Applicant Profiles

Organized Evaluation of ATS Venders

Once you have decided that your company can benefit from the use of an Applicant Tracking (ATS) or Talent Acquisition software, you must determine an efficient evaluation process. Taking a calculated approach will save time and create the data that will help make the presentation to your team organized.

Gathering Requirements
This initial step should be to develop a scope of work that will help find the services or features that are most crucial to you. Speak with all of the stakeholders including HR, recruiting, and managers with roles in the process. Create a simplified flowchart or workflow to document how candidates move from start to hire to start date. Define your requisition process in the same manner.

Establish primary and secondary objectives
Your budget and time constraints will likely be limited for this project so organization now will help ensue all objectives are met. Now that you have your processes on paper, share them with your stakeholders. Ask for comments to highlight bottlenecks or problem steps in these processes. Isolate the areas that need improvement to rank there order of importance. After narrowing down the key primary and secondary issues, create goals for each to help determine measurable factors of success. Work backwards from these goals to find the questions you want answered by prospective venders.

Evaluate venders
Contact an appropriate number of venders for information. Simple 1 to 5 scale or pass/fail scoring works well for comparison purposes. Initial response time and the professionalism of their response is a good place to start scoring. Once you determined that the software vender can meet your needs, price estimates can be requested to save everyone aggravation.

Consider how all of the steps from your workflow would be effected by each option. Intangible factors such as business size, experience, and recommendations should be a significant part of the overall equation. Compare usability factors, features (built-in or upgrades), storage limits, and license restrictions. Good venders can act as partners. Rate their willingness to accommodate your workflow(s) and solve the problems you prioritized. Be aware that some ATS venders only offer multi year agreements.

Decision Time
If you have made it to this point, pat yourself on the back. Now demo your top systems. Pay attention to the details and encourage your stakeholders to participate whenever possible. Limited trials help, but can also slow the decision process down. In the end, you should be left with only good options. Time spent planning will help avoid costly mistakes and ensure you get the credit you deserve.

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