Does your team need an "Applicant Tracking System"? 5 Questions to Help you out

Does your organization needs to acquire an ATS "Applicant Tracking System" or "Recruitment Management Solution" for your Talent Acquisition Team, Here you go 5 questions that can help you decide if your organization needs it.

1) How do you track applicants?

Tracking your applicant information including skills, background as well as all his/her previous engagements with the recruitment team is very essential to help taking the right and fast decisions within the recruitment process, it's also important to centralize the information and make more accessible for all related stake holders within the organization such as Hiring Managers and Talent On-boarding Professionals, ATS can help all pears share their feedback, assessment about the applicant in real time, this will lead to a more seamless experience that is faster and more reliable at the same time,

2) How do you track vacancy requisition approvals?

Requisition approvals is very important to any organization to make sure that the organization is not under staffed and that the business needs are being served with the right amount and quality of talents and also to make sure that the organization is not acquiring talent beyond it's needs or capabilities, that's why having an online requisition tool that is accessible from anywhere at anytime is much more effective that paper requisition because approvals can happen in a much more quicker way and even more controlled and tracked, requisition forms can stay for weeks pending signatures and even get lost among other paper work and then the whole signatures game has to be started all over again.

Some insights stats that Vacancy Requisition Approvals can take up to 42% of the time taken to fill the position since the position start being in effective need

3) How do you track the efficiency of your sourcing techniques?

Talent Acquisition is modern business process that involves several types of costs including cost figures that are being invested for sourcing Talents, this might include Recruitment Agencies, Job boards subscriptions, Participating in Events, Online and offline advertising and others, having a centralized solution where the traffic of all those sources is coming through will provide a comprehensive ability to track and measure the effectiveness of each source, so you will be able to track the ROI for each source using different figures including the hiring success rate and even have a break down for this accordingly to different demographic locations, job roles and levels which will allow you to manage your budgets in a smart way but investing in the right source accordingly to the specifications of the required candidate profile and also get rid of the other source which proved not being helpful on all levels.

4) How do you review progress of your Talent Acquisition plan/Man Power plan?

Its happens a lot that senior management faces an urgent business situation that requires their head of human resources or head of recruitment to give a detailed update of the current progress of the Talent Acquisition plan Vs the original plan, or even the standard periodic Talent Acquisition reporting that requires take time and effort to develop and audit to make sure of it's accuracy, time is being wasted here because preparing such reports involves multiple individuals because it's a collective summary of the team progress so there is time being wasted in manual entries from recruiters and managers waste more time trying to gather those updates and present them in one single report and many times the reports are not update to date as recruiters can't keep track of their reports on a daily and sometimes weekly basis even so this ends up in getting a report that doesn't reflect the 100% actual situation, having an ATS is essential to have a tracking tool to be able to asses the team effort and be able to report that easily to the upper management as you have confidence in the insights you are reading as they are accurate and up to date and be able to take the right decisions of mid-course corrections based on the updates you see in the "Talent Acquisition" Reporting as well as other strategic reporting topics such as "Recruitment Process" Reporting.

5) How do recruiters spend most of their day?

With increasing organizational demands, recruiters needs to build a strong knowledge about the latest talent acquisition techniques and about the new roles and positions are being invented rapidly but often they don't get enough time to do this because of the administrative tasks that consumes most of their day switching between different talent pools, responding to hiring managers inquiries and candidate inquiries, sending emails to schedule interview and making phone screening, ATSs takes care of all what are listed here and give more time to recruiters to focus more on trying their best to use their judgmental analysis skills on what matters the most which is assessing talents and seeking the best quality of talents to empower the organization with the most qualified talents available in the market.

The answer of the previous questions can help in answering the question of is worth it to invest in an applicant tracking system and what is the reflected return on investment for such decision.

I guess that it for me today, I will be glad to know your thoughts about Applicant Tracking Systems and if you find it helpful or not and why do you think so.

If you are interested to know more how ATS can help your in your talent acquisition strategy and activities please don't hesitate to contact me on: [email protected] I'm always opened for discussions related to Technology and how it works with Talent Management.