Does sorting, evaluating, and managing the applications you receive in your e-mail box take up a considerable part of your day? Are you wasting a lot of time updating your temporary staffing agency’s applicant tracking system (ATS) file? Do you spend hours posting the same ad on different job boards? Do you find it a daily challenge to keep your colleagues informed of the progress of current recruitments?
If you answered “yes” to these questions, this article is for you!
Did you know that it is possible to simplify your work processes and make them faster? Collect and process your data automatically with tailor-made software? And finally, save time for more value-added activities?
Your temporary or permanent staffing agency can benefit from an applicant tracking software like PRIM Logix. In 2022, the digital shift of your agency is even becoming indispensable.
But what is applicant tracking software, and what does it change to your daily routine? To understand this, I propose to analyse 3 essential recruitment tasks, with and without PRIM Logix.
What is the purpose of applicant tracking software?
The ATS (Applicant Tracking System) is the essential tool for managing applications. It supports recruiters at every stage of their recruitment process. It allows them to optimise the time spent on advertising job vacancies, centralising applications, responding quickly to candidates, send them emails, SMS, tests, or schedule a video interview.
This allows you to better manage recruitment within your temporary or permanent staffing agency. To do this, it brings together several HR managements tools: performance monitoring, CV library, communication tools, etc. In concrete terms, it allows staffing agency to dematerialise and automate many tasks. Laborious and low value-added tasks that you had to perform daily as a recruiter!
This is the main objective of a staffing software like PRIM Logix: to allow HR professionals to focus on the essential. The candidates, their aspirations, their skills, and their match with the company’s needs!
Task 1: Post a job offer
This is the first and not the least important task of a recruiter: posting a job offer. 80% of candidates use at least 5 sites to find a job? The multi-platform distribution of a job offer is even more crucial when you know that in 2021, surveys showed that at least 84% of organizations are currently using social media for recruitment. We can therefore better understand the importance of this stage of the recruitment cycle.
However, posting offers on the multitude of existing job boards can quickly become a whole task. For the recruiter, it generates repetitiveness and high broadcasting costs. So, how can we reduce the time a recruiter spends on this task? And reduce the costs associated with posting an offer on several job boards?
Without an ATS
If your staffing agency does not have recruitment software, posting your offer can take a considerable amount of time. It can take up to a whole day if there are recruitment difficulties! This means posting your job offer individually on each job board, to increase the chances of finding the right candidate. Or, failing that, to have a choice between several!
Moreover, even if you choose to post your job on 3 to 5 job boards, you must first select the most appropriate ones. This is not always easy. Should you favour specialised job boards or choose the ones most used by candidates in general? But this is only the beginning. You then must manually integrate your offer on each of the chosen job boards. And the different formats of each site mean that you must rewrite parts of the ad to optimise it for each medium.
Indeed, the steps and parameters for posting your job offer depend entirely on the job board in question, although the way it works is very similar from one recruitment platform to another.
With PRIM Logix
Of all the significant advances in recruitment, multicasting is probably the most useful for HR professionals.
With PRIM Logix’s multicasting feature, you no longer need to worry about where to post your job offer. Your temporary or permanent staffing agency’s website? Social media? Specialized job board? With the help of multicasting, posting your job offer on different platforms is possible in one click.
Task 2: Sorting the applications
It is not enough to publish a job offer. You also need to organise the reception of applications. For example, you need to get rid of the so-called “SPAM” resumes or create your list of potential candidates.
Without an ATS
Let’s go back in time, before Applicant Tracking Software became a part of recruiters’ daily lives. Each job offer contained the email address of the HR professional in charge of recruitment to receive applications. Thus, the recruiter was responsible for manually sorting through the avalanche of emails arriving daily at this address. He then had to extract the applications for the position to be filled.
So in short, the task was as follows:
- Open the email and read it
- Download the attachments: Resume and cover letter and any other documents shared by the candidate
- In the case of an interesting application: file the uploaded documents in the right recruitment folder
- Rename the resume for easy retrieval
- And finally, archive the emails so that they do not clutter up the inbox.
A real pleasure! Especially in a sector where recruiters receive a high volume of applications. You end up spending your day dealing with applications and not having time for the other tasks that a recruiter must do…
With PRIM Logix
Since the rise and development of ATS, this task seems almost invisible! It is the software that works for the recruiter. All applications arrive in one place, dedicated exclusively to the position in question.
Even better: thanks to PRIM Logix, when an offer is posted, the recruiter can choose to integrate criteria relating to the area of expertise, the region of work or the desired salary into the offer description. What can he gain from this? The software will then integrate these parameters and automatically sort all the applications that meet these criteria into your application database. The software then draws up an initial list of potential candidates for the position to be filled, without the recruiter having to get involved.
Moreover, thanks to the automatic resume analysis, the recruiter can refine this list of candidates. And, at the same time, avoid wasting time on so-called “spam” resumes!
Task 3: Maintain the link with your candidates.
This multifaceted task is perhaps the most complex of all. And the one that takes up most of a good recruiter’s time. Especially as it does not occur at a specific time, but throughout the staffing process. Acknowledgement of receipt of an application, refusal or offer of an interview… each stage of the staffing process is an opportunity for the recruiter to communicate. And in a context of talent shortage, poor communication with your candidates can have disastrous consequences. Because today’s talent is looking for a personalised and authentic digital experience.
How can you free up time to work on your communication with your candidates? And how can you avoid being overwhelmed by low-value micro-tasks every day?
Without an ATS
Do you know how many candidates have their hopes dashed by a bad experience with a recruiter? In a study published last September, 83% of respondents said they had no direct or indirect interaction with recruiters after sending their application, and 27% did not receive any acknowledgement of receipt after applying. Yet a candidate can spend several hours improving its application. It is therefore not surprising that this lack of response can be a source of disappointment. And this feeling can be very damaging for the temporary or permanent employment agency. Indeed, according to this Talent Board study, 35% of jobseekers who have had a bad application experience are likely to leave negative comments online.
These figures speak for themselves: it is more than necessary to optimise communication during recruitment. This is both to meet candidates’ expectations and to retain them throughout the recruitment process. Tom Erb, speaker, author and specialist in the staffing and recruitment industry, shared this observation in an interview conducted last year and published on our pages.
With PRIM Logix
Obviously, good candidate communication is only possible if you manage to allocate time to this specific task. That is, it must be done between two operational constraints.
This is where the use of an ATS like PRIM Logix comes into its own.
When you use ATS software, you can accurately track the path of candidates who apply for your vacancies, from the moment you receive their resumes, through the interview, to their onboarding in your company. Better still, you can automate low-value exchanges and streamline touch points with your talent, such as application acknowledgements.
As we know, better application management with an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) contributes significantly to improving your employer brand with candidates. By optimizing the various stages of the candidate process using an ATS, you improve the quality of your recruitment and consequently the image you send to your candidates. It is also in this sense that your temporary or permanent staffing agency has everything to gain from a successful digital transformation.
At a glance: 4 advantages of PRIM Logix to optimise your communications with candidates:
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Discover how PRIM Logix can transform your business. Schedule a demo today and see for yourself how our solution can revolutionize your recruitment process.
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