Successful organizations that focus on attracting top talent and engaging employees know that regular discussion and planning should be devoted to their strategy for applicant tracking. There are many reasons that effective applicant management is important, but the reasons that will resonate with you will depend on the size, industry, culture and growth rate of your organization. ExactHire offers a variety of recruiting and hiring software solutions and can work with your organization to first define why applicant tracking is important to you, and then determine if our recruiting software application is a fit.

Make Human Resources Paperless With Hiring Software

If you are still feeling the pain of sorting incoming resumes into different email folders or storing paper applications and resumes you receive at job fairs, then you are a prime candidate for understanding what a dramatic impact taking your hiring process online would have on the productivity of your department and organization. Plus, think of all the trees you would save. Go green and give your email folders a rest with paperless HR.

Web-Based Access – Manage Applicants From Anywhere

Applicant tracking systems that work on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model allow recruiters and hiring managers to post jobs, view applicants and run reports from anywhere at any time of day. Especially for organizations with decentralized offices and staff members located across the map, this benefit is a significant factor. Applicants also appreciate the convenience of completing an employment application on their own schedule and from a location of their choosing.

Don’t Wait on IT to Post New Jobs

Are you frequently waiting for your IT department to have enough time to post your hot new job listings to your company site? With a branded careers portal included in your recruiting software package, you will have administrator rights to quickly add and modify job listings on your jobs page as often as you like. Take advantage of integrations between the applicant tracking portal and online job boards to post your positions to both free sites such as Indeed and SimplyHired to name just a few, and many paid sites.

Search Your Applicant Pool

By collecting employment applications electronically, you are compiling an ever-growing database of candidates. Search and filter your applicant pool to highlight candidates with specific experience, educational achievements and language fluency, and then invite them to apply for a newly posted position. Without an applicant tracking system that does instant searches of electronic applicant records, your recruiters might wait weeks or months before they compile a pool of qualified candidates for a new, tough-to-fill role.

Get New Job Openings Approved Quickly

In the absence of effective talent acquisition software, your hiring managers are probably completing a paper form and walking it from office to office to get manager signatures before HR has the go-ahead to post a job listing for a new opening. This means that your selection process is longer than necessary – even longer if your company has multiple locations. Many applicant tracking portals have a job requisition management feature that allows hiring managers to submit new requests online so that layers of executives may approve or decline the request within the web-based application, as well.

Boost Your Company’s Credibility

By leveraging technology in your hiring process, your company is much more likely to have a more consistent and credible appearance and be a positive recruitment brand in the minds of applicants. With customized pages that are branded to match the look and feel of your corporate site, applicants can learn about not only your available job openings, but also your organization’s benefits, office culture and FAQs. Making the application process easier makes an impact on candidates.

Automate the Applicant Screening Process

A standardized employment application ensures that applicants all answer the same required questions and provides a consistent layout to recruiters who screen applicant records. Hiring software portals allow employers the chance to ask applicants job-specific screening questions, and then to automatically score and/or disqualify applicants based on their responses to certain questions.

Restrict Access to Applicant Information at Various Levels

While many people usually touch the selection process in different organizations, it is probably rare that all stakeholders involved should have the same level of access to an applicant’s record. With applicant tracking software (ATS software), HR administrators are able to assign varying levels of access to applicant information via the use of restricted logins to ensure that sensitive data is not seen by hiring managers and others outside of the human resources department.

Automate Compliance Reporting Tasks & Create Custom Reports

If you have ever been audited by the EEOC or the OFCCP, then you know it is an exercise in pulling up a large quantity of detailed files over an extensive period of time. If all your files are in actual filing cabinets and email folders, then an audit can be tedious and maybe even nightmarish. However, if you utilize an applicant tracking system, you may use the reporting features to quickly pull candidate data and create applicant flow logs for affirmative action, EEOC compliance reports and other information required by state and federal agencies.

With ad hoc reporting capabilities, create specific reports that can be saved and run on demand in the future to analyze time-to-fill metrics, identify bottlenecks in the hiring process workflow, and export data to other HRIS applications.

Contact ExactHire to discuss what aspects of applicant tracking are most important to your organization, and how that may translate into specific feature requests as you implement a hiring software solution.

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