You know the old business adage “time is money?” This phrase is certainly true for the staffing industry, where every minute counts when it comes to sourcing, vetting, and hiring the best talent for your clients. Your goal is to find the right talent and to place them—before your competition does. These days, if you are still doing things the “old fashioned” way with spreadsheets and multiple systems, you may not be able to keep up with the demand, which means your business can’t grow and flourish. An ATS with key automated features can give your staffing business a great advantage.
There are many benefits to incorporating automation into your recruiting workflow, but speed is the most gratifying and, well, profitable. It’s basic math: the more time you spend on tasks, the longer it takes to find and place talent. It makes financial sense to accelerate your processes, and automation in your applicant tracking system will do just that. Spend less time doing all the manual and repetitive tasks and increase efficiency and profitability? It may sound too good to be true, but keep reading.
The Benefits of ATS Automation
Automation increases the speed of your recruiting operations because it reduces much of the human labor involved in the overall process. This translates to greater efficiency and will contribute to growth in your business. In addition to a speedier, streamlined process, automation in your ATS will deliver benefits in many other areas. Automation can help your business:
Place Talent Faster
ATS automation enables you to choose specific criteria and filters to quickly screen applicants based on qualifications, skills, and experience. This not only saves valuable time but also ensures that you’re focusing your efforts on the most promising candidates. You can also send out automated responses, so candidates feel valued and engaged during the recruitment process.
Enhance the Candidate Experience
Speaking of candidate experience, automation plays a crucial role in delivering a positive one from start to finish. From personalized communications to providing timely updates on application status, automation helps you maintain seamless communication with candidates, establishing a good impression of your company. This is especially important since candidate satisfaction with the job search experience has been low for years.
According to this article in Forbes, candidates feel very frustrated by a lack of communication and “employers regularly run the risk of losing a great candidate by ignoring the whole of the experience.” Automation can remedy these frustrations by aiding recruiters and employers in the important work of engagement and providing a good experience for candidates.
Improve Data Management
Manually tracking vast amounts of candidate data can be overwhelming. Automation streamlines data management by organizing applicant information, tracking progress at each stage of the hiring process, and generating insightful reports. This enables you to make data-driven decisions, identify areas for improvement, and optimize your recruitment strategies for better outcomes.
Increase Productivity
By automating repetitive tasks such as resume parsing, interview scheduling, and follow-up emails, your team can focus their time and energy on more valuable activities like building relationships with clients and engaging with more candidates. This boosts overall productivity and enables your staff to work more efficiently, ultimately leading to better results for your business.
Reduce the Chance of Human Error
We’re only human, and manual processes are prone to human errors. Why not avoid those errors if you can? Automation minimizes the risk of mistakes by executing tasks accurately and consistently according to rules and workflows that you establish, ensuring a higher level of reliability in your operations. You can still have that human touch but with more precise execution.
Top ATS Automated Features
You want to realize all these benefits and achieve the resulting growth in your business, but what automated ATS features will help you accomplish your goals? The following are key ATS automation features you can begin leveraging now to maximize the efficiency of your recruiting operations.
- Auto Sourcing and Candidate Matching: Automate and integrate email systems and popular communications tools (like text and chat) with your ATS to ensure you meet and engage with candidates on their preferred platform. Identify the right talent with the help of AI matching, which can quickly find and deliver candidates right to your dashboard.
- Resume Harvesting: Schedule the automatic downloading of the most relevant resumes for any time with configurable limits to help save time and manage costs.
- Automated Engagement: Improve communications workflows (and keep candidates happy) and enable recruiters to set reminders and easily see bounce and open rates.
- Interview Scheduling: Use automation to schedule interviews through email, text, calendar plug-ins, even chat bots, and sync and manage all the information across the company.
- eBoarding: Manage your entire onboarding process to one page to create a paperless and expedited process for candidates and recruiters
- Analytics & Reporting: Automated dashboards update in real time so you can track day-to-day growth and progress. Reporting automation also enables you to “subscribe” to critical reports and regularly receive the latest information in your inbox or in the platform.
Work Smarter and Grow With Automation
Looking ahead, ATS automation will become even more crucial to process than it currently is. Businesses that use automation in their recruitment process are working smarter, not harder, and are more efficient and productive than their competitors who do not use automated recruitment tools. Simply put, if you are not using automation, you are missing opportunity. Automation handles so many mundane and time-consuming tasks, freeing up recruiters to focus on the most important task: finding the right people for the right roles. Automation is essential for businesses to compete for top talent. Work smarter with automation to streamline your recruitment process, enhance candidate experiences, and drive better outcomes.