product management threshold on a development stage. However, it’s the best option to get software tailored exactly to specific corporate needs. Building custom ATS will require hiring a team of software engineers, though you can always find vendors specialized in delivering HR software. For instance, DDI Development company have shared insightful experiences in building custom ATS for an IT company in their blog.



What are the critical features supported by modern ATS solutions?

There’s no standard set of requirements that recruitment software should meet to become ATS. The options are quite diverse, however, most of ATS vendors try to address these five HR-activities. 

Candidates sourcing. Where do you usually get your candidates from? If the source of your choice is job boards, a number of systems such as RecruiterBox and Workable offer job boards integration. It sets candidates mass import tailored to opened vacancies and instead of searching through job websites you receive an updated list of candidates to glance over their CVs. 

The main problem with job boards is that the talents you’re looking for might not be there. They‘re likely to be happy and employed already. Thus, headhunting via LinkedIn may be a better option. Systems like CleverStaff allow recruiters parse candidates’ profiles directly from LinkedIn into the system. 

If your corporate website has a tempting careers page and most of the candidates come from here, you should consider email integration to automatically import applicants into the system. Some systems embrace multiple sourcing ways as the DDI Development’s ATS allows parsing CVs from LinkedIn and has email integration as well.

Mass notifications. The pool of candidates may be quite large. For instance, Nike experienced receiving 800 CVs monthly. Processing and responding to them individually is time-draining, so bulk emailing is critical with that volumes. 

Recruiting funnel. That’s probably the most generic feature for ATS. Every candidate passes a number of stages within a recruiting cycle and ATS should provide means to map candidates journeys. Tracking a recruiting funnel also allows for precise reporting on a conversion rate. 

Task management. For a decentralized company with recruiters scattered over multiple locations task management features are necessary. They have to embrace the entire management workflow and ensure that tasks can be efficiently assigned and allocated among recruiting team members. 

Reporting. If you’re adopting HR-software you need to assess ATS effectiveness combined with hiring productivity. What are the most important metrics to look for?

Cost per hire is the most favorite recruiting metric as it links your recruitment efforts to cost savings and eventually depicts whether invested money yields tangible results for a business. Here it’s better to note that cost per hire covers the investments aspect and fails to track the quality of new hires. The turnover metrics will help to scratch the surface of the quality aspect but in order to gain these data your ATS must have an internal HR module allowing managers to see what happens with candidates as they become employees. 

Assessing the effectiveness of your recruiting campaign can be streamlined with various conversion measuring such as applications to interviews, interviews to offers, etc. and application completion rates, which help to reveal problems on the initial hiring stages. 



Does your company actually need ATS?

For mid-size and large organizations with 500 to 5000+ employees the needs to acquire an applicant tracking system are quite obvious. What about smaller companies? Well, the average number of applicants per one opening for the US is 250. This is more than enough to lose track of your candidates and start overlooking the talents you badly need. You won’t have to invest a fortune into a fancy and complex ATS system or build one from scratch, though you may always give some basic software a try and shift for the more complex one when hitting the scale. If you already have a CRM system, it’s likely that your vendor has and HR-module to be installed on top of your existing service, which can make things even easier.

After all, recruiting automation is no longer a privilege of large and decentralized companies only. And if you want to stay competitive in talent acquisition, considering ATS adoption is the best option.