Article: Next-Gen hiring management systems are taking over recruitment

Talent Acquisition

Next-Gen hiring management systems are taking over recruitment

Problems with Applicant Tracking Systems point why it is not going to work anymore
Next-Gen hiring management systems are taking over recruitment

It’s the end of the Applicant Tracking System (ATS). It is indeed a big statement. Therefore, based on our research and several other surveys conducted recently, we have listed most common problems with the ATS. 

1. Recruiting is a people process. Does your applicant tracking system let you convey your organization’s personality?

These systems, which employers use to manage job openings across their enterprises and screen incoming resumes from job seekers, kill 75 percent of candidates' chances of landing an interview as soon as they submit their resumes, according to a recent survey from a job search services provider.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs) can’t read potential, and can’t identify creativity. For that reason, it can leave out perfectly desirable, perfectly qualified candidates who simply don’t know how to structure their resume content to include keywords that applicant tracking systems look for.

2. How productive and efficient is your recruiter? Does your ATS really reduce any amount of unnecessary errands that s/he runs on a daily basis?

On a regular day, recruiters are scheduling interviews, checking the availability of the panel members, filling forms, collecting documents and all other insignificant chores that don’t need a skilled person or any person at all. A recruiter's real strengths should lie in building relationships with applicants. That's why you need a recruiter, isn't it? Or there wouldn't be a need for a recruiter at all.

Think of it this way, your recruiter has found a candidate who has aced all the assessments, s/he culturally fits in your company, has accepted to join your company; your recruiter even sends out the offer letter and while your recruiter is busy running mundane tasks for another open post, this candidate has taken up another job.

This wouldn't be the case if the recruiter could engage with every suitable candidate with intriguing, amazing, and refreshing facts and connect with them. There are so many ways the recruiter could be doing this; through social engagement, by sending videos, experiences of existing employees and so on. Your ATS doesn’t run these tasks, and hence your recruiter is not as efficient as s/he could be. Moreover, a candidate is not just a prospective employee; he is also your Brand Ambassador and a consumer.

3. What percentage of the entire hiring process does an ATS cover? It has loopholes that lets perfect candidates slip through the cracks. But, does that mean you manually recruit candidates?

We are not asking you to go back two decades where you go through a huge pile of resumes yourself and decide whom to call. Technology is evolving every hour and it pains us to reveal that the Human Resources department is the one that benefits last, when in fact, it should have been the first. Better employees make better work processes and hence the HR department should be the first to see the technological advancement. Today, there are technologies out there that can compensate for the ATS' drawbacks without tampering with the quality of candidates.

4. What sort of metrics does your ATS offer insights into? Channel and Recruiter performance? Do you know that you need a lot more than that to find better candidates? Apart from general metrics, an ATS can’t offer deeper insights into hiring such as time-to-hire, effectiveness of hiring methods, candidate drop-offs during the hiring process, etc., which are more critical to build a high performing workforce.

Modern Video Interviews tools can offer deeper insights into hiring metrics during the hiring process which are not currently tracked and are equally important if not more critical in business growth. These data points can be used to gauge the effectiveness of the hiring process, bottlenecks if any, efficiency of methods used and brand perception amongst candidates.

5. What part of your ATS addresses improvement of candidate experience?

Studies suggest that 97% of all satisfied candidates would refer others to the organization. That's a big number and that also means that you have a lot more candidates pooling into your hiring pipeline. We have heard several candidates make a joke of the hiring process, they call it the "black hole," a place from where you hear back nothing. It is quite valid, if you consider the time each candidate puts into travelling, waiting, starving, and more waiting; it is quite disturbing to not hear anything from the company.

Candidates look forward to a responsive hiring process - feedback about how the interview went or an e-mail informing them that they are not selected. Most ATSs do not perform these tasks. Informing candidates about the scheduled interview or reminding them to submit documents, etc.

6. Going by current trends, this is the most important one - is your ATS mobile- friendly?

By 2016, the number of smartphone users is deemed to surpass 2.16 billion. Moreover, that's just a forecast, the numbers could be much higher than that. That means, more candidates will have access to smartphones, more reason to reach out to candidates on the go. The Recruiter's life becomes much more comfortable if s/he can keep track of the candidate's acceptance or denial on a mobile device. Recruiters can update so many errands through the mobile. ATSs need to evolve along with the other technological advancements if it wants stay in the market, because, everyday there are so many new technologies evolving to make it possible for recruiters to lead a much simpler life.

Solutions?

A solution to this challenge is a next generation Hiring Management tool that puts candidates and recruiters at the center, where tracking & reporting are just functionalities and not the core. Think about it as a combination of a traditional ATS along with mobile interface, messaging & video capabilities, and automation techniques to make it more convenient for candidate and help recruiters enhance their productivity.

This technology should allow recruiters to automate all the chores and concentrate more on engaging the applicant and sourcing new, bright, talented candidates. This technology should provide candidates; the convenience and comfort to attend the hiring process from his/her smartphone. It should allow candidates and the company to know each other better, be in constant touch, have clarity of the outcome and provide feedback so that the engagement becomes enriching even if the candidate doesn't join the company. It doesn’t make sense to spend a few thousand dollars on five different platforms just to automate recruiting process. There are a few platforms out there that do all of this for you but how much money are you willing to spend on recruitment automation?

 

 

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, Recruitment Assessments, #TAWeek

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