Applicant tracking systems or ATS is getting widely adopted by business organizations for executing their recruiting operations. Leading corporations are employing or developing their own ATS for optimizing the hiring process.
What is ATS?
An ATS or applicant tracking system is a tool that helps the recruiter to track a candidate during the recruitment process. Though it was originally developed for automating the candidate monitoring and management process during recruitment, new ATS now even possess advanced branding capabilities.
ATS can help recruiters to post a job, perse candidate resumes, review candidate applications, communicate with candidates, and more.
Candidates can use the applicant tracking software to review the job opportunities, apply to the open positions that match their education and experience, and communicate with the recruiting team. Facilities for interviewing candidates, notifications, reports, and alerts are also available for improved hiring in these software solutions.
Applicant tracking systems are incorporating new features or integrating with other recruiting or HR solutions or candidate management systems to offer a more comprehensive experience to the users. So, it can also be a great tool to resolve the challenges of high-volume hiring.
What is High Volume Hiring?
High volume hiring or recruiting refers to the process of filling out a large number of open positions in a short amount of time. Unlike the traditional recruitment process, the practice is highly time-sensitive. Mostly, recruiting contingent workers, seasonal influx of labor requirements, and some industries like aerospace, defense, technology, and financial services need to manage high volume hiring. The hiring professional has to manage hundreds and thousands of candidates and find quality talent quickly. So, with some simple customizations, adjustments, and features, ATS can be a great aid in handling high-volume hiring for these organizations. Because this software can screen and filter thousands of resumes in a couple of minutes and automate multiple hiring functions for faster execution.
What are the features that can aid in high-volume hiring
Easier Application Process
The applicant tracking portal or software must have an easy-to-access, seamless and intuitive UI that enables candidates to search, find and apply for the matching jobs faster. These will ensure a higher conversion rate and keep applicants more engaged. In high-volume hiring, it is preferable to keep the application process simpler. Also, fill-in suggestions from uploaded resumes and other predictions can help candidates to apply faster and prevent dropout rates. Some responsive ATS tools also allow candidates to apply just by sending text or keywords to a short-code from their phones.
Chatbots
There may be many qualified and potential candidates who are visiting the company website and job boards every day. But lack of proper engagement is preventing them from applying for an open position. There may be inadequate information available for them or they may fail to locate the appropriate job post. Here deploying a chatbot in the applicant tracking system or a recruiting solution can do wonders for the hiring process.
Chatbots are available round the clock with updated information on desktop or mobile. Recruiting chatbots will be able to answer candidate queries, provide information, guide them through the application process or other tasks, and most importantly, will engage these visitors. It will surely help to convert these visitors into interested candidates or applicants. High volume hiring will surge the number of queries posed by the candidates and visitors.
Chatbots will be able to successfully manage the increased number of queries. It will help candidates with simple tasks or provide them resolutions swiftly, leaving only the complex recruiting tasks for the human recruiters.
Career Sites
Before they are applying for a job, candidates prefer to research a company. Therefore, companies should create and maintain a career site with updated and accurate information. Career sites should put more importance on the candidate experience and must add rich content and visuals to carefully represent their brand through the career site. It will help multiply the conversion rate by offering a seamless experience to the candidates and attracting passive job seekers. These will help to fill out the open position with quality candidates faster in high-volume recruiting through an applicant tracking tool.
Resume Parsing
In high-volume hiring, often hundreds and thousands of candidates apply for a single open position. Though the talent pipeline available is amazing, it becomes extremely difficult for recruiters to parse through such a large volume of applicant resumes. Also, it will increase the time-to-fill to a position. So, instead of manually parsing the resumes, the automated parsing through an applicant tracking software can greatly accelerate the process.
Applicant tracking tools parse candidate resumes, analyze them, and extract the required information into a structured format creating a refined pipeline for the recruiter or hiring team.
Also, applicant tracking tool can sort and segment or categorize these resumes and applicant data for easier processing. It will enable recruiters to manage a larger volume of candidates quicker. After all the resumes are analyzed and uploaded to the system, recruiters can search for specific keywords or phrases to quickly identify the suitable candidates for a position Thus, long hours for comparing countless applications will be saved by an ATS, and the time-to-hire and time-to-fill for a recruit will be significantly reduced.
Holistic Applicant View
When dealing with large numbers of candidates and recruiting time is limited, it is essential that hiring professionals must be able to gain granular visibility into the applicants’ details and other recruiting actions. Furthermore, high-volume hiring for multiple positions involves tracking candidates simultaneously who are going through different stages of recruitment. Also, unorganized candidates are hard to assess. So, a comprehensive view of all candidates across all the open positions will provide the flexibility to carry out diverse responsibilities associated with managing a recruiting funnel.
Video Interviews
With job applicants residing a thousand miles apart, video interviews are nowadays an essential feature for recruiting candidates. In remote hiring, candidates, hiring managers, and interviewers can connect in real time or at their convenience through video conferencing. In high-volume hiring, candidate drop-offs are a challenge, but video interviewing and conferencing can keep candidates more engaged, preventing such trends. There are lower no-show rates in video interviews compared to in-person interviews. Both synchronous and asynchronous video communication have their own advantages and disadvantages.
Automation Capabilities
The workflow of high-volume recruiting is different from traditional hiring and definitely more intensive, as handling a large volume of data, tasks, and users are involved in a high-volume hiring process. Automating simple and repetitive tasks like sending emails in different stages of the hiring process can reduce the time and effort of the recruiters, and can accelerate the entire process. Organizations can automate manual data entries, document submissions, and other manual tasks through an ATS, and it can assist greatly in high-volume hiring.
Also, online scheduling tools for the interview, onboarding, etc. with sending automated bulk correspondence to candidates, like letters of acceptance, rejection, offer, and more can be performed through the applicant tracking software. Applicant tracking solutions must enable users to configure their workflows properly and must contain opportunities for customization, like personalizing messages for candidates for more efficient hiring.
Conclusion
So ATS can help its users to handle all the recruiting needs and challenges posed by the high-volume hiring, streamlining the end-to-end hiring process for an organization for saving time and expenses. Also, it highlights the recruiting trends and potential risks, involves in high-volume hiring, helping organizations obtain quality hires through an unbiased screening and selection process.
