Talent Acquisition is a core component of any business. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) has become an essential tool for streamlining the recruitment process and managing candidates’ data. However, despite these systems’ promising capabilities, many ATS platforms often fall short of meeting the expectations of modern Recruiters and HR Managers.
Let’s delve into some common deep reasons why your ATS may not be working well enough and explore potential enhancements to your recruitment process.
Firstly, What is an ATS?
An Applicant Tracking System is a software application designed to help companies manage their applicants’ funnel and hiring process. It also acts as a central database for collecting, storing, and organizing applicants’ information, making it easier for HR Managers and Recruiters to track and manage job applications throughout the hiring cycle.
ATS Functions
These functions usually include:
- Create and post job openings like adding the job title, requirements, skills, and other criteria you are looking for
- Interested job seekers can access the job post and apply through ATS (coming usually from Job boards that you need to integrate with your ATS).
- ATS collects and organizes all data of submitted applications and may rank them based on how well they match the prior criteria
- ATS filters and screens incoming applications and helps you shortlist applicants who meet the initial criteria
- It sends acknowledgments for received applications, updates on application status, and interview invitations, till the sending of job offers and onboarding new employees.
Now, What are the hidden problems of your ATS?
Integration Complexity
The first problem we stumbled upon while using ATS is the complexity of integration with other apps (like job boards, ERP systems, SAML technologies, and many others). Many companies rely on multiple tools for different aspects of their recruitment process, which can lead to incomplete data and inefficiencies. Integrating these tools into the ATS often becomes a challenging and time-consuming task.
Why is it considered complex and challenging? Firstly, each tool may use different data formats to store applicant information. Additionally, some tools may not have adequately documented APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) or may not be designed with easy integration in mind.
Furthermore, ATS integration requires usually real-time updates to keep applicant information consistent across all systems. Having real-time data sync can be challenging, especially when dealing with high data volumes.
Broken Integrations cause major user experience gaps, thus affecting the efficiency of the whole process.
Broken Integrations create chaos and affect collaboration. This can lead to missed opportunities, duplicate work, and random candidate experience.
If applicable, optimizing this is often a very time and money-consuming process, and it is always a continuous job of maintenance which cripplers any Talent Acquisition (TA) team.
Ironically, we found that many TA members tend to never use their ATS software due to its inefficiency!
Hefty Customization and Outdated User Experience
Another problem is the fact that ATS has limited flexibility and always needs advanced experience to customize it. Even usually, ATS may lack the flexibility to be customized to your organization’s unique preferences. In many ATS applications, customization options are usually limited, hindering your ability to tailor the system to match your specific workflows and processes.
Some ATS platforms suffer from outdated user interfaces (UI), old-fashioned user experiences (UX), and are too complicated to start with! Ironically these can be the most popular products in the market!
This does not only affect the productivity and engagement of recruiters but impacts the recruitment team’s ability to identify and connect with top talent as well.
A poor UX can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction among everyone participating in the hiring process.
A poor UX can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction among everyone in touch with the hiring process. This dissatisfaction may even extend beyond the ATS and impact overall team morale and job satisfaction within the hiring team!
Hard to Change and Maintain
Legacy designs and outdated technology are very common with ATS applications! it can introduce several challenges and limitations. Subsequently, it causes limited functionality and poor satisfaction resulting in a lack of deep adoption and an absence of features that are essential for modern recruitment processes. It can also impact the ability to leverage emerging tools, automation, and AI-driven solutions.
So, as technologies evolve, older ATS systems struggle to integrate seamlessly with newer tools, software, and platforms. This can lead to data inconsistencies, duplicate data entry, increased manual work, and reduced overall efficiency.
As businesses grow and recruitment needs increase, legacy ATS platforms may struggle to handle the expanding data and stuck in endless cycles of changing their legacy ATS.
The ongoing cost of maintaining an outdated technology can be more expensive than replacing it, especially if it requires special expertise for that.
Maintaining outdated technology can be expensive, especially if specialized knowledge is required for that. This can put a significant strain on the organization’s IT resources and budget.
Missing Key Metrics
The absence of essential metrics and analytics tools in ATS software can have a negative impact on a company’s ability to manage its recruitment process and data-driven decisions.
Key metrics provide valuable insights into the performance of the recruitment process. Without access to metrics such as time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, source of hire, and applicant conversion rates, companies cannot assess the effectiveness of their recruitment efforts.
Moreover, metrics help in identifying inefficiencies in the recruitment workflow. Without this information, it becomes challenging to pinpoint areas that require improvement and optimization.
Another problem is that metrics enable companies to compare their recruitment performance against industry benchmarks. Without benchmarking data, companies may struggle to analyze their competitiveness in the job market.
ATS Doesn’t Help With Employer Branding
Employer branding obviously plays a role in attracting top talents. It refers to the company’s reputation as an employer and the image it projects to potential candidates. An ATS that lacks the feature of showcasing employer branding can lead to several challenges
Those challenges include reduced attractiveness to candidates. Candidates are seeking more than just a job; they want to work for companies with strong values, and a positive work culture. Without the ability to showcase these aspects in the ATS, a company may appear less attractive to potential candidates.
Furthermore, the ability to stand out decreases. In a crowded job market, an organization’s USPs and value proposition are essential for differentiating it from other competitors. Candidates may not get a sense of the company’s culture, mission, and values, leading to decreased engagement and enthusiasm for the organization.
Moreover, employee referrals are a valuable source of high-quality candidates. A strong employer brand can motivate employees to refer qualified candidates to the organization. However, without the ability to produce positive employer branding, employees may be less likely to actively participate in the referral process.
How to Possibly Fix It?
Overcoming the limitations using the mentioned approaches can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your organization’s hiring process.
A Smarter Modern Technology
Firstly, by embracing modern technology. For example, using SupportFinity as your ATS technology, you can ensure that your hiring process is equipped with the latest intelligent features and functions.
Modern ATS platforms often come with enhanced UI/UX, better candidate management tools, and improved overall capabilities.
This allows Recruiters and Hiring Managers to navigate the system more easily and make better-informed decisions along the hiring process.
Use AI-based Hiring Platforms
Secondly, AI-based hiring platforms can revolutionize your candidate search. These new platforms use Artificial Intelligence and machine learning algorithms to match candidates to specific job requirements, therefore it reduces the time and effort spent on manually screening resumes one by one.
AI can also help identify potential candidates who might have been overlooked by traditional keyword-based ATS systems. This approach gives an unprecedented reach and smarter focus on the right candidates, thus, increasing the likelihood of finding the right candidates at the right time.
SupportFinity is the first AI-based hiring platform for candidate search with many other use-cases that use both its patented technology along with ChatGPT to provide an unmatchable experience. For example, users can easily generate job descriptions using AI for any jobs or projects as mentioned before along with other features that are embedded everywhere within the platform.
Avoid Heavy Integrations
By using an inclusive ATS that offers easy customization, seamless and simpler integration with other applications in your company’s tech stack, you can overcome this common limitation. This enables you to tailor the ATS to your specific hiring needs much quicker and integrate it with other tools such as payroll, or collaboration platforms more efficiently.
SupportFinity now helps you reduce expenses, time consumption, and effort lost on such kinds of integrations and customization. You can easily and simply start to customize and scale using the platform. Once you create your account, the platform will show you a careers page created automatically for you in seconds using AI, thus dramatically reducing your time to customize your careers and jobs portal. You can directly and easily choose it to be your main careers page through the website. It also comes with a free job board that reaches thousands of candidates saving you huge time and cost reaching the right prospects.
Find an All-In-One Experience
SupportFinity provides an enterprise-grade and all-in-one experience that can significantly improve the hiring process’s overall efficiency. It includes features like smart interview scheduling, video calls, AI job description generation, and many others. By having all these functions integrated into a single platform, recruiters and hiring managers can save time and effort that would otherwise be spent juggling multiple tools.
Furthermore, it enables companies to either find employees or contractors directly from their jobs and careers page. Offering a complete experience from talent scout to full hiring, this is the only platform in the world with such consolidated features.
Consolidated experience improves the process significantly and makes it more efficient. As well as save you the painful hassle of integrating other pieces of software into your infrastructure.
Conclusion
Applicant Tracking Systems have very deep – and usually unforeseen – limitations. To overcome these shortcomings, organizations can embrace modern technologies like SupportFinity to avoid such issues and benefit from the modern features of the AI era.
By implementing these strategies, organizations can create a more overall efficient and effective recruitment process from the early beginning till the very end.
With SupportFinity’s patented technology, hiring companies can revolutionize their recruitment process. Supportfinity is the only Applicant Tracking System with a built-in free job board with a matching engine that is connected to a global community. One application for everything hiring. Try it now for free from here.
