1 Research- Start hunting for ATS vendors relevant to your industry only. Refrain from making assumptions on this stage and ask for referrals, evaluation and the best would be a trial. Shortlist whether your desired ATS caters to staffing, small business or big enterprises. All major ATS vendors do share few of their customers list on website; not all but yes quite a few that can help you figure out your industry types. Do check reviews & feedback about their services and confirm with industry peers, how stable & effective their tools are when in-use.

2 User experiences- Most important how easy it is going to be for my people to use this ATS. Goes for both sides; Employers & Candidates. You don’t want to loose grip on this one. So form a team or call your IT chaps that can play around with the software and share a word or two about its interface. It should be easy for sure, intuitive and quite logical to use. For technology buying go for the one which is simple, nimble and clear on display or else you’ll be lost in flashy designs and swanky automation tricks.

3 Performance- Now if we go by basics, we won’t get any trouble. Run the ATS trial or system for a while. Ask them to show complete process in product demonstrations. Don’t hesitate to repeat the same on their customer’s website and as a candidate, try uploading the resumes and see how it works at their end as well. You won’t be asking for more here if you want advanced features like sourcing social profiles of candidates, searching or matching profiles in database and having all this done in One click makes more sense.

4 Support- Majority of the companies play ballgame here and you won’t know till the end that majority of the ATS vendors earned major part of their revenue from support. So be specific and clear in your transactions. Go minutely with their SLA and service terms condition. Ask all this in the integration stage only and know how often you’ll need them. Calculate the support costs before you go ahead with payments.

5 Payments- Finances do affect our choices in selecting a staffing solution and when our recommendations count, we want the very best for our employers. Every service comes at a cost and before you pay zero-in your top requirements in lieu of price you’re ready to pay. If convinced that above all amongst other vendors this ATS can give me the best user experience & improve my applicant tracking, its time to say yes and pay forward.

I’m sure if these 5 steps are in order; your ATS will rock candidate and employer experiences and bring optimum productivity levels in workforce.