Choosing the best ATS for your business can be a challenge, especially given the wide range of options on the market. In this post, we’ll help you figure out how to pick the best ATS for you.
What is an Applicant Tracking System
According to Intrado Global News Wire, the global Applicant Tracking System, or ATS market is expected to grow by $ 138.06 mn during 2021-2025. And it's no wonder these products are in such demand, hiring in 2021 is almost impossible without them.
An ATS is a tool that enables you to streamline and automate parts of your recruiting process. For example, an ATS can rate the resumes you CV, and only mark the best ones to be reviewed by a human recruiter, saving your HR team the hassle of reviewing each resume individually.
Key Components of a Great ATS
While every ATS tool has its own value proposition, there are some essential functions that are absolute “must-haves” no matter what kind of business you do. The best ATS tools allow you to do much more than just “track applicants.” When looking at Applicant Tracking System reviews, keep an eye out for the following.
At minimum, a great ATS will:
- Allow you to create a branded recruitment portal. This feature helps candidates to feel as though they are dealing directly with the company, rather than applying through a middleman
- Create custom questionnaires for each role and allow you to use screening questions and skill tests. Data collected in this way is critical for informing the final hiring decision.
- Have advanced sorting functions to create shortlists of candidates, no matter if these candidates were sourced from the ATS or elsewhere.
- Include analytics features so you measure the performance of your recruiting process.
Integration Into Your Business
When choosing which ATS to integrate in your business, you’ll first want to assess your own needs, and especially what pain points you have in your current recruiting process. If you choose an ATS that specializes in something you already do well, it will be less of a value add.
The things you’ll want to think about when it comes to integration are company size, turnover, industry, whether you want an online applicant tracking system or software that needs to be installed, and budget. An enterprise-size corporation is going to have very different recruitment needs than a small business or startup. A small company may only fill 2 or 3 vacancies in a year, whereas a large organization may need to fill thousands.
Budget is important too and tends to track the amount of data the ATS will need to handle. You don’t want to shell out the big bucks for processing power that you won’t need. Be sure that whichever option you choose, you are getting a good amount of value for money.
Candidate Monitoring
Another key feature of any ATS is candidate monitoring. Candidate monitoring allows you to see where every candidate is in each step of recruiting the process, which means you get an overview of your whole recruiting process at a glance.
Applicant Tracking System Examples
Let’s take a look at some of the top ATS systems on the market. If you work in recruiting, you’ve almost certainly run across some of these programs before.
Oracle Taleo
Oracle Taleo is a cloud-based ATS from tech giant Oracle. It offers solutions not only for recruiting but also for retention and development. Taleo is a general-purpose ATS that does not specialize in a specific niche.
Best features:
- Easy data management
- Note taking feature
- Allows you to easily track email interactions with candidates
- Real-time record updates
- Well rounded reporting and management mechanisms.
IBM Kenexa Brass Ring
IBM Kenexa BrassRing is another major player in the field. This cloud-based ATS system uses behavioral marketing to attract and engage applicants. BrassRing offers a wide variety of recruitment features to manage your whole recruiting process.
Best features:
- Access to multiple talent databases
- Effective assessments
- Uses IBM Watson analytics and can thus find the best-fit quickly (but this computing power can be expensive)
- Specializes in social media-based recruiting
Bullhorn
Bullhorn is an ATS designed specifically for staffing agencies, and also has a CRM offering for sales.
Best features:
- Easy data management and access
- Can add notes to candidate scorecards
- Easy tracking of all email interaction with any specific candidate
- In-system access to LinkedIn records
Jobvite
Jobvite candidate experience focused ATS with an emphasis on social recruiting. They also have a mobile app. The program provides specific features for interviews and referrals. This ATS is optimized for mid to large-size businesses.
Best features:
- Easy referrals
- Interview-based candidate ranking
- User-friendly mobile app
- Smart Scheduler feature
- all conversations with a specific candidate kept in a single record
- Top-notch search function
Employa
Employa is a smart recruiting assistant that provides Recruitment-as-a-Service solutions that streamline your hiring process. Empolya specializes in IT recruitment and leverages machine learning to bring you the best talent. It’s the ideal applicant tracking software for small businesses.
Best features:
- AI verification of applicant CV
- Automated screening questions
- Buzzword detection
- Customizable red flag settings
- Cross-platform candidate searching
- Cross checks applicant information with external databases
- Custom applicant tracking system allows you to track your recruiting process all in one place
- Can be used as a tool to integrate with your existing ATS, or a full-service recruitment agency.
These are some of the best-known ATSs in the market. However, there are many more great options of HR software to choose from. Check out this article for a complete list of the best resume screening software in 2022.
Trust But Verify
Most ATS are designed to rate applicants only on the basis of the information in the CV. However, recent advances in machine learning technology have enabled new ATS, like Employa, to go beyond simple CV parsing and read between the lines. This distinguishes it from the tools on our applicant tracking systems list.
All applicants embellish their experience a little on applications, which is to be expected — the whole idea is to market themselves. Some however, go beyond standard self-promotion and lie in the hopes of getting a job for which they are not qualified. Employee automatically cross-checks an applicant's CV with external databases, to determine if the applicant has indeed been truthful.
Not only that, but Employa can also check for buzzwords that suggest the applicant may be exaggerating (eg. skill overflow) or being deliberately vague about their past roles. When Employa detects this kind of language, it raises a red flag.
Sometimes, the situation is reversed, an applicant may be a very talented coder but a poor writer. Employa also detects when a candidate may be better qualified than his or her resume suggests at first glance.