It turns out that, on average, 64% of software features are never or rarely used. This means that there are probably ATS features and functions that you didn’t know existed (or if you did, haven’t had the chance to try out).
Whether you’re new to using an ATS or are a bit of a recruitment technology expert, this post will help you become an ATS super user in no time.
Improve Experience (For Candidates and Recruiters)
Feature 1: Video Interviewing
Flexibility for candidates and recruiters.
Video interviewing (VI) is becoming incredibly popular in recruitment. It allows candidates to benefit from interviews without the pressure and anxiety of taking time off work at short notice (which always looks a bit suspicious) or having to make travel arrangements.
VI also provides recruiters with much more freedom. They no longer need to be confined to a stuffy meeting room for a full day of interviewing. Recruiters can review candidates’ video interviews anywhere, anytime, on any device, whether that’s on their way into the office, in between meetings, or even on a plane on their way to a conference.
One of our clients recently had a candidate contact them, worried that he’d miss the out on their Business Development Manager role due to being on holiday in Australia. We were able to send the candidate a link to the video interviewing platform and he’d submitted his application by the time we woke up the following morning.
Feature 2: Multi-dimensional Job Ads
You’re not going to attract the best talent with boring job ads.
If you’re not using your ATS job ad creator to its full potential, you’re seriously missing a trick. Words are great, but we all know the saying ‘a picture paints a thousand words’. If you can say it with an image or a video instead of a long paragraph, do it. Make your job ad as informative and as engaging as it can possibly be.
Post a video of a day in the life of the role you’re recruiting for. Post pictures of staff dos and training events. Give your potential candidate a real glimpse into what it’s like to work for your organisation and you’re more likely to attract the highest quality of talent.
Make sure you include the job location, or even better, the postcode. Be specific. Let’s take London as an example; it’s a pretty big city, so just putting ‘London’ as the location probably isn’t going to cut it. If a candidate is searching for a job in the centre of London, through geocoding, your job pops up. The problem is your role is actually far out to the West on the outskirts of London; the candidate is going to get a little frustrated. This is poor user experience. Not only will adding precise locations to your job ad improve your candidate experience, but it also helps your ad rank higher for mobile and location-based Google searches.
Feature 3: Communities
Easy communication with candidates and crowdsourcing FAQs.
If you create online communities, forums, and groups within your ATS, you are then able to communicate and engage with groups of candidates all in one go. For example, you might want to invite all job seekers that you met at a graduate fair to a community where they can share ideas, experiences, and tips.
Once you have a community, you can then efficiently inform the right candidates about your grad scheme or any other information that may be relevant to them. Equally, it creates a platform for candidates to be able to ask you questions before attending an interview; think of it as crowdsourcing an interview FAQ for your business.
Feature 4: Calendar Integration
No more double-booking meeting rooms.
We’ve all been there. You’ve got your own personal calendar, a calendar to book out meeting rooms, and a calendar within your ATS. Having to manage calendars in multiple systems can result in having to do the awkward ‘erm, I think I booked out this room, sorry’ as you stand in the doorway waiting for the intruder to pack up their laptop.
Allowing recruiters and hiring managers to add interview slots to their preferred calendar from within your ATS will help to avoid double booking.
Save Time (and Money)
Feature 5: Smart Analytics
Make informed decisions based on facts and figures.
Without information and data, it’s difficult to tell if you are recruiting the best candidates efficiently. You need to know how much you are spending, where you are spending it, and whether you are investing in the channels that are generating quality candidates. You also need to know how long it is taking to recruit and where the bottlenecks are.
By making the most of your ATS’s analytics platform, you can not only save money by investing in the right people and the right places but also improve candidate experience by helping you identify and fix the parts of your recruitment process that are letting you (and your candidates) down.
Let’s say you have two recruiters called Sally and John. They both recruit for digital roles within your business but you notice (through your analytics platform) that Sally’s average time to hire is 28 days whereas John’s is 39 days. By looking into Sally’s processes in comparison to John’s, you can work out how Sally is achieving a lower time to hire rate. You can then get John to follow Sally’s best practice in order to bring his time to hire down.
Feature 6: Talent Pooling and Mining
Don’t lose track of the candidates that didn’t quite make the cut.
Let’s say you received 100 applications for one role. Once you’ve made the hire, 99% of your candidates have been rejected. You might have chosen five of the applicants to interview, yet it may have been the case that eighty of your applicants were relevant and suitable for the role. Sometimes, there isn’t much between candidates but, at the end of the day, there is only one vacancy and you just had to choose someone. But what happens to the other great people?
What happens when you need to advertise that role again? Maybe the person you originally recruited resigns, or your team is expanding, or your recruit got promoted? You need exactly the same type of candidate as before. Do you go through the same pain points of sourcing another 100 candidates: paying agencies, paying job boards, paying media companies, or do you go back to those 79 candidates and invite the best ones in again?
By pooling and segmenting your candidates into skills, location, and salary requirements using your ATS tags and categories, you can re-engage with these quality candidates at any point in the future when you need them again. Some of our clients have saved hundreds of thousands of pounds simply by implementing this feature.
Feature 7: Auto-talent Pooling
Let your ATS do all the hard work.
Manually talent pooling is great, but having an ATS that can auto-talent pool for you can save you tonnes of time. Tribepad can not only auto-pool your own candidates, but it allows you to pool across external databases to make that pool of talent even bigger.
By using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, your ATS can automatically index and pool candidates as they sign up to your platform. This means that the next time you log into your ATS, you’ll have access to a wealth of new talent to review or even consider for a particular position without having lifted a finger.
Feature 8: Social Media Integration
Post to all your social media channels in one go.
It’s no secret that social media has become an integral part of marketing, whether you’re flogging a product, a service, or a job. 84% of businesses are already using social media to promote their roles. But if you’re copy and pasting a job ad link into Facebook, Twitter, or a platform like Hootsuite and manually typing out a post each time, you’re missing a trick. Link up your ATS to your social media platforms so that when you post a job ad to you careers site, it also posts on to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or wherever you’ve set it up to go.
But it’s not just about spamming your Twitter followers with job ads. If you’ve enhanced your job ad with a ‘Day in the Life’ or a ‘5 Reasons You Should Work For Us’ video, why not post that on social media instead? It’s much more likely to grab potential candidates’ attention that a couple of sentences and a link.
Feature 9: Job Board Multi-poster
Distribute your ad to all your favourite job boards at once.
As a recruiter, you probably have a list of job boards that you regularly use to promote your roles. With a job board multi-poster feature, you can set up your ATS to distribute your job to all your favourite job board as soon as you publish the ad.
Feature 10: Online Assessments
Integrate DBS and right to work checks into your application process.
By integrating DBS and right to work checks with your ATS, it creates a seamless experience for your candidates. It means that they don’t have to be logging into their DBS account halfway through an application and it gives you an all-round view of your applicants in one place.
Right to work checks are a legal requirement which means that if you don’t do it (or do it incorrectly), you may find yourself facing enormous fines and even a five-year prison sentence. Not only will integrating these checks with your ATS make you process more efficient, but it will also help avoid mistakes, and ultimately, jail time.
Feature 11: Integrated Onboarding
Automatically convert a candidate into an employee.
So you’ve just hired the perfect candidate. The problem is, you now need to transfer all their details from your ATS into your HR and payroll platforms. Copying and pasting details from one system to another is something you do not need to be doing; it’s cumbersome, error-prone, and a complete pain. If your ATS has an integrating onboarding solution (which Tribepad does), you can push all the relevant information from your ATS to your HR and payroll systems automatically. Goodbye copy and paste.
If your ATS doesn’t give you access to all these features, you’re being short-changed.
The Tribepad ATS and Video Interviewing Platform will turn you into a super user in no time. But don’t just take our word for it, let’s arrange free demo so you can see for yourself.
