WHEN SHOULD A COMPANY START USING AN APPLICANT TRACKING SYSTEM (ATS)?

Think about what business tools are used in your company. Sales, marketing, finance, and operations all use different tools to varying degrees. When it comes to the Human Resources department, except for the Fortune 500 companies (98% of them use ATS), most still manage processes with Excel sheets and shared drives. In the past, Applicant Tracking Systems were thought to be necessary for large organizations only, but for a long time now, even small startups with just 10 employees have been using ATS. Let’s look at why companies use ATS, regardless of the number of employees or the volume of hiring!

1. Receiving CVs from Different Sources for a Single Job Posting and Wasting Time: In this challenging hiring period, we use different sources even for a single job ad. The broader our network, the higher the chances of getting good candidates. We publish the ad on various career sites and our career page. Many people share the ad through social networks and communication channels. Many CVs come in through email, phone, and different communication channels. Bringing all these together and managing them is a huge time waster.

With an Applicant Tracking System, you can publish your job ad in many different places (career page, LinkedIn, etc.) from a single channel. All applications are collected in one place. You avoid the time loss from posting separately in different places and the loss of CVs from different channels.

2. Designing a Career Site & Employer Branding: Whether it’s a newly established or corporate company, a career site is a must-have showcase from day one. It’s a page where people can get an idea about your company, feel what it’s like to work there, and see your open job positions. Creating and updating this page is often overlooked due to limited resources or because developers do not want to spend time on this area. The HR Department wants the career page to be as designed as soon as possible. This is where ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) come into play, allowing you to create your page and update it anytime, as you wish, without needing coding or a developer.

3. Better Quality Hiring: The hot topic lately is the decrease in the number of qualified applications. The main reasons are: job seekers sometimes apply without reading the ad due to easy application processes, or if the ad is not detailed enough, it can be misunderstood and lead to incorrect applications. Using an ATS ensures that applications are of higher quality. Because candidates go through a certain process and questions, they know what they are applying for. Additionally, with the filtering and pre-screening capabilities in Applicant Tracking Systems, there is no need to review all CVs. You can create your candidate pools and send mass emails to unsuitable candidates within seconds.

4. A Single Platform for HR Professionals or Founders: In Excel, you track candidates, processes, whom you interviewed, how the interview went, what their expectations were, why you didn’t get back to them, whether we contacted them or they applied to us. Do you expect all these details to be healthy in Excel? Maybe with data for 10-20 people, but afterward, processing the information there, tracking it, and ensuring the data is correct is unfortunately not possible. Whether you post a job ad or not (have open ads on your career site all the time), how does it sound to have a product where all applications flow, data is stored, anyone can access information independently of individuals, emails, and invitations are sent, and case studies are shared and received? There may not be active hiring right now, but even if we don’t hire, companies receive applications continuously, and our pool continues to fill. An ATS (Applicant Tracking System) is essential just for the tracking and management of this.

5. Coordinating and Making Sound Decisions: In processes carried out without ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems), whether it’s the HR team or just the Founding Partners managing the processes, you receive messages from everywhere, transmitting CVs, organizing schedules, delegating the process to someone else, involving different team members in the process, and seeing notes about the interview are in different places and different people. Even if the information is with you, how updated and healthy is it is debatable. When the whole process is conducted from a single system, a team member can leave, transfer the process to someone else, or if you want to see a note about the candidate, you can access everything with a single click. This allows us to make much more accurate and sound decisions about candidates.

6. Accessing All Data: There was a great candidate; where were they? In my email, on LinkedIn, or did someone send it via WhatsApp? A good recruitment process is not just about open positions. The potential candidates that recruiters call a “Talent Pool” are very important. An interview may have been conducted, and there’s a great candidate, but there may not be a role at that moment. It is crucial not to forget and lose these important candidates when the role is needed six months later. Advanced ATS options like HrPanda store all the data and allow you to quickly find the relevant candidate afterward.

A successful organization and corporate culture can only be built by a good team. The recruitment process, which brings that team together, should not be challenging or carry an operational burden for everyone working towards this goal. Every task done with pleasure yields healthy outputs. Whether for a company of 5 or 1,000 people, since there is a recruitment process in every company, we should facilitate and lighten this responsibility. The best tool for this is Applicant Tracking Systems.