10 Features Every Recruiter Needs in their ATS
Talented job candidates recognize and appreciate a savvy and modern recruitment process. As a human resources professional, you need feature-rich recruiting solutions to connect with top talent. To attract your ideal candidates and increase your efficiency as a recruiter, here are ten key features that you need to have in your ATS.
1. Customizable Career Sites
Your career site is one of the first places you have to show off your company to prospective applicants. Make sure that your applicant tracking system gives you the option to customize your career site’s look and feel. It should also function just as well on mobile devices as it does on desktop computers.
2. Simple Apply Process and Mobile Experience
Candidates shouldn’t need to jump through hoops to submit their application to you. Make sure applicants can send you their information however they want: uploading their resume, easy apply through LinkedIn, or even taking a picture of their resume from their phone. Your recruitment system should reduce friction between you and your ideal candidates when they’re on the go.
3. Employee Referral Program
Referrals are one of the best, most trusted sources of hires. Make sure that your ATS makes creating a referral program seamless and easy for all your employees. By setting up a referral program, employees can easily tell their connections how to explore open positions at your company.
4. Hiring Manager Collaboration Tools
Keep everyone up to date with ATS software that lets multiple internal parties view a candidate’s status. The software’s intelligence automatically ranks applicants and predicts onboarding times. You can efficiently schedule interviews with highly refined ATS tracking features.
5. Full Recruitment Process Integrations
Your ATS is usually only a piece of your recruiting and HR process. From background checks to HRIS, you need to make sure that your ATS connects your hiring data to the rest of your recruiting ecosystem. Built-in and customizable integrations reduce redundant data entry tasks and streamline your workflow.
6. Analytics and Dashboards
Making sure your analytics are simple and easy to customize needs to be a key feature in your recruiting software. Whether you start with a pre-built report template or customize your metrics for a very specific request, your ATS needs to provide you with those capabilities. Additional nice-to-have features are dashboards to visualize your ongoing key metrics and help you keep an eye on trends like time to hire or various bottlenecks. Intuitive dashboards make metrics visually consumable at a glance so that you can monitor and alleviate hiring delays.
7. Integrated Text Recruiting
Text recruiting may seem like a trend, but with a 90%+ response rate from candidates, it’s a trend that you should jump on. Having the ability to text candidates in the hiring process through your ATS and being able to track and store transcripts is an advantage to keep in mind. Sidestep overloaded inboxes and voicemail and make direct connections with your applicants with an integrated text messaging feature.
8. Powerful Candidate Search
You’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and money to build a great database of candidates and applicants to your organization. Make sure that your ATS has a strong candidate search, so that you can find who you need for standard or even custom fields. Make sure you can refine your searches by the filters you need, like workflow, requisition, or location. You should also be able to customize filters to meet the precise needs of your organization.
9. Flexible Workflows
Every company is different. Sometimes every department is different. Make sure that your recruiting software allows you to customize your workflows, adapt your pre-screening questions, workflows, and more by the position. You shouldn’t be forced to follow an out-of-the-box process. Your ATS software should adapt easily to the needs of different department managers. They need to be able to add specific screening questions, establish recruitment workflows that fit their processes, and evaluate interviews with a mobile application.
10. Video Recording
Make sure that you can add another layer to your applicant tracking system with the ability to record short video responses directly within the system. This allows you to connect with applicants faster by having candidates respond to your screener questions, and gives applicants a chance to speak more directly to the hiring team.