For many organizations, the ATS represents the central technology that they use to recruit top talent.  It provides a great way for them to capture applicants and manage the hiring process from apply to hire.  Through these functions, the ATS is an integral technology for your recruiting process.

However, when you think about the recruiting process, the ATS by itself leaves a little bit to be desired.  While it does a great job with managing the hiring process, it often lacks in its ability to attract & make sure that the right candidates are becoming applicants in your hiring process.

In order to supplement your ATS and ensure there's a better flow of qualified candidates into your hiring process, there are a few technologies that can help super-charge your ATS:

Job Distribution with Metrics:  Many ATS vendors offer some sort of distribution capabilities to common boards but few offer the wide range of recruiting destinations that a job distribution provider will.  The value of distributing all your jobs through one system is not just the massive time savings it provides to your recruiters but more so the comprehensive metrics you capture for every recruiting destination you use (global job boards, social networks, sponsored ads, etc.)  A job distribution solution will also ensure the accuracy of the data that enters your ATS.

Best of all, try to work with companies that enable you to leverage recruitment marketing metrics (views, apply clicks, applicants) with valuable ATS data that you capture (qualified candidates, hires) so you can get a full view of your recruitment funnel.

Recruitment CRM:  While you will house your applicants in your ATS, you'll want a place to centralize all your recruiting contacts, that's where the CRM comes into play.  The Recruitment CRM provides two necessary functions that ATS systems often lack.  First, the ability to send customized messaging to targeted groups of candidates (this functionality varies among ATS)  Second, the ability to capture candidates in a number of different ways.  From doing it directly during recruitment ads to sourcing them in directly from Excel or Email to opting in via the recruiting portals you own, a CRM can help capture & centralize those contacts.  These contacts should be separated from the applicants you collect in your ATS.

Once you build up the contacts in your CRM, it becomes a new sourcing tool for you to be able to drive more qualified applicants into your ATS for every new job campaign.

Flexible Career Sites: This is one that comes up a lot but many of the ATS versions of Career Sites provide little in terms of flexibility of being able to create new content easily.  As a recruiting organization you will want to create landing pages with dynamic content for the different candidate groups that you are marketing towards.

While this is not available with many Career Site technologies through the ATS, recruitment marketing technology vendors provide functionality that enables you to create SEO friendly jobs sites that can be home for this dynamic content & landing pages.  These pages can be used to supplement or replace the ATS career sites you currently use.

All three of these technologies can help you better market your job opportunities to candidates and drive more & better applicants into your ATS.  They do this by dealing with the recruitment marketing part of the hiring process, focusing on the activities before a candidate becomes an applicant in an ATS.  And in coordination with the ATS, they can help super-charge your recruiting results leading to a better overall ROI.