Introduction
Recruitment is a time taking process and employers need to make it faster. Application Tracking Systems aka ATS have become a great tool to accelerate your hiring process. Equipped with a multitude of features, employing an ATS will allow you to hire the best talent by automating and streamlining the entire process.
ATS is a centralized tool for HR teams to track and manage each part of the application process right from candidate sourcing to evaluation and onboarding. They are mostly used by businesses having specialized needs and quite easy to use, not very expensive and require only a few HR employees for maintenance. Here’s how they work:
An ATS will generally have a portal (career site) with job openings with input forms where candidates can apply for the job. Once the form is filled, the ATS will do the resume parsing and screening as per the set attributes, and then send it to the recruitment team if it matches their requirement. Further, an ATS is integrated with a calendar that’ll automatically schedule interviews for qualified candidates.
As the candidate progresses through various stages of an interview, his/her resume, answers are all recorded in the system, which can be revisited and assessed by the recruiters, helping them to decide whether the candidate progresses to the next stage or didn’t make the cut. Everyone is notified at each stage via follow up mails sent automatically via the system.
After you have decided to offer the position to a suitable candidate, the ATS can also take care of offer letters and other documents via pre designed templates. Some are also equipped to do background checks and verify paperwork during the onboarding process.
In other words, ATS is more than just application tracking, it allows you to attract top talent, improves the candidate experience by regular follow ups and lets you hire candidates more quickly. Since you have everything stored digitally, you also have access to the data of qualified applicants who didn’t make the final cut, creating a talent pool that you can consider for future openings.
On top of that, it also builds your brand image on social networks. The analytics allow you to collect feedback, reduce your cost per hire and make recruitment teams much more efficient. For example, the analytics will help you filter out applicants who are better suited for other roles in your company, so your hiring team will have a place to start with when looking for the next potential hire instead of ground zero.
Now that you know of the immense benefits of using an ATS for your hiring process, let’s take a look at some of the features that you should look out for and top 8 ATS that you should go for in 2021.
Overview of Top 8 Applicant Tracking Systems
1. Zoho Recruit
Zoho Recruit is one of the best ATS out there that is designed for both staffing agencies and corporate hiring teams. It allows you to manage the recruitment process right from sourcing to hiring and also provides extensive reports and analytics to identify areas of improvement.
It improves your chances of getting quality hires by posting to multiple job boards such as Glassdoor, Monster, LinkedIn, etc. and the AI helps in filtering out resumes by assigning the applicants a skill score based on your must have and preferred skills. The automated workflows take care of tasks like sharing resumes with your team, sending mails and updating candidates about their application status, leading to reduced drop off rates via continuous candidate engagement.
Pricing: Zoho offers two plans for corporate HRs — Standard for ₹1250/recruiter/month and Enterprise: ₹2500/recruiter/month billed annually. It also offers a 15-day free trial period.
2. Workable
Workable is an affordable and advanced solution that is extremely easy to use for both beginners and pros alike, thanks to its powerful AI that guides you through the entire process and explains the impact of your actions.
You can easily create job ads with accurate descriptions using Workable’s suggestive features and 700+ templates that come with it. It can also create targeted social media campaigns by posting the ad to 200+ job sites and scan for online public profiles that best suit your requirements. Apart from one click interview scheduling and screening, it comes loaded with multiple templates for emails, descriptions, sample questions and offer letters that can be signed electronically, making onboarding a hassle free experience. Moreover, the data is converted into well designed reports that can make analysing identifying the trends faster and easier.
Pricing: Workable has four pricing tiers, of which, ‘Paygo’ meant for companies with occasional hiring needs costs $99 per job per month. The prices for other higher tiers are determined based on your needs and you’ll have to contact them to get your quote.
3. Smart Recruiters
Smart Recruiters known for its user interface is best suited for larger companies and is much more than a traditional ATS. This enterprise-grade talent acquisition suite has built-in functionalities such as screening assessments, mass actions, team collaboration and background checks to hire talent on-demand and under budget.
It helps you in optimizing advertising budgets, evaluating candidates and offers scheduled notifications for better communications, increasing the overall efficiency of your hiring process. Additionally, it has advanced filtering and an option to save search queries for future and builds a passive talent pipeline. It has a massive template library and integration with DocuSign and other HR systems. Further, Smart Recruiters enables its users to browse through hundreds of recruitment agencies whose services are already integrated into their platform making the sourcing candidates extremely fast.
Pricing: The pricing varies as per the number of employees and you’ll have to get in touch with them to get your quote.
4. Bullhorn
Bullhorn started as a platform for professionals to find work and now offers the best combination of an ATS and a Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) software. It’s mostly aimed at staffing agencies that hire candidates for external companies but works well for growing businesses as well.
The best part of Bullhorn is its robust and powerful email integration that allows you to view candidate information, parse resumes and schedule appointments from the email client itself. It is equipped with a relationship analytics feature that tracks your most responsive candidates and the best time to contact them. The healthy communication gives you an upper edge over your competitors and builds a community for you by constantly feeding candidate data on a regular basis. You can manage a large pool of candidates right from centralized job requisition to employee referrals all at one place.
Pricing: Bullhorn has four pricing tiers — Team, Corporate, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus which is determined by the number of people that want access to the system, you’ll have to request a pricing quote.
5. BambooHR
BambooHR is another great tool tailored for the needs of small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) that covers all aspects of the hiring process from data collecting to onboarding. The tool is intuitive, affordable and extremely easy to adopt thanks to its automated alerts, in-system messaging, templates for jobs and offer letters, and mobile app.
It is equipped with functions like time tracking and integrated with popular job boards and social media for quick hiring, there are further integrations for background checks. The collaborative features make resume sharing and reviewing much more efficient. The analytics help you identify bottlenecks in your hiring process to make it more convenient for candidates. Moreover, BambooHR goes beyond others to help you manage your employees and maximise their performance by giving you strategic insights.
Pricing: The pricing varies depending on the number of employees and your geographical location and is tailored to your requirements, you can get a free price quote here.
6. JazzHR
JazzHR is a highly customizable and powerful ATS targeting small businesses by allowing them to create a tailored solution as per their hiring needs. Its capabilities mostly lie in the recruiting process and it has loads of integrations with multiple platforms including LinkedIn, Salesforce, Monster, ZipRecruiter and HackerRank.
Like others, JazzHR also allows you to streamline different stages of the hiring process — candidate sourcing, employer branding, interviews and assessments, compliance and reporting as well as collaborative hiring. Some of its features include custom workflows, quick screening, task automation and built-in reporting capabilities to track your team and candidate’s progress. It also has a Marketplace where you can browse for multiple service providers to upgrade your HR tech stack.
Pricing: All of JazzHR’s plans have unlimited users and are divided in three tiers: Hero costs $39 per month, the most popular plan Plus costs $229 per month while the highest tier Pro is priced at $339 per month, all of them billed annually.
7. Greenhouse
Greenhouse is one of the best ATS when it comes to automating recruiting and hiring tasks and is meant for mid sized and growing companies. It boasts of a diverse partner ecosystem that allows its customers to use third party applications with no extra cost.
It comes loaded with features like multi-channel sourcing, structured hiring, scoreboards, scalable workflows, automated task workflows, customizable email templates, tons of integrations and a mobile app. While it mainly assists with planning and interviewing, it also has CRM and onboarding features to reduce the load on your HR team. The reports generated by Greenhouse are highly data driven and provide an in-depth analysis of sourcing, timing, pipeline and other performance parameters to improve your hiring process.
Pricing: Greenhouse has a three tiered pricing structure — Essential, Advanced and Expert, the prices vary as per your hiring needs, you can request a demo here.
8. Covey
Covey advertises itself as the world’s first collaborative sourcing CRM. This modern tool is not exactly an ATS, though it helps you in recruiting better by building good relations with top talent. It increased your productivity manifolds when it comes to sourcing candidates on LinkedIn, thanks to its automated follow ups and email integrations that allow you to maximize the number of candidates you can reach out to and get responses from.
Further, you can also engage your employees and gain insights across their network and manage prospect relationships on an ongoing basis to build your talent database. Covey also parses for skills for every sourced candidate in the CRM and matches them automatically when new roles open up. Overall, with Covey, you can leverage the full potential of human collaboration when it comes to sourcing and building a talent pipeline.
Pricing: As of now they don’t have any pricing tiers and only an option to request a demo.
A lot of companies have started relying on ATS to hire the best candidates and increase their overall hiring efficiency, and you should start using it too, if you aren’t using it already. We hope that the above list helps you in finding the right software for your business.
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