Not all ATS solutions are built the same, some come with a list of superior features than others, while some can still achieve the intended hiring outcomes without the bells and whistles.
Before deciding which ATS is your knight in shining armour, revisit the critical challenges your recruiters are experiencing, and refine your selection process with the following factors at the forefront of your research:
Step 1: Assess Company Size
To determine the right ATS for your organization, the first step is to identify the size of your company. Are you a small business (1-49 employees), SME (50-249 employees), or an enterprise (250+ employees)?
Step 2: Focus On Your Essential Functions
After assessing your scale of operations and workforce size, the next step is taking a deeper look into the functionalities that matter most to you as a business. For example:
– Multiple vacancies to fill
– Customized careers page
– Job and offer approvals
– Automated communications
– Candidate assessments & scorecards
– Advanced user settings
– Interview scheduling
– Collaboration with recruitment agencies
– Reporting and metrics
Depending upon the vendor that you feel more comfortable sealing the deal with, it’s ideal especially for growing companies to choose a solution that doesn’t charge by feature. For example, a small company at the moment might only be interested in selecting these functions as their core essentials for now: customized careers page, automated communications, interview scheduling and reporting/metrics.
However, within a year when they’re growing and start facing unanticipated needs such as multiple vacancies, or job and offer approvals,, they’ll end up having to dish out more money for their hiring technology than an “all-in-one” ATS provider.
Step 3: Determine Your Budget
With varying company sizes come varying budgets available at disposal. For employers that are constrained in terms of budget, choosing an ATS based on pricing could be the most viable route to go. But there other areas of negotiation to check for as well to keep the pricing in the territory that works best for you. Discuss with your vendor how they can reprice the solution based on:
– Number of employees
– Number of users
– Number of hires
– Variations in service level
By sharing these dimensions with your shortlisted vendors, you can check to see which company is willing to provide you the best technology at the price that is a perfect fit for your financial positioning.
Step 4: Research Current Users
So you’ve done all the extra work determining your company size, usage needs, core features in need and budget availability- but choosing an ATS requires one extra step that we cannot emphasize enough. In a very crowded market, it’s instrumental to research and find customer reviews for the vendors ranking high on your radar.
By gaining validation and testimonials of great experiences on websites such as capterra or getapp, you can select commendable technology with added peace of mind knowing that there are users vouching for the vendor’s service standards.
Conclusion
Before you start scheduling demos, make your ATS selection a more focused effort by truly knowing your company’s needs, financial limitations, and desired value it should add to your hiring operations. Also, keep an eye on the bigger picture so your vendor can help support future growth in functionalities if needed, ideally at a price that will not drain your budget.
Lastly, customer reviews always matter- do your research and see what fellow users like you are saying about their experiences. A little credibility goes a long way to know for sure that your vendor is the best in the business!
