Everything you need to know about Applicant Tracking Systems

Screen high-volume applications efficiently

Employers have to deal with a huge volume of unqualified applicants for each job posting.

With an ATS like Talentera, they can screen applications quickly and efficiently with these features:

• Screening filters based on location, education, years of experience, industry, and keywords to choose qualified applicants
• Customized screening questionnaires to further screen qualified applications
• AI candidate matching and ranking based on qualifications and suitability for the role
• AI-driven asynchronous video interviews for candidates to record answers to role-specific screening questions and share it with the hiring manager and other stakeholders.

Build a strong employer brand to attract top talent

A weak employer brand causes companies to lose out on top talent. If a company is not perceived to be industry-leading, stable, reputable, and growing, potential applicants will not find it attractive enough to apply even if the role is financially lucrative.

An ATS helps employers in the following manner:

• Enables them to develop a robust careers page that showcases the company’s culture, mission, and vision
• Makes advanced search functionalities available to candidates to search for relevant job openings

Comprehensively onboard expats and remote employees

In the UAE and the KSA, 88% and 73% of the workforce consists of expats. Onboarding them poses several challenges, such as:

• Workplace integration – hierarchy, role of meetings, decision-making process, and pace of work can be different
• Cultural adaptation
• Legal and regulatory compliance
• Accommodation and relocation
• Healthcare and insurance

Also, the average cost of onboarding manually is $37,500 – $40,000 per year (assuming that the company has three recruiters with a pay of $25 per hour and hires 50 employees per year). An ATS with an onboarding module will help employers reduce costs of managing onboarding tasks by 3X-4X annually, ensure distributed teams reach peak productivity 34% faster, and make it more likely for employees to stay with the company longer. In addition, the visa management module helps employers keep track of expat visa counts and manage the allocation of visas as they hire.

Eliminate manual work

The recruitment process involves a lot of manual work, including screening resumes and shortlisting candidates, sending follow-up communications, creating job offers and updating candidates about their application status, and managing other repetitive tasks such as organizing interview schedules and sending rejection emails.

With an ATS, these manual tasks can be streamlined in the following way:

• Automation of the various recruitment workflows
• AI-driven candidate matching to find the most suitable profile for the role
• Templatized workflows for offer letters, rejection emails, requisitions, and approvals to save time and reduce errors.

Centralize data management

The hiring process involves a lot of data that is challenging to manage manually i.e. resumes, cover letters, interview feedback, candidate profiles, job descriptions, approvals, and other paperwork. An ATS acts as a central database to store and manage the date flowing in from different sources. Recruiters and hiring managers can search the database and retrieve all the information pertaining to a candidate or job.

Align and coordinate with stakeholders

Apart from organizing data in a centralized location, an ATS also acts as a platform to bring all the stakeholders on the same page.  With integrated workflow notifications, stakeholders at every step of the recruitment workflow—from requisitioning to hiring—are automatically notified about any inputs they need to give. This takes away the pain of manually organizing stakeholder contributions and approvals.

Get performance metrics

Management expert Peter Drucker’s quote can be aptly applied to the recruiting and hiring process, too. With paperwork and/or spreadsheets, the lack of visibility makes it challenging to understand the bottlenecks in the process or track important performance metrics like time-to-hire, cost per hire, application completion rate, offer acceptance rate, quality of hire, and source of hire. Without such data, the recruitment workflow remains chaotic. An ATS like Talentera solves the problem with its robust reporting capabilities and ability to track performance metrics. It consolidates data from all channels, such as internal referrals, job boards, and recruitment agencies.

Keep sensitive candidate and hiring data secure

Candidate and hiring data is subject to data privacy laws in the MENA region, such as the Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) in the UAE and KSA. Modern applicant tracking systems adhere to these data privacy laws as well as GDPR in addition to industry security standards like SOC2. It also ensures that data is stored within company borders in compliance with the latest security practices.

Define your recruitment process

In consultation with all the stakeholders, you must define the various stages in your recruitment process. e.g. attracting talent, screening resumes, scheduling interviews, conducting interviews, evaluating assignments, and extending offer letters. Map your business processes and workflows to the ATS i.e. create a visual diagram of steps involved, who owns which task, and where the ATS would integrate with these steps. Then, you determine the key metrics you will track in the ATS, such as time to hire, cost per hire, application completion rate, offer acceptance rate, quality of hires, and so on. Performing this exercise ensures that you choose the right ATS to align with your hiring needs.

Set up an ATS implementation team

A company-wide change like implementing a new ATS must be planned and executed in an organized fashion. Your transition plan, or change strategy, should explain how the stakeholders across the HR ecosystem will be informed about the change, how the switch to the new ATS (or the first ATS) will be made, and how the stakeholders will carry out tasks during the transition. The ATS implementation team, who will be responsible for executing the change strategy, consists of the following members:

Prepare for data migration

Data migration involves the following steps:

Configure and customize your ATS

Once data migration is done, you work with all the stakeholders to gather requirements and inputs on how to customize the ATS to meet their needs. You’ll be performing the following tasks:

Test the ATS with a beta launch

A beta launch enables you to test any issues with the ATS in real-world settings without impacting the entire organization. You invite a diverse group of end users to use the features, workflows, and integrations of the ATS and provide feedback on their experiences. With this information, you can make adjustments or improvements before rolling out the tool to the entire organization.

AI-powered automation

Companies are leveraging AI to supercharge the recruitment process from end to end. From intelligent applicant screening and ranking to enabling real-time, access-based collaboration, and generating data-driven insights and recommendations, the applications of AI algorithms to power ATS functionalities are boundless.

Predictive analytics for talent forecasting

Companies are using predictive analytics to identify high-potential candidates, predict employee performance, forecast future hiring needs, and improve diversity and inclusion initiatives. This has a positive impact on employee retention, cost-per-hire, and productivity, and employer brand.

We have a guide that delves deeper into AI-powered predictive analytics.