Enhance Your Hiring Process with Applicant Tracking System
As per the latest reports in today’s corporate scenario, 93% businesses use an ATS, and the rest are still to reach for it. In this blog post, we have tried to capture the entire information as a guide regarding applicant tracking system (ATS).
Let us know each and everything of this ATS and ATS software in this blog in further sections.
What is an Applicant Tracking System?
An ATS (applicant tracking system) is a recruitment goldmine, it takes care about handling all right from resume screening to candidate tracking.
This recruitment system helps you attract top talent, assess candidates effectively, and simplify every step of the recruitment process.
In the next section, we have tried to break down 5 main core functions of an applicant tracking system further here.
1. Resumes Filtering
This feature is like your own personal assistant. It does the resume scanning for you, picking out the most criteria matched one – that may be skills, education, or experience.
2. Ranks Candidates
An applicant tracking system ranks candidates based on their suitability with the job description, saving on time and effort for you.
3. Applicants Tracking
To track the candidate in the entire hiring process, the candidate is always informed about the updated status of his interview, and he is always in the loop.
4. Improvises Collaboration
Teamwork is smoother than ever. You can share notes, give feedback, and collaborate smartly with your team members.
5. Ensures Compliance
This feature is for the safety, making sure that you always stay compliant with hiring laws, so that you could focus more on finding the perfect candidate.
Now let us explore how this applicant tracking system really works, in the coming section.
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How ATS Works?
Step 1: An ATS Filters Resumes Based on Keywords
In some earlier years, Recruiters has always issues. A mountain size of resumes unsuitable for the given job postings. The sifting becomes more critical for such numbers of resumes, when various job openings are there to fill up. This becomes a huge task.
Before applicant tracking systems, recruiters had to physically scan each resume to see if it possesses the qualifications and experience required for a job.
But such resumes full of unsuitable details and irregularities made recruiters helpless with their time wastage and efforts taken on the initial screening or shortlisting.
So, it was a clueless work of hours for them!
Here is the use of ATS comes in picture. Let us see what end effect it gives upon its deployment.
Now, in the place of human filtering of every resume, the ATS does the heavy work.
ATS filters and scans the resumes based on specific parameters such as keywords, skills, and experience. It also ranks candidates based on their matching with the job description.
ATS in hiring eliminates all human guessing efforts and time wastage.
Just a simplified process with some margins of error that really imitates human thought and supports recruiters find the perfect candidate each time.
Step 2: ATS is Full of Challenging Questions for Easy Elimination
This is the next step after filtering of many resumes. This is an optional step. In this, the recruiters either go for ATS software, or they simply skip this step.
These question series can be of many types: either with answers to select by clicking on checkboxes or to select the right one multiple options by the candidates in the hiring process.
This makes the sorting easy for HR recruiters, as they can select and make those candidates move further in the process, who has given correct answers to these questions. Those who have failed to give answers are easy to filter out at this stage now. This makes the further selection easier.
Step 3: Applicant Tracking Systems also Scans & Sorts of Applicants
In this step, Resume information parsing is done to sort and scan the candidates.
Most of the ATS’ in the market have resume parsing features inbuilt. These kinds of software’s also study information in a resume but also allow recruiters to hotlist standout candidates.
You can also write down short notes right on their profiles. It’s like a digital sticky note.
If you want more in depth, the system enables you to configure customized keywords for scanning – i.e. educational background, specific skills, or any other criteria you feel valued. Recruiters could insist candidates for plag free, original resumes to improve the accuracy of the ATS’s parsing.
This scanning and sorting feature enables you to have a quick review via resumes and line up interviews accordingly.
Step 4: The ATS Tracks Candidate Journeys
This is the next step after sorting of resumes. The applicant tracking software help in candidates tracking in your hiring journey via visualization format like dashboard to track them easy and fast.
For example – if you are recruiting 20 candidates, your ATS will show you that- each candidate is a fresh applicant, or they are in the first or second interview stage.
Even if a candidate doesn’t make the move, they will still be there in you recruiting database for future positions.
Step 5: ATS Maintains Timely Communication
As the hiring process is going on, you can keep everyone informed about the same.
The communication between applicants, hiring managers, and your own team become a very busy task. ATS serves with comfort here.
This tool does automation of your communication tasks. It makes easy to update clients about job openings or give follow-up emails to candidates.
The result is a more effective communication process with less effort is required.
Which Are the Misconceptions about Applicant Tracking Systems?
All details about the applicant tracking system are not necessarily right. Some of them are myths. Let us discuss them here one after the other.
Misconception 1: An ATS Removes Human Involvement
ATS improves human interaction in the recruitment process during the entire journey. Recruitment automation enables recruiters to focus on assessing candidates’ soft skills, cultural fit check, and other human-centric factors, which would not be possible if they were mainly worked on manual sorting and tracking.
Misconception 2: An ATS only Prefers Keywords
An ATS considers various factors such as work experience, education, and skills, even though keywords are very important. A suitable and self-sufficient resume is more important than many keywords usage.
Misconception 3: Candidates are not Treated Fairly with an ATS
This is the biggest ever myth about ATS. ATS treats all resumes equally to provide the fair practice. It makes sure that each application is seen and assessed based on the same criteria, improvement for a fair and unbiased process.
Misconception 4: An ATS is Only for Large Companies
ATS’ are wide to use and can be customized to fit businesses of all sizes. In case you are a small business or a multinational company, an ATS can simplify your hiring process in many ways. The key is selecting a suitable ATS vendor which suits your business requirements, size, and goals.
Misconception 5: An ATS is Too Complex and Challenging to Use
Modern ATS solutions are made with user -friendliness mindsets. With intuitive interfaces and ongoing support, recruiters can easily browse and use the system’s capabilities. The best ATS providers will always makes sure for the top – class customer support and demos so that you can get the optimization of your system, no need of much more technical knowledge for the recruiter in this.
Misconception 6: The Hiring Process Becomes Impersonal
An ATS can improve the candidate experience by enabling recruiters to keep organized and responsible. Candidates can feel more engaged and informed with automated but most-personalized follow-ups and messages.
Misconception 7: An ATS Only Supports Certain File Types
While some old systems can have limitations, latest ATS’ can handle many file types, including PDFs, Word documents, etc. Candidates should always check the application guidelines to make sure the compatibility. By now, we have developed that an ATS is not a suspicious black box.
Top Features of Applicant Tracking System
1. Nice Customer Support
As we know, the recruiters going for a new ATS, will face issues with the new technology adaption in their day-to-day tasks. And for this they need a prompt and professional customer support to resolve their basic issues to use the system. So, the ATS is available with built-in live chat support or through email or phone.
The ATS must offer you with a training / onboarding program allowing you to understand its features in deep. The right customer support from ATS, makes it favourite among all.
2. Helps Source Candidates
Consider a situation where your customer wants you to go for hiring staff for them, but you are not having the talent pool with you.
IT is a big question for you how to manage this situation now and go for the hirings?
A powerful ATS with a fair candidate sourcing feature will enable you to improve your talent pool and support to you for the roles hiring which are harder to fill up.
Can the ATS is easy to connect with candidates in just some clicks?
Does it have all the important information about the prospective candidates?
Is this search perfect?
Systems like Niyuk also have a Chrome extension enabling the users to source candidates automatically from various platforms like LinkedIn etc. without all the struggles.
3. Allows Customizability & Configuration
Each recruitment agency or company has certain requirements of their own.
Check for more user settings, adding of more users and providing them more support helps your ATs more customizable. An ATS software that can be changed or moulded to make your own will be the great winner.
4. Automatic Interview Scheduling and Management
A right ATS will integrate candidate interviews smoothly with each one’s calendar. You can structure well the process and likely to get the real-time feedback. ATs with small features integrated such as simple interview dashboards and ready-to-use interview kits are bound to get the positive candidate experience. No scope for any unconscious bias.
5. Insightful Reports & Dashboards
To make well-informed hiring decisions and to boost your recruitment strategy, you’ll have to use reports and analytics.
The right ATS can offer you with strong reports on your KPIs, they may help you in the long run.
6. Excellent Customer Relationship Management
ATS must be nurturing relations with candidates and maintaining the same in the long run. With the correct quality of ATS, tagging, filtering, and note-taking are always on the card. You can smoothly update every candidate’s record. Checking related contacts and job openings are available on a click! You can also recover the best match upon a strong boolean search. If you can do all of this in a smooth way, then you are sailing in the right boat.
An ideal or outstanding CRM will help you in documentation, contact management, pipeline management, and most importantly, will take you towards the automation.
7. Top-Notch Security
Superior security and stability are important when working with data. Check to see if the ATS caters for all security requirements. Always look for uptime guarantees and make it sure that SSL sessions and passwords protect all the conversations.
8. Mobile-Friendly Application
Your ATS must be mobile-friendly. No matter what if, you are hiring fast. Mobile usage for hiring is getting famous today. With 77% of job applications are done with a mobile device, the need for a flexible ATS is more tough than ever.
The ATS you are looking for must function well with the criteria to be mobile-friendly and should easily adapt to each device. This will inspire the candidates to fill in their applications more easily and help recruiters to work remotely on this.
Thes all above mentioned are must-have features for the ATS. You need to select the right types of ATS with your smart negotiating skills now. And we would want to support you on this.
You can ensure to ask the following questions to find an applicant tracking system that fit in the requirement exactly.
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How Niyuk’s powerful ATS software revolutionizes your entire ATS Hiring strategy
Benefits of Applicant Tracking System
1. Time saving for Value-Added Work
Just spending more time on big bunches of resumes with filtering, matching at least 75 to 80% of applicants with the required job post is a time taking task. But with the use of listing the job-on-job boards, screening and filtering for the right suitable candidates becomes task of few moments.
2. User Friendly System for Recruiters and Hiring Manager
In recruiting agency, upon using a right suitable ATS, will save tones of loads on working of spreadsheets as well as email bunches for coordination, appointments and interview schedules etc.
Your effective ATS takes care about all of this. This makes life easy for hiring managers and recruiters.
3. Better Candidates Overview
Centralising all the documents in your hiring database gives you all the required details in one location. Without ever leaving the system, you may quickly navigate between apps, compare applicants, modify the status of candidates, and choose and scan candidates. This removes the risk of a submission getting missed or trapped on a teammate’s desk.
ATS providers like Niyuk equipped with a simple view to make data viewing easy and visually (aesthetically) appealing.
4. Improved Cost-Per-Hire
As you spend millions of rupees on the hiring process, the threat of bad hire damages the investment as well as destroys team balance and morale. But, with the use of the ATS, the cost per hire has remarkably reduced.
An ATS monthly cost is much less than a monthly salary cost of a recruiter. I.e. Even less than 5% of the Recruiter’s salary.
5. Automated Job Posting
Manually posting each job post, posting across various social accounts and promoting the same in the network manually is a Hercules task. It required lot of hard work for a long-lasting hour.
However, with an applicant tracking system, you can upload your job openings on several platforms with just a single click. You also need not to track every social post-performance each time. The software will collect insights from each platform and compile them for you.
Niyuk platform helps you in this. You can collect online applications from the candidates from a page. This leads to some cost savings in marketing.
6. Improved Quality of Hire
80% of recruiters claim to have an improved quality of hire ever since they incorporated an applicant tracking system in their businesses. Research also states that the shelf-life of a qualified candidate is approximately 10 days.
By regulating the recruitment process with ATS, you can smoothly grab talented candidates which your close competitors could have poached.
7. Enhanced Inter-Departmental Communication
Using inter-departmental communication with old methods of manual mode, always creates hassles. They happen due to department out of reach, transfers, lack of knowledge, no awareness about how to deal with candidates etc.
It becomes a series of kiosks. ATS enables improved communication among the recruiting team members and with other concern stakeholders in the process.
ATS gives facilities like messages deliveries, schedule bulk emails, and assign tasks in an organized timeline. All team members can write and leave notes, give ratings, and collect feedback on each applicant. Today, many ATS software integrate swiftly with calendars and other email systems as well, leaving you with few scheduling conflicts and paperwork.
8. Faster and More Informed Hiring Decisions
A wrong decision can affect your team coordination and budget. So, ATS must take care about this issue. The ATS software gives TA heads full access to all applications, keeping them on the same level. This supports recruiters to compare candidates in objective way and supports in taking data-driven decisions.
A recent LinkedIn survey has proved that 64% HR experts strongly feel that a faster hiring of candidates is possible by ATS.
9. Votes for Collaborative Hiring
Collaborative hiring allows organisations to have an organized approach to develop a dynamic and talented team.
Applicant tracking systems like Niyuk come with multiple integrations with all the trending recruiting tools, making it easy to work collaboratively.
This makes simple for hiring teams to smartly exchange feedback and reviews on every candidate and lead a joint decision-making process in which each one has a voice. Also, the system supports annual reviews, making sure for a simple process for assessing team members over time.
10. The Recruitment Process Speeds Up
The benefit of centralized details of all applicants and they are also organized in a single platform allowing you to utilize the full recruitment cycle.
As a single ATS automates all, from receiving applications to shortlisting the best candidates, scheduling all interviews, and hiring the best suitable person for the job, everything runs with a speed and accelerates the entire process.
Features like bulk emailing, email sequences and automated follow-ups through email boost up the recruiting process, with fast communication.
11. Improved Candidate Experience
A perfectly placed ATS software delivers a uniform candidate experience to those not hired and hired, as well.
An ATS can remarkably improve your candidate experience with some essential human touch, making your talent in favour of your business.
12. Improved Employer Branding
By giving a top-class onboarding experience, also amplifies your brand image up to a larger extent.
An ATS apart from resume screenings makes your brand famous and attractive for all active and inactive top talents as a successful brand.
13. Lower Bounce Rates on Job Ads
A frequent job advertisement wastes all efforts of hiring due to no replies to that advertisement for a long time.
Applicant tracking systems are a straight and improved solution to a better understanding of how to launch and carry on job advertisements and in what ways you can have the best results.
Using an ATS will help you optimize the time spent on the careers page and increase the number of applications.
14. Simplified Recruitment Process
With a simplified development between successive tasks, the HR department can manage and review multiple applications in a few hours with ease, which could otherwise take some days. This helps recruiting agencies work faster and with certain improved efficiency.
15. Getting Rid of Unnecessary Resumes
Many times, candidates apply for many jobs without considering the requirements and suitability for the same. In these cases, frustrating situations arises at the recruiter’s end, they really need to sift through these applications, filter out the suitable job applicants, and then screen the good ones for the same.
An ATS with the CRM will manage the collected resumes by you and display applicant data to make short and comfortable comparisons. Boolean search may be a powerful tool to help you with shortlisting objective also. Here, you can input your own criteria of search each time and save it directly in the software.
16. Easy Interview Scheduling
As we know that, interview scheduling is more time – taking than pure interviews.
We have seen that, Recruiters explore the best possible time slots, comfortable for each candidate, arranging successful and planned interviews with schedules, following all terms and criteria’s required for the post.
Anyhow, with an ATS’ automated email feature, it confirms shortlisted candidates about their interview times, effectively working on all sorts of bottlenecks and confusion areas. The result is a simple and doable scheduling process releasing up your team to focus on the real task: searching and getting the right candidate.
17. Better Budget Utilization
Regarding recruiting solutions, it is tough to get the right direction on where to incur your recruitment budget.
This confusion may lead to a lot of unnecessary expenditure by a company, taking to losses. You can spend heavy currency on posting job advertisements to various mediums when it would have only been invested in the correct or preferred social platform.
An applicant tracking software finds the right one platform to invest in via several personalized data collection methods, making your tech stack deep.
18. Great Scope of Talent
A restricted reach will get limited talent. This is just a common matter. If a company wishes to hire the best candidates, it needs to expand its network in the market and let the hiring team should know in which ways they are going to search the compatible ones. And spreading out your scope in today’s challenging world is a tough task.
An applicant tracking system reaches to the right candidates easily via Chrome extensions and other add-ons features. It can source CVs from many social media platforms & job boards with automated integrations.
An ATS helps you to enter the arena of social recruiting too. For example – Niyuk has those social media integrations, where you can post a job from your system directly to your trending social media sites in just a click.
19. Auto-Generation of Accurate Reports
Applicant tracking systems keeps checking the recruiting metrics and the efficiency or ROI of your talent acquisition process. It considers all recruitment parameters and makes real-time auto-generated reports. This is done by gathering data from various segments of the process.
The data collected by the ATS supports companies identifying loopholes and implement hiring strategies to improve their business.
20. Enriched GDPR & EEO
We really need to consider in deep, the sensitive issue in today’s modern recruitment processes i.e. data privacy.
As the entire recruiting procedure is automated, most candidates are not agreed that their data would not be shared to any other sources or will become public later.
This often makes them hesitant to proceed with this medium. Even though, GDPR regulations are being enforced, and data security is now internationally regulated more, it is crucial to find a way to handle personal data safely and efficiently. You can refer how Niyuk handles compliance with GDPR & EEO.
Having a secured applicant tracking system allows businesses to stay safe and away from all unrequired and unwanted applications wasting much time and resources.
Why Niyuk is the Smart Choice for Recruiting Today?
Niyuk proves to be the best-ever ATS available in the market today by basically rethinking the conventional recruitment workflow, shifting the focus from manual work to intelligent automation.
While standard ATS software gives basic resume parsing and candidate tracking, Niyuk integrates latest, proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI) to handle the most time-consuming steps of ATS hiring. Its core strength lies in its AI-powered screening capabilities, that can automatically scan, rank, and match thousands of resumes against a given job description, claiming a time saving of up to 70% for recruiters in the initial phase. This level of automated candidate filtering makes sure that hiring teams focus their little attention on the most qualified profiles, remarkably accelerating the time-to-hire parameter.
The true differentiator for Niyuk is its entire suite of AI tools designed to make sure for objective quality in ATS in hiring. Beyond resume screening, Niyuk introduces AI Interview and AI Assessment modules providing objective, consistent, and bias-free assessment of a candidate’s fit, communication, and technical skills.
The platform possesses more than 100 curated, role-specific assessments. That allows recruiters to validate required knowledge before engaging in expensive, time-consuming human interviews. This approach drops dependency on individual recruiters for repetitive initial-stage screening and minimizes unconscious bias, leading to fair evaluation and ultimately best quality hires.
By automating the full pre-selection funnel – from smart resume screening to skill validation – Niyuk change overs the conventional ATS software into an AI-powered virtual recruiter, making it the superior choice for organizations focused on speed, efficiency, and data-driven decision-making in ATS Hiring.
How much Do Applicant Tracking Systems Cost?
The cost of an applicant tracking system can be diversified as it depends upon features it gives. For small operations, you could find economical options starting around $25 per user per month. These normally cover basic functionalities like resume parsing and interview scheduling.
Anyhow, if you are a large organization with more tough recruitment needs, costs may rise to thousand dollars per user per month. Such luxury packages mostly include latest analytics, integration capabilities, and AI-driven candidate matching. It’s tough to assess your certain recruitment issues and volume to select an ATS that caters all your hiring requirements, objectives in budget giving you returns on the investment-made on it.
Niyuk offers the best subscription model as far as pricing is concerned.
Conclusion
Some ATS platforms are all-rounder solutions, giving a wide array of features, while others specialize in some areas. ATS must fits in any kind of business, no matter the size, but must accomplish the objectives for which it is implemented.
This guide covers all main points related to ATS and how it is helpful for companies to make their hiring much more simple, cost-effective and time saving, too.
ATS is a real goldmine for recruiters and hiring managers in the long run. Also, it has got latest technological integration such as AI driven processes with platforms like Niyuk for much precise and highest quality hiring results.
For more enquires related to ATS in hiring and Niyuk ATS solution, please mail us at: info@niyuk.ai
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How does an ATS work?
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a software helping employers manage job applications with automatically scanning, parsing, and organizing resumes and other applicant data.
2. What are the main benefits of using an ATS?
The main benefits of using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) are fast hiring processes, cost reduction in hiring process, and improved operational efficiency.
3. Can an ATS help reduce hiring bias?
Yes, an ATS may reduce hiring bias with the use of AI to anonymize candidate information (like name and gender) and objectively assess qualifications based purely on skills and experience. Focus mainly on merit, AI-powered systems make a fair, more diverse hiring process, though human oversight remains important to make sure for the ethical use.
