Applicant Tracking Software – are you looking at the bigger picture?

When looking at Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), Recruitment CRM, or Talent Management Platforms to select the most appropriate solution, it’s common that a typical recruitment tech selection process doesn’t include assessing how to unlock recruitment efficiencies continually. Here’s a summary of what typically happens and tips on what to look for.

Typical recruitment tech selection process

A typical recruitment technology selection process that happens when looking to buy and implement technology is often:

1. Problem identification. This might be ‘our current tech platform no longer meets our needs’, ‘we have no tech in place to solve our recruitment problems’ or a lack of confidence in how your existing recruitment tech can support company growth and future ambitions. 
2. Once you have identified the need and the vision, this tends to be shared with key stakeholders across the business, hiring managers, HR, compliance, etc. to build a list of features, aims and goals that the new tech will need to solve the identified issues. This then shapes the features list you are looking for to support your market research and identify potential vendors.
3. From this research, identify a shortlist of providers that can provide all or some of your requirements
4. You meet with the shortlist of vendors who demo their solutions and the shiny features and tech to woo you.

Supplier research, where you identify products that appear to have the features you need, is often where many get sidetracked by by features that might not all relate to your challenges and objectives but certainly look good.

Less frequently, a highly prescriptive demo is delivered by a vendor, where the potential customer has given specific scenarios that they want to see demonstrated. This is where you should be able to see precisely where relevant features can work for your organisation. This is an ideal opportunity to ask a vendor to amend or customise their ATS platform to show you how flexible the Applicant Tracking System can be to changing requirements.

The concept of change

The one area that is often overlooked when evaluating and implementing recruitment software is the ability to adapt to change. Change is inevitable, and if you want to continually unlock efficiencies and see ongoing improvements in the recruitment function, change needs to be embraced, yet it is something many buyers rarely look at during the decision-making process.

Change continually affects recruitment technology

There are many reasons why you may need your recruitment technology to change, adapt and evolve. Here are some examples:

• There’s a good chance you’ll need to change your processes in the future, or maybe respond to policy changes.
• Changes in the law might impact the information you collect from candidates and regulations on storing this information.
• A change of brand or EVP can impact simple changes such as a logo update or alterations to the careers site, but it could be more fundamental, requiring a greater depth of change.
• Economic changes that impact working practices.
• Candidate communications might require changes that impact your emails, notifications and text messages.
• You may have different stakeholders because of a merger or acquisition of a new company that requires a greater change in your business structure.
• A change in personnel responsible for Recruitment & Talent acquisition might have different goals and objectives.

Or you might have changed your mind about what you want and how you do things. After all, when you first set up an ATS or Talent Management Platform, the reality is it might not be exactly fit for purpose as you evaluate your recruitment results.

What does recruitment technology need to have to support change?

Recruitment technology needs to be agile, and Eploy suggests there are 3 critical pillars to an agile software solution:

1. Insightful - The recruitment solution needs to give you data and metrics to help identify where change can happen. Customising the data you can drill down into, to have exactly what you need and tracking the results of change, should always be the preferred choice to a standard set of reports with little or no customisation.
2. Adaptable – Most systems have some level of configurability when setting them up. But can it be adapted in a live environment without affecting your day-to-day operations? We are not talking templates, documents and emails, but how easy is it to change fundamental actions such as application journeys, recruitment workflows, or authorisation processes?
3. Does the applicant tracking software have a comprehensive set of APIs to evolve the system and link with other systems?

Recruitment technology needs to be empowering. For example, who can make the system changes required and is this instant? Is it a system user with permissions, or do changes need to be made by a vendor as a chargeable activity? Considerations such as this should form part of your recruitment tech selection process.

Key things to consider when evaluating ATS solutions

1. Think beyond just seeing a system demonstration and expand this into a workshop where you can see how that system can be adapted to your processes. Use the workshop to spend time with the vendor to work on this.
2. Ask a vendor to show you how the ATS can give you system insights - what the data looks like, what it tells you, and how it looks at data across the recruitment journey.
3. Ask how the system can be changed to adapt to a new process or challenge and question if such changes can be made by a user or require change control and vendor input. Then question how that change impacts future support from the provider.
4. Are system configurations hidden or coded so you can’t see them, or are they visible to view and understand?

Choosing the right recruitment software can positively impact your recruitment success. Getting the recruitment tech selection stage right and understanding how to unlock recruitment efficiencies continually will be future-proof for change.