5 Easy Steps to Hire Top Talent with an Applicant Tracking System

Are you trying to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and where you’re going wrong in your hiring process?

Hint: you’re probably not using an advanced applicant tracking system.

An applicant tracking system is undeniably one of the most unparalleled inventions in the history of recruitment. In today’s competitive business environment, you need top talent to deliver topnotch customer value and grow your company. And because of that, we’re seeing more and more employers relying heavily on applicant tracking systems to administrate their hiring process.

So if you’re striving hard to optimize and improve each piece of the hiring puzzle with an applicant tracking system, then here are 5 easy steps to help you get started. 

Step 1: Design an attractive career page that converts

The old rules of talent attraction no longer cut it anymore. Gone are the days when candidates would sit eagerly in lobbies clutching their resumes, hoping for a chance to impress the recruiter. And gone are the days when candidates would find job postings in newspapers.

Nowadays, it’s true when they say ‘’hiring is marketing’’. But the truth is, it doesn’t have to be done on prime time television to be great.

Instead, employers today can build and maintain a branded career page that doesn’t take up valuable developer time. Where you can quickly build a good-looking and professional site that’s connected to your applicant tracking system. And frankly, an ATS can make managing a career page as simple as uploading an image on Instagram.

Your career page drives top talent to apply, builds your employer brand, and becomes a resource for candidates to learn more about you. For example, with an applicant tracking system likes ours you can begin by customizing your page by uploading your own logo and favicon. Then, upload team testimonials and the perks and benefits. You can also customize the colors that represent your brand in each section.

Last but not least, the photo gallery. A gallery in your career page is best used for showing off company photos. Whether it’s the office space, group employee photos, or your products. They give your candidates a behind-the-scenes look at what it would be like to work with your company.

Step 2: Cross-post your jobs on a selection of job boards

Now that you designed a glossy career page, it’s time to post your awesome jobs on it. Job descriptions are marketing documents. When your job descriptions are well written and focus on the critical aspects of the job, they tend to lure in top candidates. Remember: just as recruiters can reject a candidate in 7 seconds, a candidate breezes through job postings and makes a judgement in few seconds too.

If you’re having a hard time determining the right skillsets and keywords for your job descriptions, don’t worry. You don’t need to second-guess the skillsets required for the job with an ATS. Our advanced applicant tracking system can seamlessly help you pinpoint the correct skills for every job. All you have to do is type in the job title, and the applicant tracking system will instantaneously provide you with the right keywords to use in your job description.

After that, it’s time to promote your jobs. Advertising your job to the right job boards is the second step in attracting and hiring top talent. Perhaps you don’t have enough time to research which job boards are the best for you. And that’s not a problem. Because with an applicant tracking system like EVA-REC you’ll get quick job board recommendations.

It’s only natural to feel a little lost when you’ve got thousands of job boards to choose from. And busy recruiters don’t have time to waste Googling and researching the best job boards. Some don’t even have time to take a lunch break!
On the bright side, an applicant tracking system can recommend the best job boards based on the job requirements. All you’ve got to do is simply select the region, channel type, job category, industry, and job title. Afterwards, you’ll instantly get a list of channels that meet your sourcing needs.

This way, you’ll make sure that you’re targeting the most effective job boards for your job role. And with a more focused approach, you’ll also reduce the administrative burden of manually searching for the most appropriate job boards and attract top talent with ease!

Step 3: Customize hiring pipelines to suit your needs

The role of an applicant tracking system isn’t about putting HR hurdles between you and the potential candidate. It’s about removing data entry out of processes and curing the admin headache. Especially when it comes to managing pipelines.

An ATS eliminates the outdated hiring habits of spreadsheets and replaces them with visual hiring pipelines that streamline the recruitment process. With these pipelines, you can automatically track candidates without the hassle. In simple words, each pipeline corresponds to one job. The applicant tracking system allows you to customize the stages at which candidates enter your pipeline such as “Sourced”, “Applied”, “Phone screen”, “Interview”, “Hired” and so on. This way, you’ll see at a glance where each candidate is, at any time.

Now, for the fun part. An ATS enables you to customize your hiring pipelines based on your hiring process. Perhaps you need two interview stages and one hiring team to collaborate with. No worries. With an applicant tracking system like EVA-REC you can add as many stages as you please, re-order them with a few drag-and-drops, and add any extra stage with the push of a button.

In addition, you can also customize the pipelines to fit the role you’re hiring for. Let’s suppose you’re hiring for a senior role and you’d like to include three stages and a video assessment. You can seamlessly integrate your applicant tracking system with video interviewing software like EVA-SSESS and send out questionnaires or video assessment interviews to any candidate, at any stage. The great news is, an ATS allows you to customize unlimited pipelines based on your own preferences! Less data entry means fewer chances of making mistakes, and more time to tackle other high-level tasks.

Step 4: Parse resumes with innovative filtration tools

There’s no denying that there are many recruiters out there who have endless resumes piling up on their desktops, emails, or other external sources. And they usually don’t have the time to filter through them all. Luckily, applicant tracking systems have resume parsers that save the day. Where they can parse a mass number of resumes in a scalable manner. To simply put it, they extract the candidates’ data from resumes and create a profile for each candidate.

Let’s take EVA-REC as an example, and let’s suppose you have 200 resumes on your desktop that are begging to be screened. Simply drag and drop these resumes into the resume matching system, and EVA-REC will automatically parse the resumes for you.

It also allows you to search for resumes by using specific keywords. With EVA-REC, you can choose keywords related to the job title, career level, country, industry, major or skills. You can also choose to either include or exclude these keywords from the filtration process. Then, the ATS will directly filter the resumes and show you at a glance the candidate profiles that meet your requirements!

Last but not least, EVA-REC can intelligently help you match these resumes to pre-existing job posts or job descriptions that you have. Not only does this resume parser help you save 80% of your time that would otherwise be spent on screening, but it also helps you find the perfect fit fast.

Step 5: Invite your teammates to support you

On average, how many emails, phone calls, or text messages do you exchange with your hiring team on a daily basis? Five? Twenty? Forty? And how much time does it eat away from your day? If your answer makes you cringe, it might be time to ramp up your team collaboration.

Whatever the case, it might be hard to centralize communication when you’re relying on multiple platforms to get your message across.

In a world that relies on instant-communication and quick feedback, an applicant tracking system helps you collaborate with your team under one tab only. Say goodbye to playing phone tag and the never-ending back-and-forth emails. Which are undeniably hard to manage and impossible to keep track of.

Whether you’re a team of four or a team of twelve, an applicant tracking system enables you to invite all your teammates to support you in the hiring process.

Perhaps you’ve got this hard-to-fill position and you finally found the right candidate. But, you still want to get your HR manager’s feedback and your colleague’s opinion. Simply edit their permissions on the system and give them the greenlight to leave their comments, ratings, feedback or evaluation. You can even engage in discussions that flow in real time, assign tasks, and invite them to manage the pipelines with you.

So why is this step necessary?

Collaborative hiring allows you to garner multiple points of view and foster a bias-free hiring process. Simply because you’re getting various perspectives which reduce the risk of poor recruitment decisions in the long-run. Also, collaborating with your team in an ATS reduces stress, enhances the process of hiring cultural fits, widely fine-tunes the candidate experience, and improves employee retention.

Wrapping up

Recruiter workloads are expected to increase in the coming years. Simply because year after year we’re witnessing a stronger competition for talent. And if you’re not leveraging an ATS in today’s digital age, it makes it even more challenging for you to win the war over talent.

With an applicant tracking system like EVA-REC you can say goodbye to giant filing cabinets filled with stacks and stacks of resumes. And say hello to centralized recruitment that enables you to kick start your hiring process the fast and easy way, with the push of a button.

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