This week was ERE’s #RecruitingInnovation Summit and I was able to live stream Amy Wilson’s great presentation “Shiny & Useful: Recruiting Technologies You Should Know About”!

During the presentation, there was a lot of grumbling about Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and their lack of functionality when it comes to Talent Acquisition (mostly criticized for it’s lack of CRM functionality).  While some of the criticisms are probably warranted and should be addressed by ATS vendors, the real question I need to ask is:”Is it reasonable to expect an ATS to be good at Talent Acquisition functions?”

I would say reasonably no.  The bread and butter for most ATS solutions is Talent Management.  When I refer to Talent Management I see it as all the processes that happen between a candidate applying for a job until they ultimately become an employee at your company.  An ATS is designed specifically to make this process easy for your company to keep track of and most excel in a number of the following areas:

• Creating and managing job requisitions
• Storing and organizing candidate data and resumes
• Filtering and searching through applicants / resumes
• Managing interviews and recruiting process work-flow
• Conducting candidate background checks
• Creating your job application
• Creating and hosting your Career Site
• Conducting video interviews

Most ATS will perform much if not all of the following tasks pretty well and will save you tons of time and aggravation in doing so.  Some Talent Management suite vendors have also expanded their solutions to provide a number of Performance and Workforce management solutions as well as Employee Learning solutions to their ATS.

What I think is important is that you are seeing these ATS solutions shift from managing just applicants and the apply process to focusing on managing employees as well.  These solutions are focusing more on applicants and employees and less on potential candidates at the moment.

So when you are looking for a Talent Acquisition technology solutions, here are some of the functions that you will look to have:

• Global Job Distribution to any major or niche job board
• The ability to easily post job updates to social networks
• Resume Sourcing capabilities to major and niche resume databases
• Detailed real-time recruitment metrics for every one of your recruiting channels
• Talent Network Opt-In technology that enables you to easily collect recruiting contacts during apply process, on your career site and via social networks
• Create SEO friendly job sites
• Integrate employer branding videos and content directly into the apply process and/or your Career Site.
• CRM functionality that enables you to do the following:
  •  
    • Manage, group, categorize and rate recruiting contacts
    • Create customized talent pipelines
    • Communicate with targeted groups of contacts via email & SMS
    • Leverage contact LinkedIn and Facebook profiles to keep contact information current
    • Easily search and sort candidate contacts into appropriate groups
    • Source candidates into your CRM via email, web sourcing, excel spreadsheets and mobile recruiting

Those are a few of the talent acquisition functions that technology can help you with.  The question is which of the functions above can ATS companies help you accomplish.  Let’s take a look at some of these talent acquisition functions and what ATS solutions usually provide:

Global Job Distribution: This is one of the major talent acquisition functions that most ATS solutions provide.  Most of the time, however, they provide this function by using a partnered vendor in the space.  But also note that you don’t have to always use the recommended partner vendor for this.  There are a good deal of global job distribution vendors out there that integrate and work with most ATS solutions.  The key is finding the right one for you.

Social Networking: Most ATS companies have built a way to easily post to social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn via their solution.  This is a simple solution that can provide value to your organization if your ATS provides it.

SEO Job Sites: Most ATS vendors now provide the ability to create and host your Jobs Site.  Depending on your ATS, this job site will follow SEO optimization guidelines or it won’t.  Make sure with your ATS that your jobs site follows SEO principles.

Real-Time Recruitment Metrics: While most ATS provide good applicant data (interviews, hires, etc.) they usually lack in providing recruitment marketing metrics for the recruiting channels you use (job ad views, apply clicks and applicants).  These metrics should be provided by your job distribution solution, so make sure that you are getting metrics for all your recruiting channels in real-time.  Also ask your job distribution and ATS vendors about the possibility of seeing the applicant and recruitment marketing data within one dashboard.

Recruitment CRM: While ATS solutions have an abundance of data on applicants, one major criticism is the lack of ability to search and utilize these applicants in future job campaigns.  When looking to build your Talent Network, try a Recruiting CRM.  When looking at Recruiting CRM, make sure that it not only has all the functionality listed above but that it also integrates seamlessly with your ATS to pull applicant information into it.

Some ATS solutions will provide CRM capabilities but make sure they work for your organization as their are targeted solutions that provide tons of functionality to help you build your Talent Network.

There is a growing number of ATS solutions in the market today and they all provide varying functionality.  However, the bread and butter of any ATS is Talent Management so if you are looking for advanced Talent Acquisition solutions from your ATS you may be disappointed.  Take a look at targeted Talent Acquisition solutions and platforms and determine what’s a right fit for your organization.

And most importantly make sure these solutions hook in and integrate seamlessly with your ATS.  As the value of these solutions diminishes rapidly if you can’t use it with your ATS.