How ATS Helps Improve Time, Cost, and Quality of Hiring

Let us explore the importance of ATS in improving time, cost and quality hiring of employees.

Hiring quality talent quickly and efficiently is one of the essential tasks business owners and recruiters strive to achieve. But, with both the number of candidates and the companies looking to hire candidates on the rise, recruiters face a continual challenge of picking the right candidates and hiring them without splurging excessive time and resources.

An applicant tracking system offers advanced search options that enable recruiters to optimize their hiring process by automating everything from sourcing to onboarding. Let’s dive into how ATS can play a pivotal role in improving the time, cost, and quality of hire.

Applicant Tracking System (ATS): An overview

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is a software solution developed to streamline the hiring procedure for recruiters and HR managers. It automates the entire hiring process, thereby streamlining and simplifying it to save time and boost productivity. Besides propelling the recruitment process, an ATS combines several functions to overcome all kinds of recruitment challenges.

Features of ATS

Here is a quick look into the features of a typical applicant tracking system, itemizing the importance of ATS to improve the time, cost, and quality of employees.

• Powerful sourcing
• One-click job posting to several job portals
• Easy-to-search database for filtering the best applicant profiles
• Repository for applicant applications and resumes
• Seamless interview scheduling
• Automated emails and follow-ups
• Automated resume parsing and screening
• Recruiting analytics and reporting

Benefits of an applicant tracking system (ATS)

Investing in an advances applicant tracking system comes with a bunch of compelling benefits, including speeding up the process, advancing decision making, reducing cost per hire, developing a stronger relationship with candidates, improving quality of hire, and many more. But for now, we will focus on the three primary benefits of an ATS: time, cost, and quality.

Reduced time to hire

Time-to-hire is one of the essential recruitment metrics and is defined as the average time taken to fill an open job position. It is an aggregate statistic calculated based on several hiring tasks, including creating a job posting, sourcing, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding.  A shorter time-to-hire is a clear indicator of the efficiency of the recruitment process; it also indicates the difficulty level of filling an open job role.

More than 85 percent of recruiters using an ATS have witnessed a quicker hiring process. An applicant tracking system fastens or even automates tasks that otherwise require hours of work, such as resume parsing, interview scheduling, sending emails, and eliminating non-qualified candidates. An ATS also builds talent pools, which help in finding candidates for future roles and openings, thus, saving more time.

Lower cost per hire

Another critical component of the hiring process is cost-per-hire; it is defined as the total amount of money or monitory investment required to fill up an open job position. Several factors like recruiter salaries, employee referral bonuses, relocation costs, etc. come into play when calculating the cost-per-hire. It is indicative of the cost-effectiveness of the recruitment process and can be analyzed which job positions are the most expensive and which ones are the least.

An applicant tracking system reduces the cost-per-hire by simply saving the time a company spends on hiring. It automates several time-consuming and costly tasks that need human effort. Thus, there is no need to spend money on administrative recruiting tasks to fill a position, which makes the overall strategy cost-efficient and productive.

As mentioned earlier, an ATS helps you build and manage a talent pool, which can significantly reduce the cost per hire. With the help of a talent pool, you can almost every time have a perfect candidate ready for a job opening. An applicant tracking system also provides you with in-depth insights into which source is the best for hiring new talent. Thus, you can eliminate the underperforming sources and reduce unnecessary expenses. For instance, if most of your candidates are coming from referrals, there is no point in spending a large share of your job advertising budget on job portals.

Improved quality of hire

Another essential element of the hiring process is the quality of hire. It is defined as the total value the new employees offer to the company with their performance. Variables considered when calculating the quality of hire include ramp-up time, turnover rates, and performance reviews. It helps you measure your assessment accuracy and the quality of candidates you have hired.

Applicant tracking systems has helped several recruiters with improving the quality of candidates they hire. Research suggests that high-quality, talented candidates stay in the market no more than 8-12 days. Thus, it is vital to speed up the hiring process to ensure you get the top candidates before other companies snatch them. An ATS helps you by sending automated emails that ensure continual communication with the candidates, thereby improving candidate engagement and experience.

And, positive candidate experience is directly linked to increased acceptance of job offers. Moreover, happy candidates are more likely to refer to other high-quality candidates, which will be a bonus for your company.

Final thoughts

Although every organization should have a robust applicant tracking system, it is a must-use for companies with a staff size of more than 50. ITs and BPOs might witness resignations at quick intervals, and not having an effective hiring strategy can cost the company significantly. An ATS is an excellent solution that enables such companies to stay prepared for sudden hires by reducing the cost to hire and time to hire and increasing the quality of hire.

More About Me

Sharad Bhardwaj

subscriber

See author's posts