The primary benefit of an applicant tracking system is that it increases the efficiency of your talent acquisition team through streamlined, automated workflows. These tools can also be quite impactful: 94% of recruiters believe using applicant tracking software has positively impacted their company's hiring processes.

Other benefits include improved employer branding, access to detailed analytics, and seamless engagement of managers and employees outside of HR and TA teams.

• Customized workflows: An ATS system that can customize and automate tasks like application processing, screening, and collecting feedback can dramatically improve hiring efficiency. This benefit is especially significant to organizations hiring from very different candidate pools. If, for example, your team is hiring both truck drivers and software engineers, you can bet these workflows won’t be interchangeable.
• ‍Improved employer branding: Candidate tracking systems will help your organization create and manage a custom career site, helping your company stand out. Showcasing your best features will make it easier to attract top talent. With integrations to networks like LinkedIn, reaching a wide audience is easy.‍
• Better quality talent pools: The best ATS software can save time and money by maintaining already-sourced candidates. If you maintain occasional contact with a pool of qualified candidates, your recruiting process doesn’t start from zero each time you open a new role.‍
• Wider internal engagement: Rather than relying exclusively on your HR or TA teams for recruiting, the best ATS software will also involve your hiring managers and employees as part of the process. Employee referrals, feedback on job candidates, and social media can all be leveraged to fill open positions.‍
• Streamlined hiring and onboarding: An ATS can do more than streamline recruiting; it can work wonders for onboarding. A good first impression sets the stage for employee engagement and, ultimately, retention, so it’s critical to make the onboarding process employee-focused, timely, and effective.‍‍
• More effective recruitment strategies: An effective hiring process is data-driven. Any good ATS software dashboard will put recruiter productivity, cost per hire, cost of job boards, cost of paid media, time to hire, and other key data at your fingertips.

The primary benefit of an applicant tracking system is that it increases the efficiency of your talent acquisition team through streamlined, automated workflows. These tools can also be quite impactful: 94% of recruiters believe using applicant tracking software has positively impacted their company's hiring processes.

Other benefits include improved employer branding, access to detailed analytics, and seamless engagement of managers and employees outside of HR and TA teams.

• Customized workflows: An ATS system that can customize and automate tasks like application processing, screening, and collecting feedback can dramatically improve hiring efficiency. This benefit is especially significant to organizations hiring from very different candidate pools. If, for example, your team is hiring both truck drivers and software engineers, you can bet these workflows won’t be interchangeable.
• ‍Improved employer branding: Candidate tracking systems will help your organization create and manage a custom career site, helping your company stand out. Showcasing your best features will make it easier to attract top talent. With integrations to networks like LinkedIn, reaching a wide audience is easy.‍
• Better quality talent pools: The best ATS software can save time and money by maintaining already-sourced candidates. If you maintain occasional contact with a pool of qualified candidates, your recruiting process doesn’t start from zero each time you open a new role.‍
• Wider internal engagement: Rather than relying exclusively on your HR or TA teams for recruiting, the best ATS software will also involve your hiring managers and employees as part of the process. Employee referrals, feedback on job candidates, and social media can all be leveraged to fill open positions.‍
• Streamlined hiring and onboarding: An ATS can do more than streamline recruiting; it can work wonders for onboarding. A good first impression sets the stage for employee engagement and, ultimately, retention, so it’s critical to make the onboarding process employee-focused, timely, and effective.‍‍
• More effective recruitment strategies: An effective hiring process is data-driven. Any good ATS software dashboard will put recruiter productivity, cost per hire, cost of job boards, cost of paid media, time to hire, and other key data at your fingertips.

Any business choosing an ATS should aim to get the maximum functionality for its price point (while ensuring key functions for its specific business are best-in-class), focus on potential long-term benefits rather than short-term costs, and understand the software vendor's product roadmap.

• ‍What do you want to achieve with the ATS?: Depending on your business, you can have one person or multiple teams across your company branches interacting with the ATS day-to-day. Each may have a different pain point they want the recruitment tool to tackle. Knowing the center goals of these stakeholders and the importance of each can help you create a list of features ranked from most to least desired.
• What can you afford?: An ATS that can schedule interviews, manage employee referrals, and parse resumes will lighten the load on your HR/TA team, leading to increased efficiency. That said, investing in a feature-rich ATS could mean more complexity, steeper learning curves, and higher costs to the system. So, besides the feature list, you’d need to note down your allowed budget and the human resources involved in onboarding and maintaining the ATS system.
• Focus on individual features during your vendor research: Evaluate precisely what you need. The feature list and resource note that you have prepared in the earlier steps will help you stay focused on options that truly matter.
• Think long-term: Trying to anticipate the future is critical given how hard these tools are to replace over time (migrating tons of candidate data, different workflows for different types of jobs, etc.). Beyond the platform's capacity to scale up as you grow, pay attention to how this growth will affect product pricing and, therefore, the ATS ROI.‍‍
• Understand the roadmap: A tool with no future plan for improvements may cause trouble for future software updates, but a vendor with an ambitious list of feature enhancements, yet a very humble track record of delivery, is not any better. Ask the sales rep specific questions relevant to your business needs, and review content published on the company's channels for more information.