How an ATS can improve your productivity

If you’re struggling with the same time-consuming administration day in, day out, you might be wondering how an ATS can improve your productivity.

It may be a New Year, but for some recruitment teams, the bulk of their time is still spent carrying out the same repetitive tasks on the to-do list. Reading through applications and CVs. Booking interview slots. Creating job postings. Undertaking background checks. Sometimes, the admin truly seems endless.

But these daily activities are optional – because with the right system in place, you can automate so much of the recruitment journey that takes up your time.

And that means you can channel your productivity into more strategic, valuable projects – like establishing a talent pool of potential future applicants, engaging with passive candidates or managing those ‘hard to fill’ vacancies.

How much can an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) really boost your productivity? Well, once you’ve got the basics taken care of, we think quite a lot. Let’s look at some of the key ways that an Applicant Tracking System can boost productivity for you and your team members.

Firstly, what does an ATS do?

An Applicant Tracking System isn’t what most people would call a productivity tool, but there’s no denying that it can have a major impact on how productive the workplace is.

With key features such as automated personalised communications, application screening and filtering, consolidating candidate information, and many other useful functions, an ATS platform can increase efficiency in the recruitment process.

Let’s take a look at the specific ways that using this recruitment technology can increase workplace productivity.

Reduce administration by automating your interview booking:

Are you spending time calling and emailing applicants trying to book them in for interviews? Or chasing hiring managers for their schedules? It can feel like spinning plates to bring different parties together

A strong ATS should take care of all the interview administration on your to-do list. Hiring managers and other panel members can upload their availability to the system and the ATS will then create a selection of interview slots for candidates to choose from.

Confirmation and reminders can then be sent via both email and SMS – ensuring that your candidates know the time and date of their interview. They can also reply to cancel or reschedule if their availability has changed, reducing the amount of wasted interview time.

The benefit of an ATS is that you’ll no longer be reliant on leaving voicemails and chasing up responses – a real drain on your productivity.

Moreover, increasing the efficiency of interview booking through automation has clear benefits for candidate experience. Instead of getting a bad first impression of your organisation with an endless stream of emails attempting to schedule and reschedule interviews, applicants get to enjoy the ease of booking their interview time directly from the candidate portal.

Save time by enhancing your screening process:

Have you ever found yourself trawling through hundreds of applications for a vacancy and felt like the majority were not suitable? No matter how specific the job description you post on job boards and social media, it seems inevitable that many applicants will be unsuitable. Now, half your day has been wasted by staring at irrelevant CVs – not a productive use of your time!

This is where the screening capabilities of an ATS really come into their own. In Hireserve ATS, we’re particularly proud of our ‘killer questions’. These are mandatory questions which you can ask at the beginning of your application processes, to ensure candidates meet the minimum essential requirements for the role.

Right to work in the UK? Experience in the sector? Perhaps a professional qualification or level of education?

These screening questions save candidates time and effort in applying for a role that they are likely not currently well suited to, and saves you time reviewing unsuitable applications. Again, this enables you to focus your time and become more productive in other areas.

Can your ATS simplify the recruitment process by filtering out unsuitable applicants? If not, and you’re ready to move on from your current Applicant Tracking System, download our ‘Choosing an ATS’ guide. And if you haven’t got a recruitment system already in place, it’s also a great resource to help you get started on your ATS selection journey!

Say goodbye to endless emails and spreadsheets 

Often, we come across teams that are using hundreds of emails and spreadsheets alongside their current ATS. Let’s be clear – this is a sign that your Applicant Tracking System is not good enough. If you have a Google Drive full of spreadsheets with information about recruitment, it’s time to upgrade your system.

A high quality Applicant Tracking System can handle all this for you. There’s no need to keep using emails and spreadsheets for chasing and tracking information such as right-to-work checks; with a powerful all-in-one ATS this information will all be tracked and collated for you.

In addition to saving you time and boosting productivity, your Applicant Tracking System can keep all this data safe and secure, making compliance with data protection regulations easier than ever.

Plus, all staff with the relevant permissions can keep up with the hiring process using the ATS, no matter where they are in the world. This makes it far easier to help everyone stay productive instead of constantly searching for the right spreadsheets or email trails with the information they need.

Say hello to automated job posting

Another time-consuming part of the hiring process is posting the job adverts to job boards and social media pages – especially if there are multiple jobs to advertise at once. Switching between different mobile apps to manually post listings is a drain on your time and productivity, leaving too much opportunity for human error. However, it doesn’t need to be this way.

A good Applicant Tracking System can handle all of this for you in a matter of seconds. Automate postings to your Facebook Business page, LinkedIn page, or even set up real-time tweets for every time a new job opportunity goes live on the ‘careers’ section of your website. Another benefit of automating social media and job board postings is that it makes high-volume recruitment far easier, saving time for everyone.

In addition to freeing up your time for greater productivity elsewhere, sending out automated and consistent job postings is beneficial for your professional brand image, making it even more likely that your adverts will attract top talent.

Focus your energy on rewarding sources:

We could spend all day talking about ways an ATS platform can save you time, streamline your tasks, and reduce your administration – but that might not be fun for everyone!

Instead, here’s another way a good ATS can increase your productivity.

Most Applicant Tracking Systems should come armed with a suite of standard reports. You can use these to help focus your time and energy and on particular areas. For example, the source report will enable you to see from which channels you’re receiving the highest number of applications and, crucially, hires (remember, these could differ).

This insight allows you to focus on your highest performing sources, rather than spending time and energy on platforms that don’t yield results. For example, it might not be worth the effort of posting an advert on lots of other job boards when the majority of successful applicants find you through a job listing on LinkedIn.

Other reports, such as Time to Hire, can help you identify where there may be internal bottlenecks or issues in your internal processes. You can channel your productivity into troubleshooting and improving your recruitment journey.

Your ATS reports should also highlight where things are going right. Low cost-per-hires, initiatives that have enhanced your diversity efforts, or sources that have performed well for ‘hard to fill’ roles, can all be identified in this data.

Accurate ATS data should help remove some of the guesswork from your recruitment strategy, enabling you to be more focused and strategic. So, is that another way an ATS improves productivity? Tick!

Improve your internal engagement:

Nothing zaps productivity like a lack of buy-in to the ATS platform you’re using.

If you are currently spending time dealing with repeat offenders that fail to progress their vacancies, we’ve got the perfect solution to make you more productive.

Hireserve’s Hiring Manager Portal has been made with the casual and frequent user in mind. No need to train those Hiring Managers who only recruit once or twice a year – the system has been streamlined and simplified so they can use it with ease. Once they realise how helpful it is for their productivity, you’ll never need to encourage them to use it again!

You can also set limits on each user for their level of system access, so those less technologically able have the most simplified actions open to them.

Find out about the benefits of the Hiring Manager Portal here.

Take the pressure off your people

It’s no secret that the hiring process can be stressful. From dedicated recruitment teams trying to snag the best candidates before they are offered jobs elsewhere to hiring managers trying to juggle the recruitment process alongside their day-to-day jobs, and the leadership team trying to find time for interviews in their busy days, it can be hard to keep everyone motivated when there’s so much on everyone’s to-do list.

We know that this sort of multi-tasking can be detrimental to productivity (just take a look at this infographic), so it makes sense that an Applicant Tracking System can increase productivity by reducing the workload and stress levels of all team members.

Moreover, an ATS solution makes it easier for everyone to stay up-to-date with the hiring process in real time. No more wasting time catching up various team members – all the important information about hiring and candidates is consolidated in one easy-to-access cloud-based recruitment technology.

Find the right candidate faster

With research showing that the median time-to-hire stands at well over a month for most industries, with engineering at 49 days, marketing at 40 days, and customer service and administrative roles at 34 and 33 days respectively, finding the right candidate can take a while.

Keeping in mind that Hiring Managers are responsible for finding the new hire, while also doing their own job and probably picking up the slack for the unfilled role, a long time-to-fill can be a real drain on productivity. Until the role is filled, it’s likely that the whole team are less productive than usual as a result of the increased workload.

Therefore, to allow everyone to be their most productive, a speedy recruitment process is essential. One of the major benefits of using an ATS is the way it speeds up time-to-hire by streamlining the whole process – meaning that the organisation has vacancies for a shorter period of time and productivity can increase.

So, bottom line. Can an ATS improve productivity?

Of course we’re going to say yes – we hear it time and time again from our customers! If you’re spending all your time dealing with the routine tasks and lack the scope to work on those strategic, more complex projects, let an ATS take care of your admin, data and processes instead.

If you’re ready to see with your own eyes how much more productive an Applicant Tracking System can make your team, request a demo of Hireserve ATS today.