Why Small Businesses Should Consider Using an Applicant Tracking System?

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Why Small Businesses Should Consider Using an Applicant Tracking System?

Why small businesses should consider using an applicant tracking system
HireME23 Dec 2022Share this

Small businesses have been trying to grow on par with large enterprises in many aspects to stand out in the competitive market and recruitment is one of the crucial aspects in this context. Hiring ideal candidates is a vital task for every organization because finding the right talent will eventually prove to be an asset for an organization. But the hiring process for small businesses has never been easy since hiring levels are changing constantly and these businesses are unable to cope with the current competition due to a lack of appropriate resources.

One of the major challenges in the recruitment process faced by small organizations is the use of traditional methods in the hiring process such as the use of spreadsheets, manual search for ideal candidates, and many more. This situation further results in other major challenges such as a prolonged hiring process, over-pressurized recruitment management, not being able to reach out to ideal candidates, losing ideal candidates to competitors, etc. This is why an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is all these small businesses need as their potential solution to break away from the barriers and challenges involved in the hiring process. A Recruitment Management System will undoubtedly provide innovative solutions to small businesses and offer smarter solutions for recruitment that they have been missing without one.

Applicant Tracking System (ATS): An Appropriate Solution for Smart Recruitment Levels

All of these challenges demand the implementation of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) in small businesses to overcome the troublesome situation and create an organized hiring process. The ever-changing competitive market is constantly pushing small businesses to adopt new methods for reaching out to ideal candidates because bringing in dedicated employees will enhance an organization’s productivity and growth. This is why losing the ideal candidates to competitors is neither affordable nor desirable for small businesses.

According to a survey by IBM, 60% of talent acquisition leaders have “a strong emphasis on increasing automation over the next 12 months”. This increasing automation will be largely supplemented by the use of a Recruitment Management System for witnessing smart recruitment levels. An Applicant Tracking System is a perfect solution for streamlining the recruitment process within small businesses and creating a proactive recruitment strategy easing the crucial tasks for recruitment professionals in their search for perfect talent for their organizations.

Now let us carefully understand what an ATS is and how exactly it can be beneficial in overcoming recruitment challenges in small businesses.

What is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)?

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a recruitment-based software that manages the entire end-to-end hiring process starting from recommending the ideal candidates to efficiently automating recruiting and staffing efforts for streamlining the hiring process and filling up vacant positions faster in your organization. An ATS assists recruiting professionals to reach out to job seekers, especially active ones, help them post job vacancies, schedule interviews, get valuable insights, make data-driven decisions, send automated emails, activate notifications, etc. Moreover, with Recruitment Management Software, you can manage the broad spectrum of recruitment in one place.

Sounds amazing, right? Try an ATS to improve recruitment management in small businesses and experience the difference.

How the Recruitment Management System in small businesses can be empowered with an ATS?

There is a common misconception regarding the usage and implementation of an Applicant Tracking System in small businesses. An ATS is often considered suitable for large and medium-sized businesses. But this is not a fact. There are a number of ways small businesses can be benefitted from a Recruitment Management System.

An ATS usually comes with superior features, subscription plans, and multiple payment options so that anyone either a small or large organization can afford it. Being a small business, you might be skeptical about investing in Recruitment Management Software but honestly speaking this investment will save you extra costs on hiring levels in the long run. With an ATS, you can get a unified source of truth for storing essential information regarding potential candidates and their profiles. This reduces the chance of losing qualified candidates for your organization and you can also send them automated emails regarding your vacant positions. An ATS makes it easier to keep a track of ideal candidates and fulfill the vacant positions in your organization as early as possible.

Undoubtedly, you will find a number of candidates applying to your job position but it is quite difficult to understand who will be the perfect fit. This is where you can use an ATS and format their resumes so that they are easy to read and identify those candidates with suitable skills as well as experience. You can then approach those candidates by sending customized emails.

A Recruitment Management System will save your cost on extra staffing since you don’t need to hire a recruitment consultancy or staffing firm separately for the hiring process. You just need a system to organize the recruitment process for your business and let get the process of hiring done promptly. This will be only possible with an ATS rather than doing it manually. An ATS allows you to post and publish job vacancies on various job portals and sites and scrutinize candidates by their education, skills, experience, availability, etc. You can then send automated emails to those candidates matching your requirements and let them know about your job position. This will save you time from alerting the candidates with follow-up calls regarding the entire procedure of onboarding them.

Moreover, ATS can monitor and highlight the appropriate candidates who stand out from others matching your job requirements. This will ensure a complete proactive recruiter and candidate engagement.

This is why, it can be said that small businesses require ATS as much as large businesses for increasing efficiency, controlling costs, and streamlining the entire recruitment process overcoming the recruitment challenges. Applicant Tracking System (ATS) for small businesses is indeed empowering, especially for the ones directly involved in the hiring process such as hiring managers, recruiters, decision makers, candidates, interviewers, human resources, etc.

Major Benefits of using ATS for Small Businesses

Using an ATS for recruitment can bring overwhelming benefits for small businesses in terms of better effectiveness, cost reduction, saving time, and lots more. When most of the crucial tasks in the recruitment process get automated with an ATS, it becomes much easier for an organization to streamline the hiring process, onboard qualified employees as early as possible, and look after other factors affecting the growth of their organization. Let us discuss the ATS benefits one by one to understand how small businesses can effectively gain from using one.

  1. An ATS streamlines the recruitment process by automating vital yet repetitive and time-consuming tasks like formatting resume, screening ideal candidates, applying filters to search for candidates with matching skills, and eventually completing the entire process quickly by bringing in qualified candidates. This ultimately helps the recruitment departments as well as organizations to focus on other important tasks such as planning new developments, taking up new projects, conducting interviews faster, and developing efficient collaboration, especially with new employees that will make them understand the organization better and faster. A faster recruitment process with ideal candidates will undoubtedly increase operational efficiencies within small businesses that will help them grow faster, make better use of resources in the market, and achieve their goals in much lesser time.
  2. An ATS can easily eliminate the factors influencing the bad and poor hiring process in small businesses because small businesses often had to juggle while hiring for multiple positions at the same time. An ATS can provide you with all the recruitment essentials such as candidates’ profiles, resumes, matching skills, sending automated emails, interviews scheduling, managing job postings, and advertisements, etc. In one place. Hence, if you are using an ATS you don’t need to do the paperwork manually and can conduct a fair and faster-hiring process with accurate results.
  3. When you are using an ATS for the hiring process you can come across suitable candidates from all the popular job portals. You can hire candidates without investing in extra staffing or multiple job boards. This is a huge plus point of using an ATS and also saving extra costs. With a 100% customizable Recruitment Management System like HireME, you can automate job postings, track critical data points related to specific recruitment teams, and tailor all your unique business requirements. With an ATS you don’t need to pay for any recruitment consultancy or job boards, you will pay only for the ATS. HireME can be used by businesses of all sizes to reduce costs and increase productivity.
  4. An ATS helps you to manage a talent database of candidates efficiently. While searching for the ideal candidate for the job role in your organization you can across a number of profiles applying for the job who might be qualified but are apparently not the perfect fit. By using an ATS you can save these exceptional profiles for a different later role without losing them in the first place. Talent pool management with the help of an ATS is gaining huge popularity in the hiring process which will ultimately increase your ROI.
  5. Also, an ATS can reduce the overall cost per hire. With An ATS you can track which job portal or site is providing you with the most appropriate candidates without letting you spend huge amounts on multiple job boards. It monitors employee performance and engagement in real-time upholding employee retention rates higher. This significantly eliminates the constant search for replacements that always hampers the hiring budget for organizations, especially smaller ones.

Effectiveness of ATS: Case Scenarios

The functionality of an ATS, in reality, is more than you think. According to a survey by Livemint, 53% of talent acquisition professionals in India were using Applicant Tracking Systems as of 2017. Also, another study by Markets and Markets states that the Applicant Tracking System market is expected to reach USD 3.2 billion by the year 2026 from USD 2.3 in 2021. This implies that the demand will only increase with time in the future and if your business is not using one it is high time to rethink and start using one to ease the recruitment procedure and facilitate collaborative hiring effectively.

Here are a few case scenarios of small businesses where the intervention of an ATS can prove to be immensely advantageous.

  • A local restaurant looking to hire new waitstaff and chefs.
  • A small retail shop looking to hire sales associates and cashiers.
  • A small consulting firm looking to hire new consultants and project managers.
  • A small accounting firm looking to hire new accountants and bookkeepers.
  • A small tech startup looking to hire software developers and designers.
  • A hospital or a health center is looking for nurses, administrators, accountants, or other staff.

The above examples don’t mention mass hiring but indicate essential as well as immediate hiring because without a chef a restaurant can’t update its menu or even continue with the existing menu. In the same way, a small consulting firm or a startup can’t grow without the contribution and effective skills of project managers and designers. These small businesses will be affected without the concerned persons and also with a delayed hiring process. But the use of an ATS can efficiently solve all their problems and ensure cost-effectively hiring within the organizations. This is why an ATS is a mandatory tool for the hiring process.

Let us understand the usability of an ATS in more detail with its use cases. Here are some of the major use cases of an ATS,

  • Posting job listings on various job boards and career websites
  • Collecting and organizing job applications and resumes
  • Screening and filtering job applications based on pre-defined criteria
  • Scheduling and coordinating interviews with candidates
  • Communicating with candidates and providing feedback on their application status
  • Generating reports and analytics on the recruitment process and the performance of the hiring team.

Applicant Tracking System: Decoding the Truth and Busting the Myths

An ATS is indeed a brilliant tool for managing the hiring process and freeing up hiring professionals from repetitive tasks. But unfortunately, there are still some common misconceptions, in fact, myths about Recruitment Management Systems. The myths revolve around a lack of understanding of the system, insufficient knowledge, and also a skeptical attitude regarding its usability.

Here we will be discussing more on an ATS and debunk all the common myths with potential facts.

  • Myth #1 ATS is only for large enterprises and does not implement small businesses

Well, this is a common myth that is often encountered by all ATS service providers in the market. But this a nothing just a misconception culminated by insufficient information about the system. The fact is that whether big or small every business can be benefitted from an ATS because it serves the purposes of easing the recruitment cycle, improving scalability in businesses, and empowering businesses in managing candidates efficiently. Like large enterprises, small businesses too can gain from getting ideal candidates, simplified efforts for sorting out suitable candidates, automation of repetitive tasks, detailed analytics, etc.

A high-quality ATS like HireME can be used by businesses of all sizes and ensure 98% accurate hiring of perfect talent with its AI-based managing operations.

  • Myth#2 ATS is not affordable or too expensive for small businesses

Small businesses are often faced with problems in managing their budget and capitalizing their business. Unlike large firms, they are often skeptical about adopting new services due to their tight budget plans and insufficient resources to accommodate new services. But the advantageous side of using an ATS involves paying for the recruitment software only. While you have an ATS, you don’t need to invest in other recruitment consultancies or agencies to bring ideal candidates for your organization. An ATS will serve all your recruitment purposes in one platform saving you all extra costs. Moreover, these Recruitment Management Systems come with different subscription plans and payment methods. So, you are free to choose any plan and pay for an ATS at your convenience.

  • Myth#3 ATS is designed only for recruiters

Well, an ATS will definitely directly benefit recruiters because they are the ones dealing with and managing the recruitment process in an organization. But the use of an ATS will not only help the recruiters but also the business as a whole because when the recruitment process will be streamlined, employees can join and fill up the vacant positions in an organization much faster. A delayed recruitment process affects the workflow of an organization, especially smaller ones because they are only a few employees working in specific departments, and a lengthy hiring process results in loss of ideal candidates and other significant losses. So, this is what an ATS can solve in one go. Also, anyone can track and keep an eye on potential candidates with the help of an ATS.

  • Myth#4 Implementing an ATS in small businesses is a time-consuming method

Well, most small businesses are of the view that implementing an ATS will take a lot of time and they won’t be able to handle it. But a good ATS, for example, HireME comes with easy setup configurations and offers a user-friendly interface where you can post jobs, interview candidates, and manage the entire recruitment cycle in one platform with accelerated hiring insights. HireME also consists of a dashboard that keeps the hiring process organized. This is why implementing an ATS will not waste your valuable time but rather streamline the hiring process for you in a cost-effective manner.

  • Myth#5 An ATS will replace human employees from their jobs

Just because recruitment software will automate crucial tasks in the hiring process, it does not mean it will replace humans. In fact, without human intervention, none of the automation technicalities can take place. An ATS is for helping human employees by automating repetitive tasks but bots cannot be programmed with proper instructions without intelligent human interference. This is why it cannot be justified that an ATS will take up the jobs of human employees.

When human employees can be free from crucial yet repetitive tasks like giving follow-up calls to candidates, sending emails, etc., they can focus on the other essential aspects of the recruitment process.

Final Thoughts

An ATS can indeed act as a blessing for small businesses and streamline their recruitment process like never before. With an ATS you manage job postings in multiple portals and sites, filter profiles of ideal candidates, format their resumes, create a collaborative candidate experience, provide feedback, gather valuable insights about the performance of the hiring teams, and many more. Not to mention, small businesses require an effective Recruitment Management system as much as large business firms to overcome recruitment challenges because it is the employees who will be contributing to an organization with their skills and keep everything in place. As small businesses grow, the employees also grow with them. This is why an ATS has a vital role to play in selecting the ideal candidates for different job roles.

So, if you are a small business and not using a good ATS to manage your job pipeline, it is high time you start using one like HireME. With a new-age recruitment software like HireME you experience 4X productivity in your organization and 5X better interview process, applicant management system, and proactive candidate engagement. So, get started with HireME today and experience a revolution in recruitment management like never before.