The Top Applicant Tracking System Features for End-To-End Hiring

These days, most applicant tracking system features extend beyond a resume filter solution and database. For example, helping to provide a positive candidate experience and streamline hiring processes at scale. With an array of features and integrations available, how do you know you’ve chosen the right system to support your entire hiring cycle, now and into the future?

Integrations Across the Entire Hiring Cycle

With the amount of time and research that goes into evaluating available ATS features, you’ll want to find a solution that meets all of your needs: from attracting talent to onboarding new hires. Most platforms offer integrated tools such as interview scheduling, skills testing, and video interviewing to create efficiencies throughout the hiring process.

Centralize Data:

After someone submits their resume and progresses through your hiring journey, you’ll need to maintain all their data in one place to prevent anything from getting lost. Having to maintain several hiring channels (spreadsheets, email, etc.) is not only tedious, but it’s also risky. Ensuring your data is protected is equally important.

Make sure you consider functionality around:

Candidate Management Process:

Once you’ve begun receiving applications, you want to keep the momentum going. Most systems offer automated resume screening to help keep things moving while introducing efficiencies.

Offer Stage:

ATS features should help facilitate decision-making and onboarding. Offer letter functionality means your team can track and store offer letter changes in the candidate profile. Most systems can also automate reference checks without the time or resources needed from your team.

Integration with your HRIS or payroll tools allows you to seamlessly transfer candidate profile data from your applicant tracking database and continue maintaining it now as employee data. Many automated hiring systems also allow you to begin onboarding candidates on the platform, including sending welcome letters and pre-start date information.

How Applicant Tracking Systems Drive Business Growth

Hiring initiatives and goals are never static. While your strategy might be focused on relationship management now, you may wish to focus on attracting top-of-funnel talent six months or even a year from now. You might be looking to scale hiring initiatives or address upcoming seasonal peaks.

Either way, your system’s features should be versatile to meet current and future needs.

Creating Scalability:

To scale hiring initiatives in the future, look for ATS features that use automation throughout the entire journey. Otherwise, you risk increasing your workload for specific tasks if your applicant volumes increase.

Driving Top-Of-Funnel Success:

Custom Careers Pages are an effective way to attract top talent. By using targeted messaging, you can capture the attention of those best suited for the role and aligned with your brand. Some custom careers pages can detect where viewers are located and then show those individuals the most relevant openings based on where they are.

Nurturing Candidate Relationships:

Saving talent pools means you can foster close relationships with candidates who are the right fit for your existing and future roles.

ATS features that facilitate candidate relationship management:

Ongoing Support and Training:

Does your automated hiring system come with a support team for users and applicants? Real-time assistance can address any questions or technical needs of candidates joining an interview.

Ongoing training is equally important because it ensures high user adoption. It also means that as hiring initiatives to expand across departments, all of your internal users are familiar with the platform and features.

System Customization

Rather than looking for an out-of-the-box solution, make sure the automated hiring system you choose can be tailored to mirror your existing workflows. Your hiring stages, approvals, and internal frameworks are unique to your organization and the system should be able to accommodate them so that you don’t have to change your entire hiring process to suit the technology.

Implementation:

It’s important to consider a system’s capabilities in relation to implementation and onboarding since getting these stages right will set your team up for success.

Here’s what you should be looking for in a system:

Workflow Customization:

When evaluating a platform’s automation, look for flexibility. There are several key hiring stages and aspects where you’ll want to customize your workflows and make modifications.

Reporting and Optimization:

Most automated hiring systems have reporting features built-in. However, your process isn’t the same as any other organization. Keep an eye out for tailored reporting that you can use to optimize your performance metrics and accelerate decision-making. Configurable dashboards give each team member and stakeholder the information they need, whether departmental performance, hidden trends among your talent pool, or overarching business drivers.

Make sure the platform provides custom reporting on your organization’s:

• Diversity and inclusion initiatives
• Year-over-year performance
• Job board performance
• Top candidate sources
• Time-to-interview
• Time-to-hire
• Cost per hire
• Open positions

Applicant Tracking System Requirements

When you submit your resume to a role posted online, the organization likely uses a system to ‘read’ your resume’s contents. This is referred to as “resume parsing” within an organization's automated resume screening process. To ensure your resume is compatible with their software, you should consider keeping your formatting simple and avoid images. For more on ATS requirements and what resume parsing means when applying online, look at our article “What’s an ATS-Friendly Resume and How Do You Make One?”

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