Your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a necessary part of your company’s hiring process. Without an ATS, you could not manage a large volume of applications, track each individual through the correct hiring process through on boarding, or ensure compliance with legal requirements.
An ATS is necessary, but it may not be sufficient to support all your hiring needs—especially if your company still needs to hire more people, hire faster, hire at lower cost, or improve diversity. Needs like this are better met with a Talent Intelligence Platform.
Once you have both a Talent Intelligence Platform and an ATS, there is further value in connecting these two technologies with two-way syncing. Here are five reasons to connect your ATS system to a Talent Intelligence Platform.
1. You can search your ATS
Applicant Tracking Systems are most important for standardizing business process and maintaining records. While they perform these functions very well, they are not ideal for searching the ATS database to discover new talent.
As your ATS database grows, potentially to millions of candidate records, it can become difficult to locate talent within the system. Keyword-based and Boolean searches work poorly against candidate data. Unless you know the name of a specific person whose record you wish to find, your ATS search will probably fail.
By connecting your ATS to a Talent Intelligence Platform, your existing database is accessible to the superior search capabilities of the Talent Intelligence Platform: fast indexing, ranking, and context driven by AI. The AI-driven Platform becomes the best way to interact with your ATS data.
2. You can update ATS candidate profiles automatically
Applicant Tracking Systems only contain the data that candidates have provided about themselves, and that recruiters and hiring managers have entered about the candidates. At the conclusion of the hiring cycle for a given candidate, the data is no longer refreshed.
This reality creates a challenge if your company ever wishes to recruit past candidates. Your information on a candidate’s contact information, location, current employer, skills, and professional interests quickly goes out of date.
When your ATS is connected to a Talent Intelligence Platform, the Platform’s profile for your candidate can be automatically kept current with publicly available data. You will be able to stay in touch, and remain relevant, to a larger percentage of your past candidates. And you’ll be able to discover when past candidates might be ready to consider your company again.
3. You can nurture and recruit “silver medalists”
You hire exactly one person for every open position. But chances are, you had at least one other candidate qualified and willing to take the job. The people you didn’t hire would have become great employees, and just didn’t happen to get hired at the time—so wouldn’t you want to employ them in the future?
All the investment of effort that went into recruiting these “silver medalists” is wasted if your company never engages them again. Sadly, that is often what happens. There is no place on a podium for the runner-up for a job—usually, there is only silence. What a waste!
With a Talent Intelligence Platform connected to your ATS, you have a system that’s designed to maintain relationships with the strong performers you might still want to hire in the future. The Talent Intelligence Platform can continually nurture your past candidates, until the day arrives when you will be in a position to recruit them again.
4. You can analyze hiring criteria objectively and without limitations
Within an ATS, you have very limited ways to evaluate the potential performance of your candidates. Your interview notes are important, but subjective. You can rate candidates using test scores, past companies, years of experience, and other measures, but these are limited to the data you have.
A better and more objective way to evaluate candidates is to use AI-based models, but even if your company has tremendous technical skill to develop these models, you are limited by your data. The world’s largest companies still possess only a tiny fraction of the world’s candidate data.
A Talent Intelligence Platform offers you the ability to use models developed with the world’s intelligence. Connected to your ATS, this Platform can tell you which of your candidates best meet your holistic requirements far more accurately than any other single system or method. As a result, you can define the hiring criteria appropriate to your business and be confident that your eventual hire was considered against those criteria.
5. You can transfer data more easily among ATS and other corporate systems
Your ATS may not be designed to connect with other enterprise systems. If you decide to switch ATS providers, customize new technology, or combine existing systems, you might discover that moving your data is difficult and costly.
A Talent Intelligence Platform, by its nature, is designed to work with other sources of candidate data—ATS especially. Most ATS technologies can be integrated to a Talent Intelligence Platform easily, culminating in a two-way sync in a matter of hours.
Therefore, you can use a Talent Intelligence Platform as a hub of candidate information, bypassing the limitations of ATS data transfers.
ATS integration with Eightfold’s Talent Intelligence Platform makes your applicant tracking system more valuable
With your ATS connected to a Talent Intelligence Platform, you gain fundamentally new powers. You have the latest information on your candidate pool. You can find candidates who meet your company’s current needs, no matter how large your database is today. You can make more hires from past candidates, and look at their qualifications more precisely and objectively.
All of this new power doesn’t make your ATS less important. On the contrary, it makes your ATS more valuable as a record of everyone your company has ever encountered. ATS integration with a Talent Intelligence Platform unlocks value.