Common Mistakes To Avoid When Buying An ATS

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) streamlines hiring process by automating repetitive tasks across posting jobs, screening resumes, tracking job candidates, scheduling interviews, and facilitating candidate communication. Additionally, it allows for better collaboration between stakeholders, hiring managers, and candidates to make informed decisions easier throughout the recruitment process.

Today’s top talent gives immense importance to candidate experience, as it directly reflects an organization’s work culture. Hence, choosing the right ATS recruitment software becomes essential as it:

• Compliments your company’s professional branding to attract quality candidates
• Improves candidate engagement
• Improves adoption rates by hiring teams and candidates

Instead of making the hiring process more productive, the wrong ATS misaligns your efforts vs. output, wherein you further burden your recruitment teams with repetitive and manual tasks.

Before finalizing your recruitment software, review this checklist of common mistakes when buying ATS to make an informed decision for your hiring process.

1. Not Defining Clear Objectives

An Applicant Tracking System is not a one-size-fits-all solution — its effectiveness depends on how well it aligns with the specific organizational goals. Since the end goal is to embrace digitization, the recruitment software should remove manual tasks in your hiring process and automate repetitive tasks.

For example, enterprise recruitment software is unsuitable for a rapidly growing startup as both have different hiring processes, job profiles, budgets, and volume requirements. A startup may end up paying for features irrelevant to its recruitment teams, thus decreasing the return on investment for the adopted ATS solutions and stressing its limited resources.

To avoid such recruitment software misalignment, clearly jot down your objectives of adopting ATS for your hiring processes. For this, it is helpful to adopt the Objective and Key Results (OKR) strategy. It is a goal-setting methodology that helps businesses define what they want to achieve (the objective) and how they will measure success (the key results). OKR Strategy provides a structured approach to break down large objectives into actionable key results, adopt ATS with relevant features for execution, and measure the system’s effectiveness for further optimization.

Consider an example of a business that plans to adopt ATS to scale its team size. Here’s how they can align their objectives with ATS requirements by preparing a table:

• Problem: Define an issue in your current hiring process
• Current solution: List all possible solutions currently used by your recruitment team to solve these problems.
• Required feature: Define the required ATS feature that will solve this problem
• Objective: Define the objective of ATS that is measurable

Note: Your ATS objectives must align with your overall business goals, such as scaling operations or entering new markets.

2. Neglecting to Compare Multiple Options

Compare all feasible Applicant Tracking Systems available in the market before finalizing one.

For example, some ATS may excel at resume screening but lack robust candidate communication tools. Depending on your objectives, one must check which ATS software provides the best and most comprehensive features for your required use case.

In the case of ATS software, you have to conduct research in two main domains:

• Secondary research: Analyze customer reviews on software comparison sites or consult an automation expert. Comparing multiple ATS options allows you to evaluate different functionalities, pricing models, and user experiences.
• Run pilots: Organize a pilot adoption program with small recruitment teams for a use case and analyze performance to gain practical insight into how suitable the ATS is for your hiring process. Involve the vendor’s support team throughout the pilot to streamline the ATS adoption process and clear doubts.

Based on the above research, prepare a comparison matrix that outlines the key features and limitations of each ATS under consideration. Include factors like ease of use, integration capabilities, customer support, scalability, or other custom parameters and fill the table as follows:

This structured approach will help you make a more informed decision by clearly highlighting which ATS aligns best with your recruitment needs.

3. Failing To Involve Key Stakeholders

When you’re recruiting talent, you aren’t doing it for a single department. The recruitment teams have to collaborate with multiple stakeholders across departments, the management levels, and their existing team members to make sure they have the correct job details to search talent for.

But often companies make the mistake of confining the decision to the HR or recruitment team without consulting other stakeholders who are affected by the new system. Hence, make a list of affected stakeholders using below pointers:

1. Head of the department under whom the candidate will work.
2. The reporting manager for the potential candidate.
3. Determine the other departments and level of employees the candidate will interact with apart from their own.
4. The potential candidate’s colleagues.
5. Other supporting department heads like IT or finance.

Some example profiles to involve and consult when hiring for a particular job role include:

• Recruitment Teams: Primary users who need functionality for day-to-day tasks.
• Department Managers or CXOs: End-users who will interact with the ATS for candidate evaluation.
• IT Department: Responsible for technical integration and security assessments.
• Finance Team: Ensures the ATS meets budget constraints and offers a good ROI.

Such a collaborative approach helps build a holistic view of the company’s needs, resulting in a more effective ATS selection.

4. Not Utilizing Free Trials

Relying solely on free demos for ATS selection is insufficient. Videos or walkthroughs don’t fully reveal how well the ATS features align with your company’s hiring objectives.

Hence, choose or negotiate a free trial with the ATS vendor.

ATS vendors offer free trials to help you conduct pilots with your recruitment teams to test the adoption feasibility of your organization’s workflows. This provides a risk-free way for a hands-on opportunity to explore the system’s features and user experience. Thus, with the free trials approach, your final decision is based on practical experience rather than solely on vendor promises.

Tips on making the most of your free trial to run ATS pilots:

• Set a clear evaluation plan: Define what success looks like for your ATS adoption within the given timeframe of the free trial. Use the recruitment software objectives defined and make them measurable for tracking and analysis.
• Document pilot results: Keep detailed notes on what worked well and what didn’t during the ATS free trial. This documentation will further help when comparing multiple ATS options to make a final informed decision.
• Don’t overlook small features: It’s easy to focus on the major functionalities and ignore smaller features that could impact daily use. Explore all aspects of the ATS — including how it handles tasks like updating candidate information, sending notifications, or managing data privacy.
• Involve multiple user personas: Encourage various team members, including recruiters, hiring managers, and IT staff, to participate in the ATS free trial. This diverse input will provide a comprehensive view of the ATS’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Test for scalability: If your company plans to grow using recruitment software automation, it’s important to test how the ATS performs under an increased workload. Simulate high-volume recruitment scenarios during the pilot and check if the Applicant Tracking System can effectively scale accordingly.

Most important is to collect feedback — which is useful only if it’s acted upon. So, attend to your team’s concerns and suggestions, as they are the ones who will use the ATS daily.

5. Prioritizing Price Over Value

It is understandable for businesses to pay emphasis on budgets, especially for companies with limited resources. However, do keep in mind that prioritizing the lowest-priced ATS option can lead to long-term inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and ultimately higher costs.

For example, a cheaper ATS may lack data integration capabilities, leading to additional costs for data migration during setup. Such systems are often not scalable, and future migrations to another ATS will incur further expenses and time. This results in a poor return on investment (ROI) with ongoing additional costs and effort.

We have shared a few tips to help you make a shift to consider value over pricing to make an informed decision:

How to calculate long-term savings vs. ATS costs?

The cost of an ATS extends beyond its initial price. For example, an ATS with robust features like advanced analytics can help identify bottlenecks in your hiring process or understand where the best candidates are coming from.

Using this insight, you can refine your recruitment strategy accordingly. When an ATS delivers such comprehensive solutions, it justifies the higher cost through improved efficiency and better hiring outcomes.

To realize these potential savings, you need to design key performance indicators during the ATS pilots. For example, measure the time saved by your HR recruitment teams to screen resumes, actively communicate with the candidates, employee onboarding, etc.

If the ATS vendor doesn’t offer a generous free trial, check case studies provided by the vendor to decide. Check the quality of potential candidates on the ATS screens and the attrition rates of hired candidates. How much time will your team otherwise take to find such candidates? Compare this time to that by ATS to determine potential savings.

Don’t forget ATS migration and maintenance expenses

Another key consideration in evaluating ATS value is how well it integrates with your existing HR and recruitment tools. An ATS that fails to integrate well means your team might spend additional hours manually transferring data between systems, which could otherwise be automated. This leads to fragmented workflows, duplicated efforts, and increased manual tasks.

Thus, it negates any initial cost savings, and may also increase costs to fix, migrate, or add new software.

6. Choosing Based on Brand Alone

An established recruitment software brand may give you the confidence to purchase, as they need to maintain that hard-earned reputation and customer trust. But this does not mean it is right for your business needs.

Many established brands have cash to spend on marketing which washes off their poor customer support, broad market coverage, and expensive pricing structure. This results in the following key considerations:

• Most established brands are Jacks of all trades but masters of none. So, if your business has a custom requirement, it may not be flexible to align features to solve it.
• Investing in an expensive, feature-rich ATS just because it’s a market leader can lead to overspending without delivering proportional value.
• By focusing on well-known brands alone, you may miss out on potentially lesser-known, but superior alternatives that offer greater flexibility, a better user experience, or more custom features.

That’s why you should select ATS based on the required features that help meet your business objectives. Being mindful of this ‘objective and feature’ criteria when you discuss your ATS requirements with the vendor will help you avoid the brand trap.

7. Not Investing in Training

Even the most advanced ATS with all the necessary features can fall short of its potential if its end users fail to use it properly. When your teams complain about recruitment software’s poor user experience or feel overwhelmed, it may cause them to revert to old, manual methods, thereby nullifying the benefits of the ATS.

A simple step to tackle the adoption problem is to provide continuous hands-on ATS training.

This means training employees not only during ATS onboarding, but also when the vendor releases new software updates. Continuous learning ensures that users are always up-to-date with the latest functionalities. It allows them to leverage the full potential of the system to streamline recruitment processes and improve candidate engagement.

Hence, when choosing an ATS provider, ensure they include continuous training services. Such workshops or online sessions also serve to share feedback and feature suggestions. Having one or more of the below training programs is a sign of a mature and professional ATS solution provider:

• Level-based Training Programs: Having a ‘university’ like training sessions that address the specific needs and skill levels of your recruitment team helps. This might include different modules for beginner, intermediate, and advanced users, ensuring that everyone, from new hires to experienced recruiters, can learn the recruitment software.
• Customer Support and Resources: Check how comprehensive their ‘Help’ section is. Use resources provided by the ATS vendor like documentation, user guides, webinars, and customer support to learn the software.
• Workshops: some ATS vendors may provide paid or free workshops that encourage a hands-on approach for users to practice using the ATS in real-world scenarios.

Further, remember that these trained users are more likely to explore advanced features to automate repetitive tasks and help optimize recruitment processes. This helps save setup and support resources as users become self-reliant in using or troubleshooting the ATS.

8. Ignoring User Experience and Accessibility

User experience refers to how easy and pleasant it is for users such as recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates to interact with the ATS.

Many established or new-age ATS solutions may offer the best or out-of-the-box features that the latest technology has to offer — but what’s the use if your recruitment teams find it unusable?

Hence, it is easy to digitize, automate, and scale your recruitment process when the ATS is user-friendly. Since it is smoother to adopt the recruitment software, it is faster to resume your usual recruitment processes without much delay.

Don’t forget the candidate’s experience

A candidate’s experience with your ATS is just as important as that of your internal users.

For example, if a talented candidate cannot navigate your ATS platform, they may just give up applying.

When choosing an ATS, test the user experience from the candidate’s side across:

• Application Process: To reduce drop-off rates due to complex application processes, make sure the ATS offers a seamless mobile-friendly experience that pushes the candidate to completion.
• Candidate Communication: communicating the application status promptly with candidates helps present an empathetic and professional work culture. Choose an ATS that facilitates timely and personalized updates for effective candidate engagement.

Consider accessibility features

It is important to consider accessibility features for both recruitment team and candidate workflows. They should be able to easily navigate and use the ATS. Screen readers, keyboard navigation, appropriate color contrast, or font sizing for those with visual impairments are basic accessibility features every ATS must have.

Such measures facilitate your diversity and inclusion efforts — and non-compliance with accessibility standards may expose your company to legal risks and penalties.

A good starting point is to make user experience a key component of your ATS evaluation matrix. Include the above considerations to evaluate interface design, ease of navigation, and user feedback from your teams and user-testing candidates.

9. Failing to Check Data Security and Compliance Features

When candidates apply for a job, they often share personal information like contact details, ethnicities, preferences, employment history, identity details, etc. Hence, it is legally necessary to assure your candidates that your company has undertaken the required data protection measures.

Data privacy is of utmost importance. It is evident from increasing regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) of 2023.

Hence, your ATS vendor must comply with these standards if you’re hiring from these regions. For example, GDPR violations can lead to fines of up to €10 million or 2% of the company’s annual global turnover (whichever is higher). This also comes with reputational damage, impacting your ability to hire top talent.

Data security features in an ATS

Below are the 3 key data security features to look for in an ATS.

1. Access controls: Look for an ATS that allows you to define user roles and permissions. It helps ensure that only authorized personnel can access sensitive data, thus reducing the risk of internal data breaches.
2. Data retention and deletion policies: The ATS should have flexible data retention settings to control how long candidate data is stored. It helps stay compliant with data protection regulations that mandate deleting personal data when it’s no longer needed.
3. Consent management: ATS must provide features to manage candidate’s consent for capturing, storing, and withdrawing access to data as per regulation.

Sometimes, even if you implement the best data privacy practices, your ATS vendors may not be thorough with their processes. Hence, conduct thorough due diligence on ATS vendors by reviewing their security policies, past security incidents, and approaches to compliance.

What are the best Applicant Tracking Systems available in the market?

Below are 5 of the best applicant tracking systems that satisfy the recommendations covered in this article.

1. BambooHR

BambooHR helps streamline the recruitment process from hiring to payroll and retirement in a single platform. You get comprehensive ATS and HR automation features across startups to enterprises, making it a suitable long-term scalable solution for growing companies. With 125 integrations, BambooHR makes it easy to migrate from past recruitment software and share or sync data with third-party apps to boost productivity.

2. Beetween

Beetween is a dedicated ATS solution that helps implement a custom recruitment strategy across attracting qualified candidates, interview scheduling, and complete candidate communication across the hiring process. Beetween lets you launch a custom career site and use its built-in CRM to centrally manage candidate communication and company branding. You also get candidate assessment tools like on-demand video interviews to screen resumes and finalize qualified candidates for further hiring process.

3. Ashby

Ashby is a recruitment software that offers dedicated, data-first, and scalable ATS features for startups and enterprises alike. Ashby provides comprehensive analytics features to refine hiring strategies. You can automate manual tasks to improve overall candidate engagement across candidate communication and interview scheduling to reduce time-to-hire.

4. Manatal

Manatal is an AI recruitment software that provides visibility into your complete hiring process using Kanban boards and customizable pipelines. You can streamline job posts across 2500 free and premium job boards to attract qualified candidates. Manatal also makes your recruitment process intelligent with AI implemented for better resume screening, candidate recommendations, and automated candidate communications.

5. Greenhouse

Greenhouse is one of the leaders in the recruitment software space that centralizes your hiring process and employee onboarding. Its customizable interview kits, scorecards, and feedback tools help make consistent, unbiased, and informed hiring decisions. Greenhouse provides 500 integrations across background checking services, CRMs, productivity tools, and more for a seamless recruitment process.

Checklist To Select An Applicant Tracking System For Your Recruitment Process

Below is a checklist to select an ATS Software.

• Define clear objectives: Prepare an OKR matrix for each of your current recruitment challenges, and set measurable goals for what you want to achieve with an ATS.
• Compare multiple options: Evaluate different ATS options based on functionality, usability, integration, and scalability to ensure the best fit.
• Involve key stakeholders: Engage all relevant stakeholders, including HR, hiring managers, IT, and finance teams, in the ATS selection process.
• Use free trials for pilots: Take advantage of free trials to test the ATS’s features and usability by all stakeholders and end-users.
• Prioritize value over price: Focus on long-term ROI and key features rather than just the initial cost to ensure the ATS meets your company’s needs effectively.
• Prioritize features over brand: Don’t rely solely on brand reputation. Focus on your business and recruitment objectives when discussing with ATS vendor’s sales teams.
• Invest in employee training: Ensure your recruitment team and stakeholders receive comprehensive training from the ATS vendor to maximize the system’s potential and ROI.
• Consider user experience and accessibility: Evaluate the user experience and accessibility of the ATS such that it aligns with your inclusive policies, supports growth, and evolves with the needs of your business.
• Check data security features: Make sure the ATS complies with the data security compliance and regulations in the regions your company plans to operate and hire from.