Applicant Tracking System Needs

In our most recent class we discussed Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), their purpose, capability, and how a company's needs and requirements for their ATS can vary. Much of the need that a company will have will depend on candidate flow.

I have worked with three different ATS systems, and they have met company needs to varying degrees.

The first ATS that I worked with was a very simple called Newton (side note: Wow! It looks like they heavily revamped the software since I last used it over a year ago). When I used Newton I was working at a 300+ person pre-IPO technology company. For the number of recruiters and open positions we had, and the pipeline that we tended to generate, Newton did the job fairly well. It allowed us to easily review and track candidates and corresponding notes. However, it lacked a robust reporting feature, offering very limited reporting capability. But given its price (I don't know the details, only that it was VERY affordable), and the needs of the recruiting team, it was not a bad option.

The second ATS that I used was Jobvite. Jobvite is a pretty well known ATS and widely used by larger companies. (Actually, at the company where I used Newton, we considered switching to Jobvite for their better reporting feature, but in the end decided against it). Jobvite has more bells and whistles than Newton, such as being able to further differentiate user access to the ATS, allow employees to post jobs to social media, and schedule interviews through the system. But at the time that I used it, there were also a number of strange glitches such messages getting sent or received with heavy delay, notes or messages not saving, and scheduling not going out.

While Jobvite's reporting feature is rather robust, occasionally the info in the reports would be incorrect (hello, major glitch!). Also the custom report was difficult to use, and every other day reports would refuse to load or download.

When using Jobvite we have a pretty good candidate flow and a large resume archive, but, Jobvite unfortunately at the time did not allow full resume text searches (not sure about the situation now). Therefore, it was extremely difficult to search for talent that applied previously that may be a fit for a new opening.

The latest ATS that I have been using is a new company called Greenhouse (which I have heard is fairly more expensive than Jobvite, but I do not know the exact number). I would like to honestly tell the class that when you switch from one ATS to a new ATS the experience is incredibly painful, especially if you have a lot of open positions. Learning the new system, training others on the new system, getting everything set up, and then transferring data is an experience that was very trying.

All that being said, when I first started using Greenhouse there were a lot of bugs and confusion, but a lot of that seems to have smoothed out. What Greenhouse had that Jobvite lacked was definitely customer service. For Jobvite, it was a huge task to get any response about ATS issues, but with Greenhouse, I can chat someone immediately (Eastern Standard Time hours apply though, so their international coverage is limited to non-existent).

Greenhouse still needs to smooth out its scheduling feature and create a custom report building feature, but it has full resume text search and other features that Jobvite and Newton lacked. Also it has SSO capability, that at my current company, is very very necessary.

After working in 3 different ATS I have determined my own requirements for an ideal ATS beyond the normal requirements:

• Single Sign On
• Mobile interface
• Excellent customer service
• Easy to navigate (as few clicks as possible)
• Robust reporting feature (custom report builder)
• Scheduling capbility
• Full resume text search

When it comes to finding the right ATS for a company there are so many things to consider. I hope that this post helped you learn a little about 3 different ones!