The hiring process is a critical part of the employee experience. It sets the tone for what working at your company would be like and gives job seekers a feel for how they’d be treated as employees. It’s your chance to make a positive first impression on future employees and to create connections with candidates who weren’t hired — but could be a great fit for another position. 

Even in a job market where hiring is easier than it has been over the past several months, you don’t want to keep potential employees in limbo for too long. They might lose interest  — a long, complicated hiring process is one of the top reasons candidates ghost potential employers. With more than 11 million unfilled positions and only .5 workers available per position, you can’t afford to lose valuable candidates to inefficient hiring processes.

Fortunately, there’s a solution: software! Using an applicant tracking system (ATS) for hiring can be the foundation of faster, more efficient processes.

Why use an ATS?

It can be a challenge to pull off fast, efficient hiring while juggling a thousand other recruiting responsibilities:

• Sourcing candidates for other open requisitions
• Writing job descriptions and creating job postings
• Scheduling interviews and conducting candidate screening
• Ensuring you choose the most qualified candidate
• Notifying applicants who weren’t hired 
• Keeping former candidates engaged in case another opportunity arises

Applicant tracking systems provide software tools to make all of these tasks, and many others, faster and easier for HR teams to perform. ATS systems help HR teams stay organized, create and manage an excellent candidate experience, and ultimately, make smarter hiring decisions informed by their own recruitment data.

"There was a large increase in organizations that told us their HR tech was being used to inform their enterprise workforce decision-making or their business strategy.”

- Stacey Harris, chief research officer and managing partner at Sapient Insights Research Group in Atlanta Source

1. Reach more candidates right off the bat

One universal benefit of any kind of technology is that it enables us to reach out to lots of other people quickly. Think about it — you can post on social media, send an email, or schedule a Zoom meeting, and potentially hundreds of people will see your post, email, or meeting invite. 

ATS software does the same thing for recruiters, giving them tools to quickly get in front of and make connections with job seekers. With an ATS, your recruiters can manage job board listings and quickly post across multiple job boards, saving tons of time they would have spent logging in and out of different accounts. 

2. Make it easier for candidates to apply

Online job applications see abandonment rates as high as 60%, usually because they’re too long or complicated. You can work against that with an ATS. Today’s best ATS solutions have tools you can use to create job applications designed for a mobile browser and applications that can be submitted via text message. That increases the number of candidates who apply, since it only takes a few clicks, and can lead to a shorter time to hire.

We know because we’ve seen it in action: clients using ClearCompany’s Text-to-Apply see 3.5x the number of candidates and up to 400% faster time-to-hire, a clear benefit for your hiring process.

3. Talk to candidates via text

Text message recruiting can be incredibly effective — 89% of job seekers would prefer to text about a job rather than make a phone call or send an email. People also respond to most of their text messages in just a few minutes, too, while it can take days to receive an email response. An ATS that provides text communication tools is essential for recruiters to make fast connections to get candidates hired, and recruiters report response rates as much as 50% higher with texting.

An ATS tool like ClearCompany’s ClearText can provide the benefits of one-on-one, personalized candidate communication. Text exchanges are accessible from inside the platform, keeping a record of conversations that every recruiter can see.

4. Cut down on scheduling back-and-forth

Most ATS hiring software offers automated interview scheduling, where candidates can click a link to choose an interview time on recruiters’ calendars. This lets candidates take the reins and choose the date and time that works for them without sending emails back and forth to coordinate with recruiters. Instead of six emails and 48 hours, the interview scheduling tools offered by ATS solutions help you set up interviews in minutes.

5. Rate candidates on the same scale

Sometimes, it can be challenging for hiring teams to come to a consensus on a candidate, much less evaluate every candidate on the same criteria. Recruiting software can offer tools for interviewers to ensure they’re asking candidates the same questions and grading them on the same criteria. ClearCompany offers interview tools to help ensure fair candidate scoring, including structured interview guides for recruiters and hiring managers to follow and Interview Scorecards to collect feedback for every candidate.

These interview tools help hiring teams rate candidates more fairly and make an informed decision about which candidate to hire based on interviewers’ ratings and their overall scores.

6. Syncs with LinkedIn Recruiter

With 1.6 million engaged users on LinkedIn, many recruiters use LinkedIn Recruiter to source candidates. Great ATS solutions will offer an integration between the ATS and LinkedIn Recruiter to keep data consistent between both systems.

LinkedIn Recruiter System Connect syncs candidate data between the two platforms and saves recruiters time toggling back and forth. LinkedIn Apply Connect keeps job applicants on LinkedIn as they apply for one of your open positions rather than sending them to your career site — a transition where you may be losing applicants.

7. Build Talent Communities from past applicants

Candidate sourcing is one of the more challenging parts of hiring. You have to find a good candidate source, identify potential candidates with the right qualifications, reach out to them, and then wait for a response. Not to mention, you don’t want to start from scratch every time a position opens up — you want to have a pool of candidates already sourced that you can dip into.

With an ATS, you can easily build that pool of candidates with tools like ClearCompany’s Talent Communities. Your searchable ATS database makes it easy to find top talent whose skills and experience match the position you need to fill.

8. Learn from your real data

We know you’re constantly looking for ways to improve hiring: a shorter application process, a pleasant candidate experience, and a fast time to hire. But unless you know where your hiring process is losing candidates or causing bottlenecks, you can’t make impactful changes. 

But with HR software like an ATS, recruiting reports allow you to dig into data like cost per hire, top candidate sources, the number of open positions, and other important recruiting metrics. Armed with real data produced by your recruiting efforts, you can make more informed decisions and watch how those changes impact the data for the most successful strategies possible.

There are even more benefits of a modern hiring platform than we listed here, and no doubt the future of applicant tracking software is full of innovative breakthroughs that can benefit your business for years to come. Don’t miss out on the many advantages of using an ATS in the recruitment process— meet your hiring goals, delight your candidates, and enable recruiting efficiency with the power of software.

See these advantages firsthand and find out what ClearCompany’s award-winning Applicant Tracking System can do to help streamline your hiring process. Sign up for a demo with the ClearCompany experts today.