Signs That Indicate Your HR Recruitment Software Has Outdated

Using an outdated applicant tracking software (ATS) can be a death trap for your talent acquisition process. It is like a frog sitting in warming water oblivious of the imminent danger until the water finally boils the frog alive. The situation is infamously dubbed as “boiled frog syndrome.” No Credible Hr department wants to be in that mess.

Why evaluating your current recruitment software matters

Hiring success means success in your business. The competitiveness of your company depends on how well you can attract talent, screen them and hire the best. For your business to shine in the modern business space, you have to leverage innovative and powerful software that will help optimize your workflow. That way, it becomes easier for hiring managers, recruiters and staffing firms to achieve their goals. ATS is one of the HR recruiting software that is designed to optimize workflow.

Here are some of the red-signals that show that you need to upgrade to a better HR software system.

•       Introduces bottlenecks that lead to increased hiring time

If you have been in the business of recruitment, you must be very familiar with the frustrations that result from bottlenecks.  You might be having a mountain of applicants obstructing your candidate pipeline. As a hiring manager, you might a flood of applications that sitting there waiting for you to review.

Reducing the time it takes to attract, source, interview and hire new talent is good news for your company. Besides, it reduces the cost of recruitment. And, the most important of all, it helps create a better applicant/candidate experience. It also relieves the hiring manager of the tormenting moments you have to sit at hiring panels.

That’s where a good ATS comes in. The Hr software should b able to usher applicants/candidates through the different stages of recruitment. The process should be smooth, and quick enough, yet allow time for the recruitment team to make better decisions. Besides, your ATS should provide you reports detailing the time each candidate spent along the recruitment pipeline. The report should as well include data-driven, evaluations of both applicants and candidates.  If your ATS takes a lot of time to execute basic candidate-based decisions, it is high time for you to upgrade to a better one.

•       You can automate repetitive administrative tasks

If you are a hiring manager, you know how repetitive tasks can be irritating and time-consuming. Statistically, recruiters and hiring managers spend an average of eight hours per week performing manual, repetitive administrative tasks. That obviously means a dent in productivity cost.  But, most importantly, such repetitive tasks usually frustrate man recruiters.

That is why it is very important for you to automate administrative tasks.  Some of these tasks you need to automate with ATS software include drafting interview questions, generating pre-screening questions, leaving candidate feedback, and source tracking applications.

It will save hiring managers and recruiters’ time and monetary resources that can be spent attracting, sourcing and interviewing candidates. The main attraction of AT software is the optimization of the hiring process. If your ATS won’t just cut it, then it won’t be capable of optimizing your current workflow. It is time you need to switch to a better one that can handle the new demands of your company.

•       Poor candidate tracking

It is good to find a good candidate. It is also wiser to establish where the candidates came from so that you won’t struggle finding ‘new catches’ in your future recruitment efforts. For example, if most of your candidates are coming from social media, or job boards, it will be a waste of time (and probably resources) turning to recruitment agencies in a lookout for the right talent.  That will make very low if not poor return of investment (ROI). Your ATS need to clearly tell you where the best talents are coming from. It should also offer you insights on how you can build talent communities that cater to your future talent needs.

•       Out-of-date keyword matching algorithm

You don’t want to miss out on the best talent and end up with a candidate without the requisite skills. Unlike in the past, the ATSs of today are AI-base. They rely on AI to sort through an avalanche of applicants resumes by scanning specific keywords. The process is super cheap but also highly effective.

But there is a huge challenge. The process relies on keywords. That means if a skilled candidate fails to include one of those keywords, there are high chances they might be overlooked by the system. That means the recruitment team will end up interviewing the wrong guys, inadequately skilled guys for the job.

You need an ATS that can score applicants/candidates not based on keywords but rather on the job requirements and descriptions. That means, if your ATS leverage natural language processing and smart artificial intelligence tools, you might need to get another one. ATSs also offer a better way for recruiters to eliminate recruiter bias.

•       Doesn’t allow you to scale your hiring practices

Your ATS should allow for the future growth of your company. Just like the other departments, your Hr department should also be stoking the embers of business growth.  Hr should not hold back businesses from growth. If your ATS can’t accommodate the rate which your company is growing at, you need a better one.

Summing it up

Having out-dated recruitment software could be the reason you are getting poor talents. As an HR department, you need to look at the functionality of your system and compare it with the current company recruitment demands. It doesn’t fit the bill, get another one. Your company desperately needs it to grow.

Guest article written by: Darshan Trivedi is a Content Specialist at SoftwareSuggest, software discovery and recommendation platform. He writes about reviews about software in categories such as Human Resources and recruiting and more. In his spare time, you’ll find him watching movies or enjoying music.  Email ID: [email protected]