How Does an ATS Help Recruiters Save Time?

In this blog, we review:

• What are the key time-saving ATS features?
• How saving time on manual recruitment helps recruitment teams boost candidate experience.
• How an ATS can help recruiters fill roles faster.
• Real-life examples of an ATS reducing time to hire and time spent on manual administrative tasks.
• Frequently asked questions about streamlining recruitment with an Applicant Tracking System

Key Ways an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) Saves Recruiters’ Time

Having the right applicant tracking system in place can have many benefits for your recruitment process, one of which is undeniable time savings, allowing in-house recruitment teams to focus on what really matters. Rather than having to spend a large chunk of their day on repetitive administrative tasks, an ATS enables recruiters to automate them and spend more time engaging with highly skilled talent, providing them with a great candidate experience and getting successful applicants through the process faster. Here are some of the key ATS features that help recruiters spend less time on admin:

• Automated Job Posting features enable recruiters to publish a single job listing to multiple job boards, career sites, and social media platforms in one click, eliminating the need to post manually on each channel.
• Built-in Employee Referrals enable your teams to refer suitable and highly skilled candidates, which can help speed up the hiring process. Referred candidates are often likely to stay with the organisation longer, which also saves time having to fill the role again.
• CV Parsing tools automatically read resumes, extract key details, and match candidates to job requirements. This helps recruiters shortlist top applicants in minutes and filter candidates based on skills and experience.
• Automated Candidate communication built into a recruitment system enables recruiters to send interview invites, status updates, reminders, or even rejection emails to multiple candidates at once, whilst still keeping the content personalised.
• Interview scheduling tools allow candidates to choose available time slots, removing the back-and-forth of scheduling. This ensures faster interview turnaround and eliminates time spent on emails.
• Centralised candidate data provides easy access to candidate information, interview notes and more, which are stored in one searchable database, making it easy to find information without switching between tools and applications.
• Built-in reporting and analytics in an ATS can instantly generate metrics like time-to-hire, source of hire, and pipeline progress, so recruiters spend less time on manual spreadsheet-based tracking and more time improving hiring results.

Why Saving Time Helps Recruiters Improve Candidate Experience

When recruiters spend less time on administrative tasks, such as data entry, interview scheduling and CV parsing, they can dedicate more energy to engaging with candidates personally. This could mean:

• Providing better candidate experience.
• Giving faster application feedback.
• Having the time to share detailed interview preparation tips.
• Following up with feedback after interviews.
• Offering a more personalised recruitment journey.
• Having the time and opportunity to make use of your ATS talent pooling capabilities for future vacancies.
• Reduced human error due to automation features and recruitment teams having more time to review important documentation has been entered correctly.
• Ability to manage a high volume of applications.

The result is a hiring process that feels more personal and engaging for the candidates, and more.

How this happens:

• Job postings go live on multiple relevant job boards instantly, appearing in front of a wider pool of relevant candidates.
• Screening happens automatically in minutes without the need for Talent Acquisition teams to go through every single application manually.
• Interviews are booked without back-and-forth emails and with ease.
• Feedback is shared instantly between hiring managers, ensuring everyone stays informed.

Meaning you can secure top talent fast.

ATS Real Life Success Stories:

Real-world examples also back up the effectiveness of an Applicant Tracking System when it comes to achieving great time savings. Eploy’s customer, The 1:1 Diet by Cambridge Weight Plan, was able to save 360+ hours annually since implementing Eploy’s ATS.

B&M used screening forms built into the application process to assess and filter candidates automatically at the early stage of the hiring process. This was previously handled manually, where 6 team members were responsible for phoning each candidate to answer pre-screening questions or identify unsuitable candidates based on role requirements. This equated to 37.5 hours per person per week. After improvements of automated screening, these hours were no longer needed to perform manual pre-screening, so the team were re-deployed into different areas of the business.

Meanwhile, Islington Council used Eploy’s ATS to reduce their time to hire to just 10 days, also cutting the average time to create a vacancy down to just 3 minutes.

HomeServe’s recruitment team also use Eploy’s Multi-Poster to send vacancy details to preferred job boards. By sending the same vacancy simultaneously to the chosen job boards, the team saves time and can better manage vacancies, applicant tracking, and candidate management. The team can also drill down on the results of each job board using the extensive ATS reporting dashboards.

And very impressively, Samworth Brothers was able to save 91 hours for the team of visually sifting and manually rejecting CVs, as Eploy has eliminated manual checks, saving at least 1 minute per CV.

For more real-life recruitment successes and ways Eploy’s customers have saved time and cut time to hire by using an Applicant Tracking System, visit our case studies page.