Congratulations! You’ve convinced the powers that be that your recruitment team needs an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). That’s an achievement to celebrate in its own right. Now comes the tricky bit –making sure that your project is a success. This can be easier said than done. To give your project the best start in life, you need to carefully plan how you will roll out your new ATS companywide. This article is the result of years of experience of helping to make ATS projects work for our clients. Please use it as a guide to help you think about your entire implementation process from beginning to end. And if you have any questions – please don’t hesitate to give us a call.
Our previous posts included understanding your processes, creating baseline measurements, considering a phased approach, picking the right ATS, getting hiring managers on board, keeping it simple and setting realistic expectations.
Step 8. Get your recruiters to use your ATS.
If your recruiters don’t use the system (and use it correctly) the critical info you need for your system will not be available. There are several ways to do this. First, make the system easy to use. If you have chosen an ATS with a friendly and intuitive interface, you have already crossed that hurdle. Next, get your recruiters buy-in. Ask for their suggestions before you built the system and test it on them and use their feedback. Then offer rewards for using it (such as user of the month, etc.) Tight reporting requirements and quality control of the data can also help to encourage correct usage. e.g. if someone doesn’t run a particular process in a timely manner, it may adversely impact their time-to-hire stats compared to other members of the team who are doing it – let peer pressure do the rest.
Next time we will discuss monitoring change management.
This post is an excerpt from the white paper "Twelve steps to a successful ATS implementation". If you would like to read more, you can download it now.
-Susannah
Photo credit: arbron
Hi Susannah,
I agree with your article, no matter how good the system is, people dont like change and avoid doing anything more then they have to inorder to get the job done.
We use a uk based system called www.applicantextra.com and have found it easy to use and very functional but its only when they brought in really good Outlook integration that i could get my users to really start using to its potential.
The bottom line is, we are lazy and need an easy system to learn and use to get good accurate results from. Most systems dont deliver this and thats why its so hard.
Sam
Posted by: Sam | August 06, 2010 at 15:58