Recruitment Software and ATS

Your job description isn’t just for laying out what you want from applicants. It’s also your opportunity to let candidates know why they should work for you.

This is where some recruitment software can help, with sophisticated AI-driven writing tools that help you refine your job descriptions and develop career pages.

The best recruitment software also allows you to easily design and create fully branded, professional job advertisements and marketing materials – all of which helps you stand out from the crowd.

Once you’ve got your job description, it’s time to share it in online – but where exactly does it need to be uploaded to?

The best recruitment software includes functionality that will help you:

• Determine which online job boards and job sites your vacancy needs to be posted to
• Effectively manage your budget (e.g. you can choose to only share to free job boards)
• Identify any niche or sector-specific vacancy sites you might not otherwise know of

Finally, online recruitment software can also automatically submit your vacancy to any number of job sites. Depending on how many vacancies you have and where you want to advertise, this can save you many hours of manual admin.

To help you manage the ongoing recruitment process, you can use an applicant tracking system (ATS), a type of recruitment software.

ATS recruitment software can differ depending on the product or provider, but many will allow you to:

• Maintain an at-a-glance overview of recruitment progress
• Multiple stakeholders to view applications and “tag” any promising candidates
• Store and access useful candidate data, like CVs and contact information
• Keep track of communication and send out messages via the software

Schedule interviews with candidates and internal stakeholders

Certain types of applicant tracking systems (ATS) and recruitment software use artificial intelligence (AI) to screen incoming applications, filtering out any that don’t meet your mandatory requirements according to your specific parameters.

For example, if you wanted an IT specialist with 5 years’ experience, you can instruct your ATS to discount applications that don’t meet that requirement. However, you could allow for applications with 2 or more years’ experience if the applicant meets other promising criteria.

Overall, this function can save you a lot of time, making the recruitment process far more efficient.

Whatever the job market is looking like, it’s always best to establish and maintain excellent communication with your candidates.

Recruitment software and applicant tracking systems improve how you manage that communication through features like:

• Clear overviews of who you’ve messaged, when and how
• Alerts to prompt you to correspond with and/or update candidates
• Automated emails that help keep candidates in the loop

Maintaining good communication helps you keep promising candidates on the hook by making them feel valued.

After all, if an ideal candidate doesn’t hear from for a week after an interview, they’re more likely to be tempted by offers to work elsewhere.

The best recruitment software can slot into your existing systems and make tasks onboarding new hires easier and more efficient.

Recruitment software that integrates with your wider HR systems can improve onboarding by:

• Carrying over data submitted by the successful candidate during the recruitment process to your HR system, saving time and manual data-entry
• Providing new hires with an online self-service onboarding portal where they can easily submit additional employee data
• Supplying new employees with valuable information and downloadable documents e.g. company benefits brochure and welcome pack.

A lot of online recruitment software or applicant tracking systems (ATS) come with powerful, real-time reporting features.

Via an accessible online dashboard, you can see at a glance how your recruitment efforts are progressing, including what’s going well and what needs to be improved.

This can give you the data you need to make better, more informed strategic decisions on how you handle recruitment – plus, you gain insight into what needs to be done to improve your approach.

You don’t need to be a big multi-national business to benefit from this feature – the reports can be as straightforward (or complex) as you need them to be.