11 Ways An ATS Can Save Your Company Money

Whether you’re going through budget cuts or scaling up, you’re probably being asked to do more with less. To make money, your company needs people, and your ATS is essential to getting the right people in the right roles faster. 

The right applicant tracking system properly configured, can save money by increasing recruiter productivity, employee retention, compliance, and speed to hire. Let’s look at all the ways an enterprise-grade ATS can save your company money while making better hires.

1. Automate interview scheduling. Interview scheduling can take up a vast amount of time for recruiters and recruiting coordinators. With SmartRecruiters’ automated scheduling system, food delivery and grocery store business Wolt kept the same number of recruiting coordinators while scaling from 1000 to 6000 employees in just three years.
2. Automate candidate screening. Text messaging chatbots allow you to reach more candidates, screen them all quickly, and schedule interviews without even making a phone call. It can even be done on outdated phones: Anglo American, a mining company, processed 12,500 applications in less than an hour with a text messaging system built for non-internet-enabled phones.
3. Streamline hiring processes. Scorecard hiring brings transparency to the hiring process, allowing teams to make better hiring decisions with a consistent evaluation strategy that covers desired skills, behaviors, and competencies. Increasing retention by using a system that helps you make better hires saves your company money with reduced recruiting costs later on.
4. Improve reporting relevancy: How efficient are your processes? Where are you losing candidates? With role-level drillable dashboards and export to BI tools, you can pinpoint exactly where your hiring process is breaking down and take steps to mitigate roadblocks. Wolt kept its leaders up-to-date by integrating TA analytics into its business intelligence tool. Did we mention that smart volume hiring helped Wolt get acquired by DoorDash?
5. Streamline offers: Your ATS should allow you to make same-day offers that can be signed digitally. With easily configurable offer letters in SmartRecruiters, you won’t lose candidates before they get another offer — and you won’t waste resources looking for another person to fill the vacancy left by the one who got away.
6. Automate consent and candidate data retention. Non-compliance can be costly, so you must ensure that candidates consent to each type of interaction. Additionally, your system should be configured to automatically handle candidate data retention as required by law in your local jurisdiction to minimize the risk of non-compliance.
7. Empower internal mobility and referrals. An ATS with an internal jobs portal that simplifies employee job search and referrals improves your employee experience, increases retention, and boosts morale with referral bonuses. After just three months with SmartRecruiters Employee Portal, telecommunications company CityFibre filled 40% of its positions with referrals and internal hires. 
8. Advertise in the right places.  The old adage about advertising, “I know that half of my money is wasted, but I don’t know which half” is rendered obsolete with the automated ad spend adjustments in a modern ATS. With SmartJobs, you can manage all your job board contracts all in one view and optimize spending in real-time.  
9. Amplify your employer brand. Employer branding and a careers page may require some upfront investment, but this is the place where spending a little can save you a lot. Candidates can self-select and get inspired by your mission and growth opportunities. For Aspen Skiing Company, better job visibility on a central careers site resulted in a 24% reduction in recruitment marketing spend.
10. Streamline your recruiting tech stack. Fees add up and people waste time chasing reports from system to system. By bringing a CRM, recruiting, onboarding, internal mobility, and referrals all under one roof, you get analytics in one place and reduce the IT burden.
11. Integrate with time and money-saving tools. Perhaps your ATS can’t do everything, but it can make it easier for you by integrating with tools that bring you time and money savings. Background checks, reference checking, and AI-powered sourcing are just a few of the solutions in your recruiting tech stack that promote efficiency and time savings when integrated into your ATS.

As we’ve shown, an applicant tracking system impacts the amount of time recruiters, hiring managers, recruiting coordinators, legal, and IT staff spend on getting the right people in the door – and that time is money.

For a deep dive into how money in multiple ways across your talent acquisition function, download our Guide to Evaluating the Business Value of a Talent Acquisition Platform.

In addition to more details the 11 items listed here, you’ll get information on 5 business value drivers for talent acquisition and 2 checklists to help your organization prioritize its TA platform search. Get in touch with us today and see how we can help save your company time and money by creating a more efficient talent acquisition process.