“A candidate’s first impression is a lasting one – and it can mean they stay with you for six months or six years.” -Ross O’Rourke
Your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) doesn’t do all of the recruiting work, but it can certainly make or break your recruiting team. What are the components of a good ATS? And even more importantly, what are the elements of a bad one?
ClearanceJobs was joined by Ross O’Rourke who is a United States Marine Corps veteran. O’Rourke saw the flaws within the federal contracting lifecycle as a contractor, started his own GovCon company, and now specializes in agile recruiting and is the founder of Agile Onboarding, a state of the art, drag-and-drop user interface that completely automates an organization’s hiring process.
Tune in to this episode of the Security Clearance Careers Podcast to learn how doing searching and sourcing in bulk creates momentum to secure offers, how KPIs for your recruiting staff can help weed out the bad apples on your team, and how recruiting metrics like time in stage can help you streamline processes to better staff your contracts.
What are the components of a good ATS?
Having good search parameters, recruitment marketing capabilities, and allowing integration between applicant tracking, your email, onboarding, employee timesheets, etc. Recruitment marketing in a tight labor market is critical – these communications included in a good ATS, among other tools.
What recruiting functions can a bad ATS totally derail?
A bad ATS can bog recruiters down and cause more organizational problems instead of organizing your team and candidates. One that does not share information and mine data across the recruiting team can make you look unprofessional to potential candidates.
Recruiting + HRIS: Why is it important to have a one stop shop system?
A one-stop shop system doesn’t necessary exist, according to O’Rourke. But at least integrating with one other system, whether that be employee timesheets, or email, will get you the best bang for your buck.
What is the importance of onboarding as an employee retention tool to lower turnover rates / recruiting backfills?
Even upping your welcome swag game or having executive leadership record videos to send out to employees once they join a company are cost efficient options that go a long way in making new employees feel valued.
The cost of hiring a new employee is high – and if you don’t monitor those metrics, you would never know how much revenue is going down the drain.
But it’s not all about tech…what recruiting tasks must be done within a good ATS?
Making meaningful connections is something a computer or robot is never going to do, but even though O’Rourke notes that they have found qualitative sourcing not to be as successful, automating tasks like reaching out to more people (the more people you contact the better off you are positioning yourself to make a hire), gives you the time to cultivate relationships.
