Is Your Team Missing out on the Benefits of an ATS?
If you’re in the staffing industry, you’re probably already familiar with applicant tracking systems (ATS). More than 90 percent of large staffing firms use them, and 75 percent of small and medium firms use them. But what makes a recruitment ATS worth the investment?
We happen to think applicant tracking systems are extremely important to the success of your staffing firm’s success—no surprise there—but we also have the data to back it up. Here are ten important benefits you get from using a great ATS.
10 Benefits of Applicant Tracking Systems
Scale Your Business
An ATS is a long-term investment that both grows your business and grows with your business.
In fact, growing your firm without an ATS can be downright impossible. The bigger your firm gets, the more complex your database becomes. Tracking candidates, communication, and your recruiter’s activity can quickly become unwieldy as your firm grows in size. Candidates get lost in the crowd, errors add up, and you risk losing important accounts.
Avoid Errors
As your business grows, it’s easy for bad data to slip through the cracks. And spotting an error in thousands of rows of numbers and names can be near-impossible. As your team’s data—and potential mistakes—pile up, it can have costly repercussions on your reporting and your business.
Source Candidates More Efficiently
Want to step up your candidate sourcing game? Existing candidates within an ATS is the number one source for identifying quality candidates, according to a survey of staffing professionals—outpacing referrals, social media, and job boards. With the organization an ATS provides, it’s easier to place and redeploy candidates.
Find the Solutions That Match Your Needs in an Open Ecosystem
Your firm’s needs are never going to be exactly the same as another agency’s needs, so how do you get around that? The best applicant tracking systems have an open ecosystem. With an open platform, you can customize your ATS to meet your specific needs by integrating third-party vendors, adding partner extensions, and building new applications on your platform.
Ramp Up Your Team’s Productivity
I have enough time to do everything I need to do is something no staffing professional has said ever. Luckily, an ATS is one of the most powerful tools available to you for saving time and improving productivity. Firms that use an ATS report:
- 75% decrease in unproductive time
- 70% increase in report generation speed
- 15% decrease in time to fill
- 10% increase in placements per month
Improve the Candidate Experience
It’s a candidate-driven market. Candidate sourcing and improving the candidate experience are the top two priorities for staffing firms in 2019.
And with all the selection available to candidates, it’s never been more important to provide an incredible experience. 1 out of 5 candidates who have a negative experience will tell their peers not to apply to that firm.
Eliminate the steps that lead to hassle and frustration. An excellent ATS and its integrations can help simplify every step of the candidate lifecycle, from streamlining the application process to eliminating timely paperwork during the onboarding process.
Improve the Client Experience
It’s also pretty important to keep your clients happy: improving client management is a top-five priority for staffing firms in 2019, and building better client relationships was voted as one of the top areas where staffing professionals said they need more development.
A good recruitment ATS can help you better manage your client relationships in a number of ways. For example, it can automatically log all of your conversations with a client, so nothing gets lost in transit. You can also harness the power of AI to avoid getting blindsided by unhappy clients through predictive intelligence that flags potential problems before they become terminations.
Onboard Your Team More Effectively
Time is money in the staffing world, so it’s important to get your recruiters up to speed. Want to ramp up your recruiters more efficiently? Use an ATS.
This is especially true if you’re looking to ramp up your recruiters in a month or less. An ATS increases your chances of doing so by 57 percent.
Go Mobile
It’s a huge boon to your productivity if you can do your job anywhere. Fortunately, the best applicant tracking systems feature a mobile application with all of the ATS functionality you and your team needs to carry on business as usual.
Understand Your Business
A good ATS will illuminate all aspects of your business. In addition to tracking your recruiter activity data, an ATS will help you better understand your candidate pool as well. You can closely review all communications with candidates to ensure all their needs are met.
Understanding your candidate database and using it to improve your recruiters’ performance enables you to act more quickly, which is critical in today’s highly time-sensitive market.
Want to take a deeper dive into the world of applicant tracking systems? Check out the ATS Buyer’s Guide for everything you need to know to make a worthwhile investment in your staffing firm’s future.
