9 Reasons Why You Need an ATS for Your Startup

An applicant tracking system, popularly known as an ATS, is nothing new in the hiring space. Indeed, it has re-engineered the way a recruiting team works, eliminating menial tasks while nurturing relationships with candidates. 

To your surprise, presently employ ATS solutions. But don’t worry; startups and SMBs can leverage the same benefits, plus some unique ones while integrating a reliable applicant tracking system. 

Trust us, a good Applicant Tracking System or ATS is needed for your business to scale and grow.

We know, we know! You probably heard a zillion times why having an ATS is essential. Though, there certainly is a good reason for that – 9 to be true! 

💡 You can read our detailed guide to applicant tracking systems for recruiters and understand all the ins and outs of an ATS. 

In the meantime, let us explain why you should use an ATS for these nine reasons. 

9 reasons your startup should be using an ATS

ATS saves both – “Money and Time.”

Investing in an ATS can pave the way to tremendous cost savings. 

After all, for a startup, time is money, especially when it comes to the expensive process of hiring, recruiting and onboarding employees. Hiring costs, and it can take weeks. But, companies have reported eliminating weeks-long processes by 20% with an ATS.

Fortunately, an ATS makes hiring a cost-intensive process – from advertising to recruiter costs to in-house shortlisting and candidate screening, training costs etc. A faster hiring process means fewer empty seats, maximised productivity and, eventually, a successful business!  

An ATS allows you to attract top talent who will likely be more involved in their roles. Besides, you have better employee retention, which simultaneously ensures better productivity outcomes and minimises the losses related to new hires. 

An easily available talent pool 

Rather than slogging through one or multiple flooded email inboxes and arguing over late replies and buried emails, it’s high time to put an ATS to work! 

You can store candidate databases anywhere, like spreadsheets, emails or papers. Though, spreadsheets and email will be daunting to manage in the long run as your business starts accepting more candidates. The database is probably prone to errors as these approaches need exclusive manual entry. 

Often, the staff within a startup or an SMB multitask and manage different types of data, which usually is challenging to handle with a growing business and the scope of work increases. Instead, use your ATS to store and manage candidates’ information in one place. The applicant tracking system keeps track of all the interactions between recruiters and prospective leads. Thus, creating a great talent pool.

“No more manually duplicating entries and inputting data”. 

Seamless Cooperation

There’s no doubt managing a small team has its pros and cons. While you have access to potentially lesser hassle when communicating with your team, the fact that almost everyone will multitask and handling behemoth data can be a real challenge. 

Here, an ATS solution can allow your team to: 

💡 Add your accessible unified database with collaboration features paving the way towards a seamless teamwork experience. 

A better candidate experience 

Candidate experience is an unskippable element in the recruitment process as it influences their decision to apply for the respective job opening and move ahead or not. 

To your rescue, an applicant tracking system delivers a more organised and better experience to the candidate journey. Here’s how! 

For example, an ATS allows convenient and continuous communication with the candidates throughout the recruitment process, enhancing their experience. Another feather in the hat is that you can create a customised experience with automated email templates. 

Comprehensive analysis and reports 

An ATS is a must-have tool to hire the best candidates. 

A complete ATS should allow you to track all the crucial data for constant improvement. Usually, these KPIs tell you about hiring metrics that can significantly impact the business, like time to hire, hiring quality and many more. 

A trusted ATS offers comprehensive reports and insights that can be easily exported in merely one click. Besides, having an in-depth understanding will be beneficial to alter the hiring approaches as needed depending on data-driven facts. 

Accelerate Hiring Decisions 

Talented and skilled candidates have a lot of options. And, with the right talent, you can put your business at a significant advantage if you contact candidates faster than your competitors- an ATS with built-in messaging and evaluation tools can quickly help you do that. 

A study by CareerPlug found that 30% of job seekers ranked responsiveness as their priority after initially applying for the job when it funnels to candidate experience. So remember, candidates look for prompt and clear communication as they evaluate their interest in a position. 

Expert’s Tip: Build relationships with top talent quickly by creating an unparalleled candidate experience throughout the hiring process. 

Host an attractive career page 

Often, it’s noticed that company career pages are under-utilised, but on the contrary, they are high-quality and a source of applicants. Also, we observed that an applicant who had applied from a company careers page was 23 times more likely to be hired than a candidate from a job board. 

So, a good ATS offers you the ability to create an attractive careers page for good reasons: 

Automation 

An ATS automates your organisation’s recruitment process, from using the algorithms to finding candidates’ profiles matching the administrative to-do tasks. As a result, you or your team no longer need to interact with applications manually. 

An ATS ensures a friction-free hiring process

Furthermore, an applicant tracking system minimises administrative burdens, like job ad posting, creating social media content, and sending emails to candidates; all these tasks take a lot of time. 

An ATS comes into the big picture by automatically scheduling interviews, sending rejection emails, and the list goes on. 

Job Management 

Last but not least! 

Manually screening through heaps of resumes in every hiring season is overwhelming for recruiters and businesses. Thankfully, the applicant tracking system is here to help.

An ATS helps recruiters to manage the position seamlessly so that the best candidate will no longer fall between the cracks of their wearied selves. 

Notably, the ATS software allows for collaborative hiring. This means HR teams can quickly take notes on every candidate and make a collective decision by keeping each recruiter’s say. 

Simply put, this ATS feature helps assemble a diverse and more successful team. 

The hiring quality improves as recruiters have more time to collect information about each candidate. This way, they have ample time to assess every candidate before making a hiring decision. 

Over to you… 

But remember, an applicant tracking system is the right tool to help you save time, attract more qualified candidates, and make the right hire; in simpler terms, it helps your startup grow exceptionally. 

After all, you want the best minds working for you, and an ATS helps you focus on hiring them. 

Good luck!