How to successfully implement an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

Article updated in February 2024

Are you eager to transform your recruitment process and take it to the next level? Implementing an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can be a game-changer for your organisation's hiring efforts. In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk you through the steps needed to successfully implement an ATS.

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The value of ATS implementation

According to the McLean 2024 HR Trends Report, recruitment remains the top organisational HR priority. The benefits of a well-chosen and implemented ATS can be immense. A survey from Capterra reported that 94% of recruiters and hiring professionals say their ATS or recruitment software has positively impacted their hiring process. However, to ensure success, it's crucial to avoid common mistakes made due to a lack of understanding, as highlighted by Information Age, where 19% of IT projects fail completely.

Why are you implementing an ATS?

Define your metrics for success: Start with understanding why you're implementing an ATS. Common recruitment challenges that an ATS can address include:

• Being too reactive when it comes to hiring and wanting to be more informed of new roles (so that you can plan ahead) and be better prepared with talent pools or pipelines of candidates, so that you can act quickly.
• Struggling with high volumes of applicants and needing a more effective and efficient way of handling these.
• Facing a lack of applicants for your roles, in which case your focus will be on candidate reach, attraction, and streamlining the application process.
• Dealing with high volumes of candidates and attrition (people leaving), so you'll need a system that can handle volume effectively and is better at scoring applications, tracking shortlisting, and delivering a better preboarding and onboarding experience.
• Finding it difficult to find relevant strong candidates for your niche roles.
• Having inefficient processes that impact your ability to hire at speed, poor communication, time-consuming reporting, or overuse.
• Depending too much on and spending excessively on recruitment agencies.
• Dealing with high advertising costs – this could be very high, and you need to better understand what actually works. Can you save a defined amount of your current budget? Around 25% may be seen as a realistic start point.
• Ensuring your workforce is diverse enough or demonstrating that you have a very good Diversity and Inclusion strategy and program in place, but where is the factual data to help analyse this throughout the recruitment process?

Form and build your project team

The success of your ATS implementation relies on assembling the right project team. Involve HR professionals, IT experts, and relevant stakeholders early in the project. categorise stakeholders based on their roles, responsibilities, and involvement levels, using the RACI model (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed).

Before implementing an ATS, evaluate your existing hiring process. Identify what's working well and what issues need attention. Ensure that your processes are efficient and effective. An ATS is an enabler, not a solution to broken processes. Mapping out your hiring process and producing a visual flow can help highlight areas that require improvement.

Understand that implementing an ATS brings change. Prepare for change management by clearly communicating the benefits of the new system to your team. Engage with your ATS vendor and other partners early on. Ensure that your ATS provider has a dedicated implementation success manager/consultant to work actively with you.

Define your metrics for success

Once you are clear on the outcomes and improvements you expect to realise from the implementation of your ATS, you should take time to consider what the metrics for success will be and how you will measure these. Most commonly, these will fall into two categories - quantitative and qualitative measures.

Quantitative data is very much like a measuring stick. If it can be counted, measured, and given a numerical value, it is quantitative.

Examples of quantitative data:

1. Time to hire
2. Average time to fill an 'empty chair'
3. Cost per hire
4. A candidate or hiring manager satisfaction measure (e.g., Net Promoter or Customer Satisfaction Score/CSAT)
5. Diversity of new hires
6. Qualified candidates per job
7. Offer acceptance rate
8. Reduced candidate drop-off (e.g., at application or offer)

Examples of qualitative data:

1. Candidate feedback on the candidate and recruitment experience
2. Senior stakeholder comments on the board reports and data shared with them
3. Hiring manager comments on the service from the recruitment/talent acquisition team and their usage of the ATS itself
4. Recruiter feedback on their experience of using the ATS day-to-day
5. HR's feedback regarding using the platform to manage offers, pre-employment checks, and onboarding

Consider doing an audit of your recruitment process before you start. By doing this, you will not only sense-check your thoughts on what challenges you face but also establish benchmarks for your continuous improvement journey.

If you are wondering how to undertake a recruitment audit in your organisation, I can recommend a quick but effective solution from our Talent Intelligence Unit.

Once you've decided on the key success measurements and KPIs for your project, take a measurement on each before you start the implementation. This will provide you with a clear benchmark to start from and with a successful implementation, a highly impactful and compelling report to share with the organisation on the success and impact of the project.

Your ATS provider should be open and very willing to work actively with you on this, as these measurements can form the basis of a valuable case study for you both to build and benefit from!

Form and build your project team

If you're working in Talent Acquisition and Recruitment, it may seem that all the responsibility for choosing and implementing an applicant tracking system solely falls to you, but that should never be the case. A successful implementation project will always be one that effectively utilises relevant skills and expertise across the business.

You will no doubt have access to a whole team of talent and skills in IS/Technology, HR, and Marketing that you can draw on, so involve them early in the project. Their expertise will be invaluable, and they'll appreciate being consulted and involved. If you fail to do this, they could even prove to be blockers just when you least expect it and hamper the progress or even success of the project.

In the 20 years' experience I have, I've seen hundreds of ATS implementations, and this must be one of the vital contributing factors to the success or failure of implementation projects.

It's useful to categorise all stakeholders across the organisation and a project team of colleagues that will support you. This is sometimes called the RACI model. Those people who are:

• Responsible for the project (e.g., recruitment lead, HRIS implementation lead, etc.)
• Accountable for its success (this might be the Head of Recruitment / Talent Acquisition Manager)
• Consulted during the process (e.g., Marketing, IT, Hiring Managers, HR, etc.)
• Informed as the project progresses (HRD, Leadership, IT Director, etc.)

Challenge your process

Always bear in mind that an ATS, like any technology, is an enabler and not a solution in itself.

Before even considering a tech solution, look first at your end-to-end hiring process as it is today; what elements are working well and what are the key issues and why? It’s critical that you analyse and fix the basics in your process first, or at least produce a ‘to be’ process which will help inform you which platform best suits your needs, not just today but in the future.

If elements of your hiring process are inefficient, or worse still, broken, implementing an ATS will only accentuate these issues, not fix them.

It’s a good idea to map out your process and produce a visual process flow. This can be shared with stakeholders for their input and will often highlight areas that can be refined and improved way ahead of the first scoping meeting with your ATS.

If produced early enough, this can also be shared with prospective vendors for them to better understand your processes and evidence how their solution will support them.

At Jobtrain, we map out all our clients’ processes in just this way!

When selecting the project team, do ensure that each has a clear understanding and appropriate knowledge of the areas they are responsible for. Ideally, the team should have been involved in the building out of the requirements and ATS selection process so that they understand all aspects of the project and have at least been consulted and informed during the ATS selection.

I have seen external and internal 'analysts' and consultants appointed with no knowledge or understanding of the business, its practical hiring processes, needs, and its nuances. These scenarios invariably cause delays, confusion, and can severely impact on the successful outcome of implementations.

Don't forget your suppliers too!

Don't miss another vital stakeholder – your vendor! They are a vital partner and should be keen and willing to take their share of the responsibility for delivering your ATS, plus the commercial and strategic objectives for the implementation and beyond.

Ensure you have a dedicated implementation success manager/consultant from your vendor. We will come onto what support and guidance you should expect from your vendor later in this guide.

If you have other partners and suppliers such as Employer Brand Agencies, Testing Providers, other technology solutions, and an HR Software vendor that will require collaboration or integration they should all form part of the project group. You should engage with them and your chosen ATS at an early stage (ideally during the demo and selection process) to discuss and agree the scope and requirements for any technical integration work.

Of course, the most important thing when it comes to implementing an applicant tracking system is clear, transparent communication! The implementation team at Jobtrain pride themselves on their speed, efficiency, and clarity through the whole process. So if you’re looking at applicant tracking systems today, drop us a message.