For many of us, hiring freezes and a lack of recruitment became the norm while we weathered the storm of COVID-19. For much of the western world, that storm is starting to pass and global economies are starting to pick up speed once again. From my perspective as a recruiter, I know that a lot of companies are starting to forecast their workforce needs and are realizing that they have some large recruitment projects ahead. The challenge now is, how do you successfully launch back into recruitment when it’s not an area your organization has engaged with in quite some time? Perhaps you downsized your recruitment team or lost other individuals with recruitment experience within your organization. That sounds like a pretty daunting place to be in, especially if you now find yourself needing to rapidly scale up in order to meet consumer demands.

Whether you’re frantically trying to re-establish yourself within the recruitment world or you’re attempting to scale up with your new recruitment challenges, one of the best things that you can do right now is investing in an Applicant Tracking System. We’ve talked about the value of an Applicant Tracking System or ATS quite extensively in the past but if you’re about to undertake a surge of recruitment in the coming months, you need one. Trying to manage multiple campaigns by either excel or email is a sure-fire way to make mistakes and miss out on top talent. However, with the right ATS for your organization, you’ll be able to manage multiple open roles simultaneously while progressing potentially hundreds of candidates through your recruitment process

Avoid missing top talent

One of the best assets of an ATS is the automation it offers. Through this automation you, your hiring managers, and recruiters will save valuable time. A resource you’re going to need a lot of to manage multiple recruitment campaigns. Within the recruitment world we know that timing is key, wait a few days to reach out to a candidate and that candidate might be gone. As soon as strong candidates apply for your role you need to be on them and inviting them forwards for an interview. An applicant tracking system allows you the control to be able to do this. Anything slower and you run the risk of missing out on the strongest people within your applicant pool. The best people who apply to your role aren’t just applying with you, and they aren’t going to wait around for you to contact them. They know their own value and they are going to seek out an organization that can see it too.

Removing bias from candidate selection

In terms of rating and ranking your candidates, an ATS offers you the capability to do this in a much fairer manner than just a standard resume review. Resume reviews by their very nature lend themselves to all sorts of biases. Even something as simple as formatting could bias you towards one candidate over another. Most Applicant Tracking Systems allow you to avail of screening questions and very quickly use them to score your candidates. While referring to a resume is still important, this equal comparison can give you a much fairer assessment of the talent that has applied to your organization.

Automate candidate care

Looking to candidate care, an ATS is once again key. As recruiters, and most likely as candidates too, we know that the greatest sin when applying for a role is never getting a response from the organization. Or receiving a generic rejection email months after forgetting you ever applied for the role. In an ideal world, every applicant would receive a custom response. Unfortunately, as recruiters, we know this isn’t possible. However, using an ATS you can build automation into your process and link automatic replies to every part of your process. Our own ATS, Scout Recruit, allows our clients to send an email to candidates with the click of a button. This can keep candidates abreast of where they are in your recruitment process and with a bit of clever copywriting you can even make your automatic replies appear personable.

Recruitment is tricky at the best of times, but when recruiting for a large number of roles at once it can become a beast. The best way to make this challenge manageable is to utilize the technology available to you. Here at Scout Talent, we have an ATS offering that is scalable based on the size of your organization. If you’re interested in learning more, please do get in touch and one of our specialists would be happy to set up a demo.

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