Recruiters already rely on Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to perform repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as screening CVs for key words or phrases, or previous company histories that would mark a candidate as suitable for specific job vacancies. But just how much further could this go?
ATS have made a huge impact on the Recruitment sector, indeed, with high applicant-to-vacancy ratio, without ATS the job of a recruiter would, these days, be an endless round of sifting, virtual or paper! Speak to any recruiter or any hiring manager and they’ll tell you, the hardest part of the job is isolating the few truly suitable candidates from a large applicant pool.
ATS algorithms are becoming increasingly intelligent too: some ATS are built specifically to remove unconscious bias from the original sift, by eliminating fields such as the gender, age and name of candidates, opening up a larger and potentially more diverse pool of applicants. Some ATS are able to go one step further and actually recognise traits on a CV that highlight an individual as a suitable candidate, even if the key word/phrase match is low. Some systems will augment the selection process by pulling additional information about the candidate, such as details on the companies listed as previous employers, further reducing ‘legwork’ time for the recruiter. Some systems analyse language on a CV and on job specifications to identify sentiment bias. Pretty nifty stuff! ATS technology Is unquestionably here to stay – until the White Hats develop something more efficient.
Read more here.
Blog written by Francis West, CEO at Westtek.
More Westtek insights from Francis can be found in our Recruiter Growth Toolkit.
Voyager Infinity and Voyager Mid-Office are software solutions that make Recruiters’ lives easier. Voyager Infinity is a CRM used by thousands of recruiters globally to source, nurture and maintain the relationships with their clients and candidates, and Mid-Office manages the entire Pay and Bill process (IR35 ready).
