As a small business or emerging growth company, you’ve got to be sure that every penny spent is worth the investment. You might initially think that paying for an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) may seem like an unnecessary expense. After all, you can use spreadsheets and email and manage your candidate interactions without much effort. Why invest your additional operating capital in something that you’ll only use occasionally?

An Applicant Tracking System, or ATS, is absolutely worth adding to your budget. It brings several ongoing benefits to your company that justify the monthly cost. Not only is it leveraged when actively recruiting, but it also provides a shared solution that withstands transition over time of those individuals responsible for your talent organization.  It serves as a historical database for team feedback, position descriptions, employment marketing, and a dynamic job board integration for your website. An ATS should be as critical to your business as your CRM or Financial Management Systems.

From talent focused analytics to relationship management, here are four excellent reasons to implement an ATS in your small business. You can always reach out to our team here at Bell Falls Search for help crafting a Talent Attraction and Candidate Experience strategy that will grow with your organization.

People are as important to your business as the products or services that you create and sell.   In today’s economy, owning a CRM to track and manage your customer and industry partner relationships is critical to your company’s daily operations.  For maintaining history of your team member’s employment information and performance reviews, HRIS applications have also become ubiquitous.   To compete in the hyper competitive talent market, your business needs a similar software solution for attracting and managing candidate relationships.

Recruiting is not a singular event. It often occurs over several months or years, courting candidates and building relationships over time. To support your talent strategy goals, an ATS should be leveraged to attract and retain great people, and stay in close communication with candidates. One study found that superior talent is eight times more productive so it shouldn’t be a surprise that excellent workers can make or break your bottom line. It’s critical to invest in the tools that will help you attract them.

When an ATS is utilized, it can withstand any turnover that exists within your Talent Management Team.  Even if your Talent attraction efforts are primarily generated by third party recruiters, or prior to a dedicated internal owner, your ATS will exist as the central database for all candidate history and communication tracking.  Find prior role descriptions quickly, identify past candidates in your pipeline for proactive outreach, and generate valuable insights into previous activities without missing a step.

Losing your Talent leader doesn’t have to be a scary situation.  In their absence, hiring managers can access candidate info quickly and view current status of communication to keep the process fluid. In distributed office locations, an ATS provides a range of collaboration tools, such as team scoring, visualization tools, and notification triggers, to help coordinate recruiting for disparate teams.

Most ATS platforms offer seamless integration with your website and dynamically update your Careers section. This provides content management capabilities to your Talent team without needing to request expense technology team member help.  It also provides your business with the unified capability to manage both paid job boards and free sites via syndication of your posted roles via several external services. Synchronizing your postings will facilitate the broadcasting of your role to a wider audience. JazzHR is a favorite of the Bell Falls Search team and one that we have implemented for several of our clients.

The most important part of recruitment is candidate evaluation. You shouldn’t be spending hours copying and pasting the same job description across multiple platforms. An ATS can harmonize your job marketing campaign, saving you time and energy.

The importance of clear reporting cannot be overstated. An Applicant Tracking System can easily produce key insights into your Talent Attraction progress, and provide the lever your business needs to make informed decisions. It can provide data for potential audits, and it can be a huge asset in potential M&A transactions.

Ultimately, all of the benefits of an ATS help to improve the quality of recruiting through providing a transparent and positive candidate experience.  With the pace that highly sought-after candidates move through an interviewing process, it is vital to have a technology solution like an ATS.  Your communication with candidates will not only improve, but every interaction will further advance your employment brand and future success of attracting the best talent.

Grow your business with an ambitious talent management strategy. Ron Laneve at Bell Falls Search is a talent advisor with expertise in crafting comprehensive strategies for emerging growth companies. Reach out today to schedule a consultation.