8 Indications Your ATS is So Five Years Ago

Back in the 80s while the whole world was busy being captivated by the likes of Care Bears, the original Nintendo, and of course a plethora of hair metal, some computer scientists were hard at work building the first known Applicant Tracking System (ATS), which would revolutionize the way people find and hire talent.

Fast forward to 2017, and believe it or not, some of the original ATS providers are still in the market. While these “legacy” solutions certainly hold fast to a certain amount of industry clout, in some cases, they’re being outperformed by the newer and sleeker hiring technologies out there. The newer ATSs specifically target the pitfalls of the larger clunkier ones to deliver a set of features more appropriate with the times that leverage new recruiting tactics and technology.

So while you may be an expert and have full trust in the ATS software provided to you by a company that has been in the business since the first dot-com boom and boasts 10,000,000 happy customers, it may be time to consider trading in old faithful for a shiny new sports car in order to keep up with the times.

Here are eight obvious signs that your ATS is stuck at a Twisted Sister concert:

• Long and Time-consuming Application Process
• ATSs in the 90s put a lot of emphasis on reducing the labor-intensive paper trail that came with finding and hiring talent, and boy is Mother Nature happy about that. Unfortunately, this often translated into long online applications that required a login and password to be created among other tedious things. Your ATS should make it quick and easy to apply to jobs, not be scared off by an hour-long application. Many of the newer ATSs, like MightyRecruiter, offer one to two-page apply processes that ask for just the essentials, like a resume and contact information.

• No Out-of-the box Careers Site
• The notion of a careers site is probably not something you would expect to be provided by your Applicant Tracking System; it’s more of something built internally on your website. However, most newer ATSs come with a branded careers site that is fully customizable, displays all open jobs for your company, and can be hosted on your site as part of the subscription. MightyRecruiter offers both a careers site as well as a simple widget that you can easily implement anywhere you want on your website to display open jobs. Careers sites can be a huge source of candidates, especially if your brand and website receive a lot of traffic, so make sure if you don’t have one that your ATS provides one for you.

• Unreliable Database
• Some older ATSs definitely missed the memo about how to run a search query, and often searches for candidates populate irrelevant results. Let’s say you are looking for server engineer candidates in NY and run a search, but your ATS spits out restaurant server candidates from Ohio, leaving you scratching your head. Fortunately, newer ATSs pride themselves not only on better search algorithms and Boolean search capabilities (for those power recruiters), but they also sometimes offer their own resume database so you can uncover new candidates that may be a good fit for your open jobs. MightyRecruiter offers a database of 18+ million unique resumes to all its customers and gives them the ability to reach out to any candidates of interest – not too shabby!

• Limited Collaboration
• Since ATSs of old prioritized candidate management, they didn’t develop collaboration features that would allow colleagues to easily communicate with each other about hiring decisions in the software. Nowadays, more people are involved in the hiring process and need a way to see feedback, communicate, and rank candidates. The ability to create multiple users with different privileges, track where someone is in the hiring process, leave notes about a candidate before an interview, as well as share candidates with other users should be an essential feature set of an ATS. If your ATS doesn’t have those abilities, you are likely not hiring the best possible candidates and should change with the times.

• Lack of Referral Features
• Most recruiters understand that referrals are often times the source of the highest quality hires, but does your ATS make it easy to collect them? A high emphasis on referral features is the sign of software that understands the source of quality candidates, and accordingly, it should enable you to share open positions with your employees and leverage their recommendations. MightyRecruiter both offers a simple way to blast out an email for collecting referrals and tracks them – that way you know to whom you should attribute the candidate and can hopefully offer a nice reward if the candidate gets hired.

• Poor Reporting and Analytics
• We are in the age of big data, so if you’re still using spreadsheets and multiple programs to track the performance of a job posting, then it’s time to upgrade. You shouldn’t have to track down the source of an application; that critical information should be offered in plain sight by your ATS. The ability to have important recruiting metrics like cost per hire, time to hire, and others automatically calculated for you will save you endless time and energy.

• Lack of Distribution
• While ATSs in essence weren’t originally designed to get your job posting onto as many websites as possible, job posting distribution has slowly become one of the most important features to employers and recruiters. Originally, the system was just supposed to keep track of the candidates that you went out and acquired, but now ATSs and similar software allow you leverage their huge distribution network and track and monitor all in one place. MightyRecruiter has a network of over the leading job boards that you automatically get sent to for every job you put in the system. They also offer several options to buy premium postings for even better coverage.

• No Recruiting Automation
• Just like we are in the age of big data, we are also in the age of automation. The ability to complete a task once and set it up to repeat without having to touch another button saves time and money for recruiters and keeps the hiring process seamlessly moving forward. For instance, ATSs of the present would automatically schedule social media postings that promote your open opportunities. MightyRecruiter has a robust social media scheduling module that can keep your jobs on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter around the clock.

With the labor market approaching full employment, more companies planning to hire in 2017, and less employers planning to add recruiting headcount, it’s essential that hiring leaders are getting the most out of the software they use. In other words, you need an ATS or recruiting automation system that makes your hiring process as efficient as possible.
MightyRecruiter offers all of this and more – start your free trial today to take our features for a test drive in your own time!