1 - What integrations does your ATS need?
2 - What is an integration?
3 - What are the benefits of integrating other systems with your ATS?
4 - What types of software should an ATS integrate with?
What integrations does your ATS need?
Most Applicant Tracking Systems have the capability to integrate with (or ‘talk to’) other software systems to provide a more seamless experience and support your organisation’s recruitment lifecycle. They enable you to use your ATS as a recruitment hub whilst still being able to send and receive information from the other complimentary tools you use.
Here, we'll look at the types of integrations a good ATS will either automatically include or have available as an additional option, alongside the benefits of integrating them. So, let's get started!
What is an integration?
When we talk about integrations for recruitment technology, this is the process of linking together different systems and software applications to share information and data between them.
It can often be something you might not consider too, such as having your ATS link to job boards in a much more dynamic way.
What are the benefits of integrating other systems with your ATS?
Integrating your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) with other tools and platforms, can help to streamline recruitment processes and save time for you and your team by not having to work across multiple tools and systems.
When an ATS is integrated with other platforms and software, it enables it to ‘talk’ to the other systems, such as a HR System or psychometric testing platform. Depending on the level of integration, it can often allow recruiters to leverage data from multiple systems in one place. Furthermore, integrating other platforms with your ATS can automate workflow processes to help speed up tasks like new starter information automatically being pushed through to your HR System, thereby saving a lots of manual data entry and administration.
By integrating your ATS with other software solutions, recruiters can optimise their recruitment process even further and reduce the time spent on tedious administrative tasks and instead invest it in what they are experts in – recruiting!
What types of software should an ATS be able to integrate with?
Job boards and job board aggregators
Any good ATS will have established and collaborative relationships with job boards and aggregators. By leveraging integrations with job boards, you’ll save time, have access to more data from them and you’ll also be improving the experience for candidates, such as speeding up the application process when they first see one of your job adverts on a job board, rather than your own careers site.
For example, our Jobtrain ATS works and integrates with many job advertisers and job aggregators from Indeed, reed.co.uk, TotalJobs and CV Library right through to Adzuna, Talent.com, and ZipRecruiter, ensuring our clients have many options to choose from when it comes to candidate reach and advertising their jobs.
Quick apply from job boards
Check if your Applicant Tracking System has a quick apply integration with the major job boards. Wondering what this is? With reed.co.uk, TotalJobs, CV Library, and Indeed, we developed a number of quick apply options. They’re designed to combat candidates not completing their application forms by allowing a candidate to apply directly from the job board and the ATS takes all their CV and profile information to automatically create a new application in the ATS.
HR Management Systems
Integrating your HR System with your ATS is especially valuable for larger organisations with complex processes. Manual data entry and manipulation for organisations hiring at scale is very time consuming and costly in terms of time and resource required.
The best ATS platforms will integrate with most HR system providers – after all, the more candidates you hire, the more new starters you’ll need to add to your HR system!
We provide our customers with the option to link their HR system with their Jobtrain ATS. We’re proud to partner with the largest HR software providers, including SAP, MHR, CIPHR, Core HR, Oracle and Workday.
Integrating your HR System - the benefits
The ability to automate many of the onboarding processes is a clear front-runner of why organisations should do this. When a new hire has completed their pre-boarding, in most cases their details will also need to be entered into a HR System too. It’s important to input information and data correctly and is not something you want to get wrong. Integrating removes manual data entry and radically reduces the risk of any data input errors.
Pre-employment checks
Bringing new hires onboard can often mean lots of admin. It might involve using the services of organisations who provide services to deliver certified Right to Work checks and DBS Checks (or Disclosure Scotland).
Certified Right to Work checks
New legislation came into force in the UK in October 2022 that changed the way organisations could gather evidence of new starters’ right-to-work compliance – we hosted a webinar about this at the time with our partner, Yoti.
After the legislation change, the UK Government strongly recommended that businesses used a certified IDVT organisation to ensure checks are carried out robustly using technology. If this technology is integrated with your ATS, it can be a real game changer and time saver.
DBS Checks
Yet another important task when bringing onboard a new hire – DBS checks! If you’re navigating between multiple platforms (your ATS and DBS provider), it becomes complicated, confusing and often difficult to see exactly where a candidate might be in the process if a user only has access to the ATS for instance.
There are many Online Disclosure and DBS checking providers that offer integrations with ATS platforms, including First Advantage. Checks are started from the Applicant Tracking System and information of the check automatically feeds back into the ATS.
An integration removes any complex admin of switching and transferring data between systems. It ensures full transparency, for those users that need it, to understand where a check is up to in the process direct from the candidate’s record in the ATS. And often it can speed up the time it takes to start a DBS Check and receive it back too – helping to remove any added stress for HR!
Online psychometric testing platforms
As part of the recruitment process, some roles may require candidates to complete psychometric or other online tests. Did you know, if your ATS is integrated with your testing platform, your ATS should allow you to invite candidates from there and have their responses automatically feed back in, so you have all the information in one place?
Most ATS providers will have established relationships with online testing companies – at Jobtrain, we’re happy to already integrate with many of them, including SHL, Kenexa, Cut-e, The Test Factory, and Thomas International.
Single Sign On
We all seem to have a million and one passwords to remember, so integrating a Single Sign On (SSO) process - whereby users don’t need to remember a password for their ATS - can play a significant role in making sure your ATS is used to its full potential by everyone in your organisation.
There are many different integrations that can help you make the most of your applicant tracking system. Research which ones are best and right for your business that will improve the experience for candidates, save you time and money, increase efficiencies and reduce stress for your teams.