Speaker 1: HR has been supporting, recruiting, and hiring efforts for, well, ever, but more and more employers and HR leaders are using applicant tracking systems to optimize recruitment. For small and mid-sized employers, these platforms help level the playing field, meaning you can better compete for top talent against bigger businesses. In this episode of HR Party of One, I'll cover how applicant tracking software makes hiring easier and your job more valuable. We'll discuss what applicant tracking systems are and how they work, how applicant tracking system functions make HR's role more valuable, and how HR can use an applicant tracking system to help coach hiring managers. Let's get started. Simply put, an applicant tracking system, or ATS for short, is a hiring software tool that manages recruitment online. Life without an applicant tracking system can be messy. We at Bernie Portal know this firsthand. Before we adopted an ATS, HR and our hiring managers really wasted a lot of time, hours, tracking job candidates, forwarding emails back and forth, and sifting through resumes in search of the right candidate. We often have hundreds of people apply for positions on our team. We're fortunate in that respect. How do hiring managers even begin to sort through all those applications? A lot of that changed after we adopted an ATS. Now, our hiring managers use the system's functions to streamline, centralize all our hiring processes, including things like job post creation, job post sharing, central candidate repository where all candidate information is in one place regardless of where they applied, collaborative candidate review, applicant communication, and job offering tools, and even onboarding. Not all systems are created equal. The best ATS platforms should feature the four following functions. No logins. Look for a system that doesn't require applicants to create a login to submit an application. This can deter quality applicants from applying to open positions and slow down your time to hire. Don't make it harder than it needs to be. Integrating with job search websites, such as Indeed, empowers small and mid-sized employers to expand their reach to get to even more qualified candidates. Bernie Portal partnered with Indeed to enhance and optimize our recruiting so that when a hiring manager creates a job in the ATS, the posting's automatically available on Indeed because of a direct integration. Internal messaging. Hiring managers should be able to communicate directly with job candidates within the ATS. This cuts down on inbox overflow and centralizes all the relevant interactions, making the hiring manager's job even easier. An ATS as part of a HRIS. An all-in-one system means new hires and administrators don't have to use multiple sites with multiple logins to manage hiring, onboarding, benefits enrollment, and everything that comes with it. And one simple system also means a one-stop shop for support. Now this may seem counterintuitive, but sometimes HR makes its role more valuable by minimizing its necessity in certain processes. Recruiting and hiring is the perfect case study to prove this rule. Typically, both hiring managers and HR professionals will have a hand in recruitment tasks like writing job descriptions, posting open positions, and reviewing resumes. While the hiring manager is generally the ultimate decision maker, they also want and need information and support from HR to facilitate the process. There's this inherent tension between hiring managers and HR and employers of all sizes, especially when HR is too front and center in recruiting. How often have you heard hiring managers complain that HR isn't bringing me any good candidates or HR isn't hiring people quickly enough? Most organizations feel like hiring managers should be most responsible for hiring, and the reality is that the best managers demand that. They want as much control as possible over recruiting because they know they're judged on the success of their teams, so they view recruiting and hiring the best as integral to their own success. Providing hiring managers access to an ATS empowers them to own more of the process. If a hiring manager has real-time access to the resumes coming in, they'll have full transparency in their candidate pool, and they won't see you as so much as a bottleneck to getting them the resumes they need. Another component of ATS platforms that I love is that administrators can save time by creating communication templates. For example, at Bernie Portal, we've built out templates hiring managers can use. The templates do things like initiate first contact and ask for more information from candidates, schedule a phone interview or an in-person interview, and even decline candidates delicately, appropriately. These pre-built templates in our ATS save hiring managers time and ensure that all candidates have a consistent and positive experience with our company. All these ATS components add up to work that can be done by the hiring managers and influencers who should actually be in charge of recruiting and hiring. By making this happen, you've created more capacity to focus on higher-value priorities. The kinds of priorities HR parties of one can and should be looking at to elevate their roles and add value. These priorities include many of the topics we've covered in past episodes. Now, don't get me wrong, HR shouldn't completely remove itself from the hiring process. In one way, though, you're no longer a bottleneck in the day-to-day hiring process, because an ATS empowers hiring managers. But it's not enough for HR to adopt the ATS and just forget about recruitment. To really elevate your role, you should check in on how effectively your hiring managers are using the ATS, so you can help support and coach them. This system of checks and balances is a good thing. Even if you've selected the best, most intuitive ATS on the market, hiring managers will vary in their understanding and ability to manage the process in a way that improves the organization. This is where you can and should step in. In your regularly scheduled meetings with managers, which we've discussed in previous episodes, you should review open and recently closed jobs with hiring managers to look for trends around response times, position open times, and even unread applications. The idea here is to make sure all managers are giving your open positions the consistent attention necessary to build a world-class team. From these conversations, you can not only guarantee consistency, but also share best practices from the highest performing hiring managers. For example, some hiring managers may not appreciate how important it is to get back to candidates in a timely manner. You can see response times in the ATS and help them see how they should be able to fill positions faster and with higher quality candidates if they get back to those candidates more quickly. I mentioned earlier that an ATS permits HR to step away from the day-to-day hiring process, so you can focus more time and energy on higher value tasks, higher value priorities. And reviewing recruitment metrics is exactly the kind of high-value task that demands your attention. ATS platforms typically offer insights into this performance, and HR should make use of these reporting tools to measure a manager's efforts when hiring and how they're trending over time. Some things that you can measure with an ATS include things like candidate pipeline status, hiring stages, and the number of candidates received per job. Not every job posting will immediately be filled once you've adopted an ATS. It's not a panacea. But if HR notices that a hiring manager is struggling to fill a position, you can use these statistics, this data, to offer feedback or suggestions that may help them find the right candidate more quickly. If your candidate pipeline is low, well, maybe your hiring manager needs to focus more on finding candidates on LinkedIn proactively. Maybe a job description could use a refresh, including adding target compensation to attract the best candidates. A topic we'll cover in a future episode. Regardless, the separation of duties created by ATS automation and centralization establishes two key benefits. First, hiring managers can use robust tools to focus on finding the best candidates for open positions. And also, HR can focus on giving hiring managers the support and feedback they need to be successful in those efforts without getting in the way. Applicant tracking systems make recruiting easier. From start to finish, hiring managers can use streamlined and integrated functions that locate better candidates, cut down time to hire, and even make the onboarding process easier once an applicant is hired. Also, ATS platforms give HR the time to step away from the day-to-day recruiting processes and dedicate more energy to ensure that hiring is as fine-tuned as possible. And this shift in responsibility makes your role within the company even more valuable. And that's what HR Party 1's all about. That's all for this episode. 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