How to Measure the Success of Your Applicant Tracking System?

Your Applicant Tracking System may be built with multiple features and powerful functionalities, however, you would still want to get a holistic view of what it is doing in the background. As an employer who has implemented an ATS recently in your company, you may have questions like

• Is the ATS helping you save time on recruitment? 

• Are the best candidates moving throughout the pipeline with ease and converting into hires? 

• Are you cutting down unwanted costs? 
• How well is the quality of hire after implementing the ATS? 

Application Tracking Systems have the potential to help your business scale. A credible ATS lets you organize candidate data for all your recruitment activities by sifting prospective candidates based on their experience and skills. It enables real-time collaboration between the teams to streamline the hiring process and acts as a repository for your candidate data—such as job applications, resumes, and any notes or feedback from your team.

Some top benefits of an ATS are:

• Reduced time to hire

Time to hire represents the gap between the days when the recruitment process began and on which day you hired the candidate. For instance, you began the hiring process on 25th January and closed the position on 25th February; the time to hire would be the gap between these dates.

An ATS lets you analyze the performance of the recruiting team by tracking the speed at which good candidates move through your hiring process after submitting an application.

You can measure the amount of time it took to move candidates from one stage to another, to maximize your time to hire. 

With an ATS, you will be able to reduce the time to hire with quick communication as there is no need to go back and forth; your team members can easily sift the resumes, schedule the interviews, and update all the data on a single dashboard. 

• A decrease in early-stage interview cancellations.

Since your ATS streamlines the interview process and leaves no room for unwanted applications—you only get to interview the candidates who are genuinely interested. Your ATS lets you automate the interview scheduling process and saves time on the back-and-forth conversations.

This way your recruiters save hours by not having to send reminders, or coordinate multiple calendars; candidates too get impressed by the quick response time, the ease of self-scheduling via email or SMS, and the individualized experience that your recruiters will have the bandwidth to provide. 

Your team can seamlessly sync all candidate communication, scheduling information, and other data with an ATS – All of it leading to less early stage interview cancellations!

• Higher interview-to-hire ratio

This metric is essential if you want to cut down on the amount of time it takes to hire and streamline your recruiting process. It is simple to identify the slowest parts of your hiring funnel by breaking it down stage-by-stage. The candidate experience and your employer brand may suffer if more candidates are interviewed without receiving offers – Your ATS lets you close this gap.

Certain stats that talk about the market success of ATSs and its implementation are:

• 75% of recruiters and hiring professionals use applicant tracking systems.
• 94% of recruiters said that their ATS has positively impacted their hiring process.
• 98.8% of Fortune 500 companies use an ATS to filter the resumes.
• The ATS market is expected to grow to $3.3 Billion by the year 2027, resulting from worldwide adaptations by large-sized companies from different sectors.

How can you measure the success of your ATS implementation?

Here are the five metrics that can help you measure your ATS’ successful implementation:

• Source to Hire (SOH)

SOH represents the percentage of your total hires that came into your hiring pipeline from each recruiting channel or source (such as job boards, referrals, direct sourcing etc.).

For instance, let’s say you have hired 60 candidates from external sources in the past two quarters; 30 of them came from referral programs (50%), 20 applied through job boards (33%), other 5 came from career fairs (17%); these percentages are the SOH data that allow you to know which source is yielding more returns. You can allocate your recruiting budget more efficiently & remove or modify sources that consistently lag behind.

• Candidate Experience 

Candidate Experience acts as a metric that lets you understand how candidates perceive the effectiveness of your ATS. You can measure candidate experience by collecting feedback from candidates after they have interacted with your recruitment software.

In 2014, a “Rejected Candidate Survey” was conducted by Virgin Media. A quick look at the numbers revealed that 18% of them were customers and that approximately 7,500 of them–-or 6% of the total number of applicants–had a bad recruitment experience and switched to a Virgin competitor. Virgin Media was looking at a loss of approximately £4.4 million as a result—roughly equivalent to the amount the company spent on hiring that year.

Your ATS can assist you in conducting brief surveys with the candidates—those who received offers as well as those who did not—to gather important information about how they were dealt with by your recruiting team. This metric will help you improve your candidate experience and modify your recruitment approach too (if need be).

• Time to Fill 

When candidates apply for positions in your organization, you want them to be assessed, interviewed and hired as quickly as possible. The shorter the time it takes to fill a position, the more effective your Application Tracking System is.

‘Time to Fill’ represents the number of calendar days it takes to find and hire a new candidate; It is measured by the number of days it takes from when you approve a job requisition to when the candidate accepts your offer.

This metric can be influenced by a number of factors, like how quickly the recruitment team works and what the ratio of supply to demand for particular jobs is; It’s useful for business planning and gives the manager a realistic picture of how long it will take to find and hire a new employee.

Your ATS software can help you understand where the system is hindered and when your process doesn’t work as intended. Eventually, this metric will help you fill the gaps so that you can reach your goals quickly.

• Quality of Hire (QoH):

Evaluate the success of your ATS by assessing how well a new hire performs in their given positions and duties.

A candidate’s first-year performance can be measured by their annual performance rating. While candidates with low-performance ratings are not indicative of successful hiring, those with high-performance  ratings are. A single bad hire can result in direct and indirect expenses totaling tens of thousands of dollars for a business.

How can you calculate the quality of hire?

The success ratio (input for QoH) is calculated by dividing the total number of candidates hired by the number of successful hires. A high success ratio indicates that the majority of hired candidates perform well, whereas a low success ratio indicates that your selection procedure needs to be improved!

• Cost per Hire (CPH): 

The Cost-per-Hire metric allows you to calculate how much it costs your company to successfully hire a new employee—CPH is made up of several cost structures that can be divided by internal and external costs your ATS keeps track of. 

• Compliance costs, administrative costs, training and development costs, and hiring manager costs are all examples of internal costs. 
• Background checks, and costs associated with sourcing, travel, and marketing are examples of external costs.

Takeaway…

ATS is a game changer for employers who want their recruitment process to run seamlessly. With the right ATS, you can gain control of all your recruiting activities and understand how to invest effectively in the sources you deem fit, with the right data insights. 

The metrics explained above form the basis of the success of your ATS. If you wish to know more about how ATS can help you hire only the best candidates and save on unwanted costs, then talk to our experts at Auzmor today. We will be glad to assist you in implementing the best ATS – Auzmor Hire.

Find, engage, and recruit great candidates in a single, powerful platform with Auzmor Hire.

FAQs 

• How long does it take to implement a new ATS?

For small and medium-sized businesses, ATS implementation takes around three to four weeks, whereas, for large corporations, it may take months. The resources involved and the requirements, customizations, and implementation timeline all vary.

• How does an applicant tracking system work in the recruitment process?

An ATS helps employers and recruiters keep track of candidates throughout the recruiting process. It allows you to speed up candidate management and significantly reduce time-to-fill.

• What is the primary purpose of an applicant tracking system?

Companies can organize candidates in an applicant tracking system (ATS) for their recruiting purposes. The hiring managers can filter applicants, organize prospects according to experience and skillset, and collect information with these systems.

• How much time does an ATS save?

An ATS helps save up to 20% of the hiring time for the recruiters.