How to choose an ATS for your recruitment agency?

In today's job market, it's essential to multiply the number of channels for sourcing and distributing job offers, if you want to find the best talent. Given the numerous tasks involved in the recruitment process, it can quickly become necessary to equip yourself with tools to centralize and automate them.

Many recruitment agencies are already equipped with application management tools. Automating many tasks saves time and adds value to many other parts of your day-to-day work. 

At a time when recruitment continues to be accompanied by numerous digital transformations, the pressure is on within companies to unearth the best talent, under the most optimal conditions possible.

Let's find out how ATSApplicant Tracking System can adapt to your needs and save you time.

The bottom line 

• An ATS (Applicant Tracking System) is a software program that simplifies the management of job applications within companies, to save time and money on recruitment. 
• ATSs bring together a range of key functionalities for effective management of the recruitment process , including a CV library, career site, job posting system, HR messaging system and assessment grids. ATS allows you to centralize all recruitment-related tasks . 
• On the whole, an ATS is accessible to all types of profile within your company, even if it remains the most relevant for the recruitment team.  

Definition of an ATS

The ATS, or Applicant Tracking System, is historically a recruitment software program for receiving and managing applications. 

Essentially, it's a digital solution for sourcing and tracking the hiring process of candidates in one or more companies. Today, an ATS meets a number of challenges for recruitment managers in staffing firms. 

As the recruitment market becomes ever tighter, the latest generation of ATSs includes talent pool management to simplify the sourcing of candidates.

Digitalization and the growing complexity of recruitment processes have made the use of organization and collaboration tools a necessity. 

ATS gives recruiters a global view of all stages in the recruitment process. Overall, they help to reduce the workload of recruitment managers on previously manual, low-value-added tasks.

The return on investment in an ATS can be seen very quickly, as you'll save time on time-consuming tasks and be able to devote more time to finding candidates.

Who needs to know how to manage your ATS? 

For recruiters and managers

ATS is first and foremost a tool designed to help recruiters with all their operational tasks. In concrete terms, ATS does not replace recruiters. The human element will always remain at the heart of recruitment. On the contrary, it enhances the value of recruiters and capitalizes on their work.

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This tool can also be useful for managers, who can use it as asupport for scorecards with their staff and to track the success of their teams. 

A tool accessible to all

One of the strong points of ATS is its ease of use. No special skills are required, and the interactive guides included with the ATS are all you need to learn how to use the tool quickly and efficiently. 

A tool that needs to be adapted by the whole team

When recruiting is a collaborative process, ATS software ensures that all those involved are aware of the recruitment process in progress.

Indeed, tooptimize the recruitment process, several people in your company need to have access to the ATS. On the one hand, recruiters will use it on a daily basis as their main work tool to manage all recruitment-related tasks. 

On the other hand, managers also need access to the ATS to monitor the activity of their teams, measure their success and use it as a support for their one-to-one meetings with their staff. ATSs enable and facilitate collaboration between all recruitment stakeholders. To choose the right ATS, you need to take into account a few key elements that it must be able to handle. 

What are the most important features? 

ATS - an all-in-one tool

In concrete terms, recruitment management software is used to set up recruitment campaigns and easily track the recruitment stages of candidates. 

No more endless Excel lines, lengthy e-mails or lost files: with an ATS, everything is centralized in a single tool. 

The main features of an ATS

Your ATS can allow you to : 

• Finding candidates for you: Thanks to AI, Marvin's ATS is the first ATS capable of automatically suggesting profiles that best match the recruiter's pipe jobs. This intelligent sourcing is key to saving time and quickly finding the best candidates from existing databases, social networks and other internet resources. 
• Add candidates in just a few clicks: ATS enables you to obtain a candidate's contact details in just a few clicks. It's the ideal solution for easily adding profiles to your candidate database, and then easily exploiting this data.
• Keep track of the entire recruitment process: The ATS streamlines the entire recruitment process, facilitating candidate management from initial contact to the end of the probationary period. All these processes can be visualized directly in the ATS in a simple, clear format. 
• Collaborative recruiting: ATS enables you to share candidate profiles with your colleagues, and exchange views with the rest of the team in the comments section of each profile. 

ATS at Marvin's

At Marvin, our ATS allows you to centralize all the information about your potential candidates and those already in the recruitment process.

Globally, the entire team can access information on current processes and partner customers. 

More qualified candidates

As you can see, ATS gives you greater visibility not only of your recruitment processes, but also of all your company's teams. Thanks to ATS, you'll also be able to have more qualified exchanges with candidates and follow them throughout their careers.  

Marvin's ATS 

Candidate qualifications

One of Marvin' s ATS flagship tools is its candidate qualification management. You may often find yourself taking notes during interviews, but these often end up lost in a note or folder on your computer, right?

With an ATS, you get the benefits of these notes by having them easily at hand, and in a more legible form. Recruiters can easily share candidate qualifications with colleagues. The organization of notes also makes it possible to find the candidate's most recent qualification in just a few clicks, to quickly give yourself some context. 

Within a firm, it is important to be able to dissociate note-taking according to its type. For example, a qualification of a candidate will not have the same value or the same impact asa note taken on the exchange with the candidate during the recruitment process. 

It is therefore important to separate note-taking according to its type, in order to be able to see more clearly and, above all, to know where to find the information quickly, by distinguishing between information relating solely to the candidate, to the recruitment process or to the customer.

Manage the entire process

With an ATS, there's no need to rummage through the different parts of your notes! The ATS enables you to manage the entire process, with a clear view of each stage. 

Being able to qualitatively store a candidate's profile is also key to gaining time and efficiency throughout your recruitment processes. 

Tracking profiles over the long term

If a candidate you've identified doesn't join your company in the short term, the ATS will enable you to follow their profile over the long term and support them in their career. This will cost you less in terms of resources. This solution is far more cost-effective than prospecting for ten new candidates.

Advertise on all job platforms

For markets with rarer profiles, such as developers, a key advantage of ATS will be the multi-distribution of ads on job platforms.

Sourcing these profiles takes a lot of time, and the cost of acquisition is very high. For each job creation on each different platform, you lose time on other tasks. 

Analyze data

Beyond the functionalities, don't forget to take the time to analyze the data collected on your ATS. This tool is a real goldmine for analyzing tracking indicators such as the number of qualifications achieved, the number of deals or the number of opportunities opened.

Manage customers 

Marvin's ATS can be very useful for recruitment agencies, enabling them to :

• Easily track company prospecting
• Add contracts and open opportunities
• Fill in job ads

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ATS are tools that optimize your recruitment process from A to Z. They bring real added value to recruiters in terms of visibility and clarity of processes with their candidates.

However, the tool doesn't define your recruitment strategy and won't help you find the best candidate, unless you've worked out your processes beforehand, and really identified your employer brand. 

In a context where the candidate market is very tight in many sectors, equipping yourself with an ATS adapted to your needs will enable you to spend more time on what can add value to your company on job boards, and to attract candidates more effectively.

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