Category: Blog

In the current highly competitive marketplace, recruitment is fraught with pitfalls for even the most seasoned recruiters. Effective recruitment now requires speed in recruiting candidates, the ability to hire a large number of candidates, and most importantly the ability to consistently find quality candidates. An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) makes the entire recruitment process simple by giving recruiters and hiring managers access to the right tools to boost recruitment and to help them quickly find the right candidates. Let us understand the top benefits of ATS.

What is an Applicant Tracking System?

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is software designed to help recruiters and hiring managers to optimize the entire recruitment process. 

A good applicant tracking system (ATS) will receive, store, and process all candidate data while providing a number of tools to better understand, search, and filter applicants. 

It will also enable you to sort and categorize the resumes and applications received based on keywords and criteria of your choosing so you can better understand which candidates are more suited to the position you are hiring for. 

Some applicant tracking systems can even scan job boards, social media platforms, career websites, etc to find candidates using keywords based on education, experience, skills, etc.

9 Benefits of ATS

Let us take a closer look at how businesses can take advantage of applicant tracking systems (ATS) to refine and streamline the entire recruitment process and ease some of the difficulties in hiring and talent acquisition. 

1. Faster Recruitment more Hires
2. Increases Hiring Efficiency
3. Increases Productivity 
4. Improves Candidate Experience
5. Delivers Social Recruiting 
6. Easy Analytics 
7. Full Integration
8. Simplified Interviews
9. All Recruitment under One Roof

1. Faster Recruitment more Hires

A good ATS will speed up the process of recruiting and could save you a huge amount of time that could be spent on more important tasks. Having candidates’ information in one centralized software that is easily viewable and searchable by HR professionals, makes it easier to find, select, and contact those that are most suitable for your business.

On top of this, an ATS system will remove many of the time-consuming manual processes of an HR professional. No more publishing job listings to each job board one at a time. One click and the advisement will be delivered to all the job sites you use in a fraction of a second. Follow-up emails or rejection letters can be sent out in batches to successful/unsuccessful candidates without having to draft each individually. Interviews can be scheduled easily with correspondence sent out automatically.

2. Increases Hiring Efficiency

Waste in terms of time and effort is something that can be ill afforded in business and the recruitment process is rife with opportunities for both. What and ATS does is it allow a business a better overview of the recruitment process while automating many of the processes required in hiring an individual.

In the past, an HR professional would have had to read through hundreds of resumes, judge their quality and suitability, create a shortlist, then begin the laborious process of contacting and inviting to interview. In modern business, screening every resume you receive is often unrealistic and you may have to dismiss some candidates without looking at their details thoroughly.

With an ATS you can search through resumes and applications for specific skills, experience, or education that is vital to the role without having to read each resume in turn. This makes creating a shortlist a far quicker prospect. Then, with the click of a button, the applicants on the shortlist can be invited to interview, and letters/emails generated automatically. This gives you more time to focus on the more important aspects of recruiting that can’t be automated, like interviewing. Moving on in this article on the benefits of ATS, let us look into productivity.

3. Increases Productivity 

An increase in productivity often comes hand in hand with saving time and being more efficient. If you can automate the tasks of an employee, then you make them more productive.

This statement is true for HR professionals. An ATS system gives them a number of tools that help them save time and effort. Tasks like contacting candidates via email, generating letters automatically, searching through resumes using keywords, or generating reports automatically are all geared towards efficiency.

Without the need to manually read applications, draft rejection emails or invite to interview letters, or manually share information with other departments, you naturally reduce the amount of time an HR professional will have to spend on the task. This is the very essence of increasing productivity.

4. Improves Candidate Experience

On top of building a more efficient recruitment process, an Applicant Tracking System will enhance the experience of candidates exponentially. Hiring the right people in the current market often means creating the right experience for them. In many ways, recruitment is a customer market out with candidates as the customers.

The people you hire will become your brand’s ambassadors so creating a climate that they buy into and they can see is well put together and efficient is vital.  And regardless of whether they are hired or not, a good Applicant Tracking System will provide a professional experience they may recommend to others.

No more will a candidate be forced to wait months for a letter only to be told their application has been rejected. No more dodgy letters with spelling and grammar errors inviting applicants to ‘interview’. Most ATS software can create incredibly professional emails and letters branded with your logo and words automatically.

They will also ensure that candidates are kept in the loop at all stages of the process. At the end of the day, this will leave them with a better opinion of you as a company win or lose. Next, in this article on the benefits of ATS, let us look into social recruiting

5. Delivers Social Recruiting 

We mentioned this briefly earlier. Social media is becoming incredibly important in the recruitment arena but understanding how to utilize it effectively can be difficult. On top of this, the fickle nature of the platform requires a careful approach because one false move can damage your company’s brand.

As a business, the audience you reach on social media will consist of customers, clients, current employees, and potential employees. That’s a lot of people. If you fail to connect effectively with this audience, your business can be seen as arrogant or uncaring. It can also appear to be behind the times. A good ATS system will include many tools for using social media effectively in any recruitment campaign, including:

It will allow you to post any job listings to all your social media channels automatically as well as job boards and agencies.

It will allow you to engage potential candidates on social media. If they have a question, you will be able to answer it easily and the ATS may even be able to guide them through the application process.

Some advanced ATS software will allow you to search social media for specific skills, education levels, or other keywords. This is most effective when using sites like LinkedIn which specialize in helping businesses and candidates connect.

6. Easy Analytics 

One of the best features of an Applicant Tracking System is the way that it not only collects vast amounts of data on your recruitment process but also allows you to analyze and collate it easily. This can be a great way to dig into your hiring policy to see where it may be falling flat.

If you want an overview of the entire recruitment process, an ATS can give you this. You can see simple things like how many people applied for a job listing and how many of them were accepted to move to the interview stage. If you are getting a lot of initial applicants but few have the skills to move to the next stage of the recruitment process, then your initial job listing may be lacking or you may be advertising in the wrong areas.

If you want a deep dive into things like the skillset and education of the people applying for your vacancies, an ATS will give you the option to analyze these too. It will even be able to tell you how many applicants came to you from social media and how many sent their resumes by email. A good ATS system will give you total flexibility over the data you analyze giving you the option to take a broad overview or a granular approach to the reports you generate.

On top of this, ATS software can create reports automatically at periods of your choosing. No more time-consuming number and data crunching by HR teams just to tell you your job advert was poorly worded. With the click of a button, the report will be delivered to your inbox in seconds. Next on the benefits of the ATS list is Full Integration.

7. Full Integration

A good ATS system will integrate with the software you already have. This will allow data to be passed back and forward between the systems with little to no user input, thus saving more time and increasing efficiency further.

An ATS system that integrates with other software will have the ability to send candidate information, resumes, application forms, and any other data from your ATS to a 3rd party software. This software could be something as simple as an email client or as complex as a database program.

The main benefit of integrations is that it can further speed up the candidate application process as well as provide functionality beyond what the ATS provides itself. It can also allow extra data reporting and analysis tools to help you make more informed recruitment decisions.

8. Simplified Interviews

As well as automating the process of sending out letters inviting candidates to interview, an ATS can allow you to manage the interview scheduling process more easily. Having an HR team fill out a schedule manually can be time-consuming and prone to error. An ATS can allocate slots automatically and provide a central diary that can be changed quickly, with letters and emails advising of alterations generated automatically.

Easier sharing of information between departments – collaborative hiring

If your business is large and you have a variety of different teams or departments to juggle, dissemination of information can be tricky. An ATS system provides a central touchstone for the entire recruitment process, making hiring people collaboratively easier.

This is a great way to pool resources, talent, and skills while empowering team leaders. After all, your line managers understand your employees better than anybody and will see how any potential hires fit into the current setup more easily.

Interdepartmental communication can be one of the most troubling sticking points in recruitment and can slow the process down significantly. By the time a team leader responds to an email about a client, the candidate may have already jumped at the chance to join a different business that ran a more efficient recruitment process. An ATS gets around this by keeping everything centralized and viewable by all stakeholders in the hiring process. Finally on our benefits of ATS list is performing all recruitments tasks under one roof.

9. All Recruitment under One Roof

The final benefit of using an ATS software system is, in a way, an accumulation of all the other benefits we have discussed above. By making the recruitment process more efficient, providing better collaboration between those involved in the process, making interview scheduling easier, and freeing up time for your HR professionals to concentrate on the task of interviewing, you speed up the process of hiring.

There is a saying in business that the early bird catches the worm, and this is true in recruiting. The longer you make a candidate wait, the more chance there will be of them looking elsewhere. Most people when looking to find a new job will apply to more than one business. If your recruitment process is laborious then don’t be surprised if the best candidates slip through your fingers.

There you have it. Good quality ATS software will not only streamline your entire recruitment process but make it easier to find the right candidates at the right time.

An ATS which integrates well with your CRM & HRIS helps you get benefits beyond the usual ATS solutions available in the market. To know more about how an integrated solution might help your business, you can checkout out Oorwin product page.

Discover how a truly modern, AI-powered Applicant Tracking System can help businesses achieve a competitive advantage in the fast-paced staffing industry.

In the rapidly transforming staffing industry landscape, automated solutions are necessary for any organization to stay ahead of the curve.  This is especially true for the tedious and time-consuming process of recruiting candidates. 

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is an easy-to-use software that helps recruiters find and hire candidates in an organized way. The main purpose of a truly modern ATS is to make the entire recruitment process efficient by filtering, ranking, and suggesting candidates. The ATS also offers actionable insights using intelligent algorithms.

In this blog, we offer a deeper understanding of the various functions of an ATS. We will explore the most crucial features of a modern ATS, its top advantages, and understand how it helps businesses achieve a competitive advantage. We will also explore why an AI-powered ATS can be immensely beneficial for your staffing business.

What is an Applicant Tracking System?

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is software that manages the entire recruitment process of a company and helps speed it up by providing effective, time-saving tools. In short, it helps companies, hiring managers, and recruiters quickly reach, attract, identify, and hire the best candidates. 

An ATS typically handles tasks such as posting jobs, storing applicant data, and screening applications. A modern ATS, however, goes beyond the basic functionality to offer actionable insights to recruiters and helps them track and rate applicants. An ATS also brings your entire recruitment team on one page with a unified database so the whole team can easily collaborate. 

Benefits of using an Applicant Tracking System

1. Save time
2. Reduce hiring costs
3. Improve review process
4. Improve Application Process
5. Enhance Collaboration Between Recruitment Team Members
6. Reports and Actionable Analytics 
7. Improve the Quality of Hire
8. Robust Resume Storage
9. One-Click Job Posting
10. Increase Employer Branding

Save Time

An ATS software reduces the time spent with administrative tasks, saving your recruiters time for other important tasks. It does all the work such as publishing open positions on job boards and social sites, sending follow-up emails, and organizing resumes and applications only in a few clicks. 

It tracks candidate responses and it even sends reminders so you can save a huge amount of time and get a better picture of all the candidates on one, easy-to-use dashboard.

Reduce Hiring Costs

By reducing the time spent with administration and management and automating the most time-consuming tasks, an ATS can be a highly cost-effective solution for staffing companies looking to streamline the recruitment process.

With a modern ATS by their side, recruiters can focus their energy on more high-value tasks rather than spending hours in zero-value processes like adding or updating resumes, manually sifting through hundreds of profiles to find the right candidates, and publishing jobs on various job boards. 

Improve Review Process 

Filtering out applications and analyzing resumes to hunt the right candidates is a hectic and sometimes messy process. 

Applicant Tracking Systems provide the recruitment teams with simple tools to automate steps like screening, filtering, ranking candidates. 

An intelligent, AI-powered ATS automatically parses CVs you receive, ranks the candidates automatically based on your criteria and presents candidate data in a transparent way that makes comparisons fast and simple. 

Finally, an ATS eliminates a huge amount of paperwork making recruiting not only convenient but also environmentally friendly. 

Improve Application Process

Since it provides a step-by-step guide to all the candidates from presenting the role itself to attaching resumes, portfolios, and other additional documents, it enables applicants to apply quickly and easily. 

The process and the platform give a determining impression of the company and it almost functions as virtual assistance where all the questions get answered without having to write emails addressed to the recruitment team.

Enhance Collaboration Between Recruitment Team Members

Using one single recruitment software highly improves communication and collaboration between team members. Team members and managers involved in the recruitment process can add notes, ask questions, mark details, and track everything about applicants. 

It saves the time spent with meetings and it provides clear communication, so every member has the same amount of information on the possible and potential candidates. It also helps in managing tasks, scheduling, and preparing for personal interviews.

Reports and Actionable Analytics 

An AI-powered ATS software generates data-backed reports and customized analytics to help to hire managers and recruiters easily monitor the whole recruitment process. It provides data such as the effectiveness or a job posting, the click-through rates and engagements, or even the demographics and main characteristics of the applicants to optimize further procedures and steps. 

It’s an excellent tool to help businesses understand the market and improve their progress to maximize the returns of their invested energy, money, and time.

Improve the Quality of Hire

Powered by the latest advancements in technology, an ATS can offer the best candidates for any given job by comparing hundreds and thousands of CVs. An AI-powered ATS can use semantic search algorithms to make sure no candidate is overlooked and that you always make the best placement decisions.

An ATS not only has a positive effect on the first steps of the application process, but it improves the quality of the whole by being a professional and reliable platform.

By using an ATS software, a well-prepared and communicated interview is guaranteed. It provides a calendar for candidates to choose the most convenient time for an interview and it sends out a pre-written agenda to help both parties prepare for it. It makes the process smoother and much more professional than sending emails and scheduling candidates manually.

Robust Resume Storage

Applicant Tracking Systems are a great tool to store and access resumes. The data and application of candidates are easily accessible and can be analyzed for better decision making. 

An ATS can help you track applications easily with rich filters. It saves time and gives companies the possibility to reach a bigger number of potential candidates besides easily publishing open positions on job sites and social media.

One-Click Job Posting

By posting the open job description and the possibility to join the company as an employee, the possibility of reaching and hiring the right candidate is bigger. But selecting the platforms and following the registration process of each site is not only time-consuming but also chaotic. 

An ATS system helps to share the job ad on every social site and many additional job-seeking platforms just by one click. A consistent and branded job posting is provided across each site and the company’s own website. 

Increase Employer Branding

One of the best features of Applicant Tracking Systems is that they can be personalized and designed to be coherent with the brand identity. Logos, photos, videos, and personal toned paragraphs can be added, which help to present a site that is corresponding with the company’s DNA. 

It’s a great tool for employer branding to show people the values of the business and inspire them to work with them. Besides that, it can be designed to be an integral part of the official website of the company.

Why invest in an ATS software?

The undeniable benefits of using an ATS not only saves time and money during the overall recruiting process but puts your company in a position where you can stay ahead of the curve and reach your objectives. 

You’ll be delivering value to your recruiters and help them make better hires in lesser time. It provides a smooth and convenient experience for both candidates and the recruiters.

Advantages of an Applicant Tracking System

Learning how to use the features and maximizing the opportunities provided by an ATS system can smoothen the application process and help companies in many ways. The tops benefits of an ATS include: 

• Speed up processes
• Improve quality of hire
• Better decision making with data analytics and reports
• Easy communication between recruiters and candidates
• A positive experience for applicants and simplified application process

Features of a modern Applicant Tracking System

To make the hiring process easier and more efficient for hiring managers and recruiters, the following features should be offered by any ATS systems:

• Automated resume screening and parsing
• One-click posting to social media platforms and job boards
• Detailed reports and analytics
• Integration with other business softwares like CRM, VMS, HRMS etc
• Interview scheduling features
• Email templates for automatization
• A user-friendly site and transparent database for applicants
• The possibility to collaborate and communicate with team members

ATS systems are designed and developed to help improve the hiring process for companies and organizations of any size. It can be personalized and branded in order to follow the values and styles of any business while making the whole recruitment process more efficient and provide a great experience for recruiters and candidates. 

It might sound a little too impersonal, since human interaction is eliminated in the first steps of the whole process. But, in fact, an AI-powered, intelligent ATS helps you find the right candidates in less time while maximizing the effectiveness of the recruitment period.

Oorwin’s AI-powered ATS

Oorwin’s remote-ready, AI-enabled ATS offers you all the above features and much, much more to give your recruiters a huge leg-up in finding the right candidates fast using cutting-edge semantic search and AI-powered candidate matching.

With hundreds of satisfied customers across US, UK, Singapore and India, Oorwin ATS offers a host of unique, state-of-the-art features to give your staffing business an edge over competitors.

Want to give Oorwin ATS a try? You can request the Oorwin product tour.

What is HRIS (Human Resource Information System)?

Human Resource Information System or HRIS is a piece of software or an online solution that fulfills all the data, information management requirements of a human resource department. Services normally include things like attendance, payroll, leave and holidays, staff management, employee engagement, as well as various other accounting functions. 

One of the main draws of an HRIS is that it allows you to track and maintain data that can be analyzed statistically to inform your business strategy. 

Most HRMS are packaged and sold as databases with each one having different functions and capabilities. This makes it incredibly important to pick the right HRMS for your company so that it addresses all your needs and keeps your Human Resource department running smoothly. 

And with the cost of a good HRIS running into the many thousands, making sure you get the right one is crucial to prevent you from wasting vast amounts of time and money.

What to look for in an HRIS

Picking the right HRMS for your company can be a stressful task and finding the right options that suit your needs is a challenging prospect.  

While a basic HRMS is fairly inexpensive, it is essential to make sure that it meets all of your needs. If you need a specific report then your HRMS will need to be able to run it. If you require your system to create post organizational charts, then there’s no point in implementing an HRMS that can’t create them.  

Speaking to HRMS developers can also be an interesting experience as the staff you speak to are often salespeople with targets to meet and little regard for what you need for your company.

With so many factors to think about, it is easy to become confused by the entire process. 

To help you out, here are a few things to consider before buying an HRIS:

• Check out multiple sources for reviews and read discussion groups and LinkedIn comments.
• Pick a system that can grow with your business as you expand. 
• Make sure that the HRMS works with any other software you already use in your company. 
• If your staff has never used an HRIS before then they may need the training to get up to speed. 
• Check that the company you purchase your HRMS software from has a good track record for ongoing support and offers an easy-to-contact team if things go wrong. 

Features of a modern HRIS

A modern Human Resource Information System (HRIS) will provide the following features:

• Easy management of all employee information
• Simplified document management
• Remote onboarding, digital signatures
• Immigration and legal compliance
• Benefits and vacation 
• Payroll integration
• Track applicants and manage resumes
• Performance tracking, skill development
• Record of disciplinary issues
• Records of employee training

Easy management of all employee information

One of the main purposes of an HRIS is to store and manage employee data such as names, addresses, titles, the position at the company, performance history (appraisals), and their salary. It should also ideally contain any medical information about them including their sickness history and any disabilities and medical requirements they may have.

Simplified document management

A good HRIS should also provide space for you to store all your business-critical documentation. This can include things like your employee handbook, health, and safety documentation, emergency procedures, sickness policies, and any safety guidelines your company needs to abide by.

Remote onboarding, digital signatures

The ability to onboard employees remotely is crucial in the current work environment.

Staffing businesses now need digital signatures for quick approvals and simplified document management with expiry reminders for full legal and immigration compliance.

A modern HRIS helps you do all this and manage the entire employee life cycle with ease from seamless remote onboarding to automated invoice generation and payments.

Immigration and legal compliance

A modern HRIS gives you complete peace of mind when it comes to compliance by offering simple immigration document management with expiry reminders. The HRIS also ensures all labor law requirements are met from a job offer, onboarding to contract termination.

Benefits and vacation 

Ideally, your HRIS will include systems for administering employee enrolment in specific benefits they have access to as well as allowing holiday allocation and booking services. Most good HRIS will provide the option for employees to access this information without having to go through the HR team. 

Payroll integration

One of the most basic tasks a Human Resource Management System should be able to perform is to integrate with and successfully run payroll services.

To be able to do this it will need to talk effectively with other financial software and accounting systems within your company as well as those in third-party companies when necessary. If your HRMS fails to do this, you may find that employees are not paid correctly or on time and your accounting software may not tally accurately with your actual finances.

Track applicants and manage resumes

Over time your business will receive hundreds (maybe thousands) of different applications for a number of different positions. Without a good way of tracking these, you may find that quality applicants slip through your fingers.

A good HRIS should not only allow you to seamlessly store applicant data, but it should also allow you to, with one click of a button, turn them from wannabe employee to actual employee when they are successful (as well as generating any specific data systems required to add them to payroll or send out offer letters, etc).

Performance tracking, skill development

Nearly all businesses these days have a form of a development plan for their employees that will allow them to record how they are performing and what their aspirations are.

Keeping these in paper form or in a basic software package like Excel or Word can be incredibly unwieldy and when an employee moves from one role to another, data can be lost. A good quality HRIS should be able to save this information centrally and allow it to be easily transferred across departments when required.

Record of disciplinary issues

Without a central record of an employee’s disciplinary history, it can be easy to lose track of who has been warned, who has been suspended, who has been demoted, as well as any other negative actions taken against them. This is especially true when they switch roles or move departments. It may even be useful to keep this record after the employee has left so that references can easily be written. 

Records of employee training

If you run a business that requires your staff to have specific training, certificates, or licenses, then having this recorded for easy viewing can be vital. Even if training records are not essential for your business, it may be useful to know who has been trained in each area so that staff can be matched easily to roles. A good HRMS should allow this information to be stored and retrieved easily. 

Benefits of using an HRIS

A good HRMS will provide your company with a way of storing and retrieving all the information you need to analyze, track, and manipulate data essential to the running of your business. It should provide powerful tools for you to manipulate the information you store for your current employees, previous employees, as well as any applicants who wish to work for you. 

Here is a list of some of the key features of a good HRIS:

• An HRIS should provide a decent level of self-service options for staff.  A good HRMS can reduce the workload significantly by allowing employees to modify and change data related to them. More complicated self-service tasks may include booking holidays and filling out documents. It may even allow them to enroll in benefits like pensions or apply for other roles.
• Errors made by Human Resource departments can be costly, time-consuming, and cumbersome for your business. They may also lead to legal issues and a negative public perception of what you do. A good HRMS will automate many of the HR team’s tasks, reducing the chance that an error can be made.
• Being able to analyze data effectively and easily is key for any business to understand how it is being run.  A good quality HRMS allows HR employees to run a variety of calculations and data manipulations efficiently and quickly. This data can even be stored inside the system to be further analyzed as more information becomes available. Many of the reports that an HRMS can perform can be run automatically when certain criteria are met, such as a specific time and date, saving more time.
• A good HRMS should be able to easily and efficiently run many of the financial management services your business requires. Payroll is notoriously time-consuming for HR teams but with an HRMS many of the more difficult tasks can be automated and changes due to things like employee raising, taking unpaid leave, and promotion can be made with just a click of a button.

Overview of a modern HRIS

A modern HRIS will look very much like a database that can be searched and accessed to bring up information about specific employees. This information should be easy to change and manipulate and anything that is amended should filter through to the rest of the software. 

For instance, if your employee changes their address due to moving home, you should be able to access their details by searching for their name and with a quick change of details, the address change will filter through to all parts of the software. It may even generate a letter to the new address to inform the employee that the change has been recorded. 

Another example would be when an employee gains a promotion. Again, a quick change on their detail page should filter through the entire system so that payroll and any documentation related to them is amended.

Outside of the basic information storage, an HRIS will also allow the creation of reports. These options should be powerful and allow a range of data to be selected with outputs set to the formats you require.

Having a good quality HRIS is vital for all businesses and can save both time and money in the long run. But it is essential to do your homework before jumping at the first system you come across to make sure it is exactly right for your needs.

Explore G2Crowd top-rated HRIS – HERE

Identify the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) staffing businesses need to track and learn how to leverage them to measure and boost productivity

As the staffing industry adjusts to the new, remote normal, it is now more crucial than ever that staffing and consulting businesses are able to effectively measure the performance of sales reps, recruiters, account managers, etc.

Before we get into what key performance indicators staffing businesses need to track, it will be useful to understand who is the ideal person to monitor the KPIs and who you should be sharing the key performance indicators with.

Who tracks the Key Performance Indicators?

Key performance indicators need to be tracked from the top to the bottom of the organization: C-suite, VP, director, branch manager, and finally recruiting and sales managers.

KPIs should not be mandated. They should ideally be an organic part of the organization and embedded in the fabric of the staffing organization itself. 

If KPIs are being challenged by the sales teams or recruiters, you need to find out what is going wrong and explore what can be done to align your teams and KPIs. 

Who to share Key Performance Indicators with

Staffing businesses also need to be transparent about the key performance indicators. One of the most important things staffing companies need to do is share their KPIs with their clients!

If a client is taking too long to hire a candidate after an interview, or if there is a trend of too many candidates being rejected, you need to communicate the metrics with the client. By sharing the metrics, you can work with the client on improving the process and removing any inconsistencies.

You can also help them understand what the industry standard for success is, and you can help them to make sure they are measuring that.

Lastly, there are new technologies that can help staffing businesses track key performance indicators with detailed metrics. 

An AI-powered Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can help you make better submissions and improve the overall quality of hire. Video has also become a very important tool for staffing businesses. For instance, the ability to carry out video interviews is one of the easiest ways to improve the quality of hiring.

And without further ado, here are the top six key performance indicators a staffing business needs to track to remain competitive in the post-Covid world.

Top 6 key performance indicators to measure staffing productivity

1. Time to Hire

Before Covid-19, IT unemployment was at 1 to 2 percent. IT unemployment went up to 5% after the pandemic. It’s clear that there is still incredible demand in the market and short supply.

The time-to-hire key performance indicator can be broken down into much more specific actions and processes: submission to interview and interview to hire.

The submission to interview KPI will tell you how quickly your customer is moving. You must share this KPI with the client so you can work with them on improving the process. This will also help you understand which customers are better for your business and which aren’t.

2. Quality of Hire

The quality of hire is crucial for all staffing and recruiting businesses. Be it agency, corporate, or retail recruiting, setting the right benchmarks for candidate quality is an important key performance indicator for everyone.

To measure the quality of hire, the company needs to track all the variables between hiring and termination.

You must keep an eye out for negative trends. When you identify a problem, you must first check for internal issues, problems with processes and teams. You can then check external issues including negative trends at the customers’ end.
Also, with video interviews now becoming mainstream, it is crucial that you deploy video to improve the quality of hire. By improving the quality of hiring using video, you can instantly improve your quality of hire KPI.

3. Candidate Sourcing

Sourcing is vital to staffing companies. We have an unlimited amount of sources: Job boards, Linkedin, social media, sourcing partners, etc.

It is important for any staffing business to diversify sourcing and spread it across different media. The most crucial step any staffing business can take is to leverage social media for sourcing candidates.
You also need to track where you are getting the most submissions, interviews, and the best candidates. Once you know which channel works for you, you can start focusing more on it.

4. Cost per Hire

Leaders of staffing companies need to look at all end-to-end expenses: recruiters, salespersons, software, staff, infrastructure, etc. when evaluating cost per hire. They need to figure out the burden on the company by adding all the costs including payroll, overhead expenses, etc.

Salespersons and recruiters also need to know what the cost per hire is, so this key performance indicator needs to be transparent.

5. Candidate Pipeline

A good candidate pipeline is extremely important for any staffing business. When a customer hires a staffing company, they are looking for quick access to qualified candidates.
The customers expect the recruiters to have already established relationships with numerous candidates that have experience and that have already been vetted.

A staffing company must always maintain a list of ‘most placeable candidates. So when someone comes in with a requirement, you can immediately place the MPC who is a known quantity. You could also share lists of most placeable candidates with your clients to proactively create opportunities.

It is also important to use the right tools. An ATS or a Candidate Tracking System can help you build this pipeline and increase speed to market.

6. Offer to Acceptance

A vital element in the staffing business, offer to acceptance is a crucial key performance indicator. 

Staffing businesses always try to retain their workers, and to do so successfully, they must first understand what drives the candidates. Failure to do so can increase rejection rates.

You can leverage an ATS to help you do this. If you see rejection go up, you can check internal processes to identify the issues. You could then go to the customer to find out the root of the problem. 

If the pay rates are too low, you can negotiate with the customer and decrease the experience required to match the budget.

Also, engagement with candidates is now more crucial than ever. You need to understand why a candidate rejected an offer and try to change your processes to improve acceptance rates. 

After Covid-19, rejections have been low as people wanted to hold on to their jobs in an uncertain business environment. But these will start to increase once people feel the market is healthy. 

So it’s vital to track the offer-to-acceptance KPI and communicate it with all the stakeholders.

We will evaluate each of the key performance indicators in detail, explore their meaning in the context of staffing, and learn how tracking these KPIs can save you vast amounts of time, effort, and resources.

As a CXO, recruiter, or HR manager, one key task on your plate is to find and leverage a great Applicant Tracking System (ATS). This article on the ATS evaluation toolkit will help you learn how to analyze pricing, features, integrations, security, support while buying an ATS.

An ATS is an essential component of a recruiter’s arsenal to find and hire stellar talent. Obtaining a highly intuitive and feature-rich ATS will make your job much easier. On the other hand, investing in a poorly-performing or confusing ATS is not only likely to cause headaches, but may also cause your company to lose out on opportunities. 

That being said, the actual process of buying an ATS isn’t necessarily straightforward. There are all different kinds of ATS software on the market today. Along with this, ATS systems may offer different pricing. For as great as a particular ATS may be, it simply may not be an option if it is out of your company’s price range.

In this article on the ATS evaluation toolkit, let us take a look at the following parameters, you can consider while buying an ATS:

• Pricing
• Features
• Integration
• Installation
• Security
• Support

ATS Evaluation Toolkit

Pricing

To start this guide on buying an ATS, we first want to discuss pricing. In some other guides, you may see pricing as the last variable that you should consider. We believe, however, that pricing is one of the most important variables because it directly affects the types of features that you can find in your ATS. In other words, the sleekest and best possible features won’t mean much if you can’t afford the ATS that has those features. 

So in terms of pricing, you will find that ATS subscriptions start at free and go up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. That being said, typical ATS subscriptions range from $25 to $250 per user per month.

Annualized, this comes out to $300 to $3000 per user per year. This is just the average range, however. There are some ATS plans that go for as low as $15 per user per month while others eclipse $500 per user per month.

As you can see, the specific price of your ATS is often correlated with the number of users or employees that you’ll have. However, you’ll want to read the fine print and understand how your targeted ATS is calculating the total price.

Some other ATS programs charge based on things like the number of active positions or job openings and available features. There are then other ATS vendors that charge a flat monthly or yearly rate. 

The good news for you is that there are plenty of options. Often, the best thing to do is to start with your budget and then create a shortlist of ATS candidates. By doing it this way, you can substantially increase the odds that you’ll find an ATS that is within your budget.

Nonetheless, the fees listed above are just the costs of subscribing to the ATS. You may find yourself paying other fees like data migration fees and onboarding charges. Keep this in mind as you are reviewing your shortlist.  Next, in this ATS evaluation toolkit is ATS features.

Features

We now want to share some of the different features that you can get in different ATS software. Along with pricing, the feature set is one of the most important factors that you must consider when buying an ATS. 

Because there are so many ATS vendors out there, you’ll find that each ATS is slightly different. Yet you’ll discover that the vast majority of ATS applications have many similar key features. They include the following:

• A Customizable Career Page: Great ATS software lets you create and customize professional career pages. Because your career page is one of the first impressions that prospects receive about your company, you want it to be crisp, polished, and representative of your brand.

• A Simple Application Process: Your ATS should make it easy for candidates to apply to open positions. An ATS that is overly difficult to navigate may turn away stellar job candidates.

• A Seamless Way to Review Applications: Depending on your company, you may receive hundreds (or even thousands) of applications for a single position. Your ATS should make it extremely easy to review those applications and send the most promising candidates down your recruiting funnel. This can include everything from interview schedulers to hiring manager collaboration tools. 
• Resume Storage and Candidate Search: A great ATS has robust resume storage and candidate search system. This means that you can build a great source of candidates and review that source when you are looking to fill new positions.
• Detailed Analytics: One of the most valuable parts of an ATS is the fact that you can see how applicants are interacting with your ATS. With an easy-to-use dashboard, you can quickly see which posts are (and are not) generating traffic among your applicant base. With that data in hand, you can then alter your job post copy to attract more high-quality applicants. Some of the top features to look for in an ATS

These are just some of the features that you’ll likely want to note when thinking about how to buy an ATS. Therefore, make sure that you carefully study the ATS on your shortlist. Ensure that they not only have these features but other features that will help you recruit and filter through great candidates.  Next in this ATS evaluation toolkit, let us look into integrations.

Integration 

Next, let’s talk about integrations. For as many features as an ATS may have, it may not be a great choice if it is time-consuming and/or expensive to integrate within your current technology stack. 

The simple fact is that ATS is just one part of any business’s recruiting and hiring process. Because of this, the last thing you want is for your ATS to slow down—or disrupt entirely—your recruiting procedures. 

The best way to go about this is to first take stock of the current recruiting and HR tools that you use. From there, take a hard look at the ATS applications on your shortlist and see if they offer integrations with those recruiting and HR tools. For instance, your organization may use tools like Salesforce, Paychex, and Indeed.

Whatever the case may be, you need to ensure that your ATS seamlessly works with your current stack. If not, you should seriously consider an investment in another ATS. 

You’ll also want to ensure that your ATS has integrations for tools that you think you may use. For example, if your organization is thinking of switching from Paychex to Ceridian soon, ensure that your ATS has integrations for all potential products that you’ll use in the next few months or years. This will save you from massive headaches down the road.

You can refer to  Oorwin Marketplace for more details. Moving forward in this ATS evaluation toolkit, let us look into ATS installation.

Installation

We alluded to this in the features section, but it is worth speaking about in more detail. When thinking about how to buy an ATS, you need to complete some due diligence on installation. 

The unfortunate reality is that some ATS applications are more difficult to implement than others. Whenever you are installing an ATS, you’ll follow a simple three-step process. That process is customizing your system, importing relevant data, and then inviting your colleagues to the ATS. It seems relatively straightforward, yet there are some that are difficult to install.

The natural question is what ATS vendors make the installation process much more difficult than it should be. While we don’t want to single out any names, the best way to find out is to speak with current or former customers of an ATS.

By seeking out these referrals and having candid conversations, you’ll quickly discover which ones are easy to install and which ones aren’t.

Security

You must also consider security when buying an ATS. This is true when purchasing any type of software, but this is especially true here. This is because any ATS handles confidential applicant data.

This can be everything from an applicant’s home address to their phone number. Any data breach, no matter how small, can severely harm your company’s applicants and your company’s reputation. In all likelihood, great applicants will apply somewhere else.

So when considering an ATS, take some time to understand how the ATS protects user data. Also, see if the ATS has reliable service and maintenance.

Hackers and bad actors are working around the clock to obtain valuable user data, so you need to ensure that your ATS takes security seriously. Again, one way to tell is to speak with current or former users of your target ATS.

This is a great way to get beyond the marketing copy and truly understand whether a particular ATS invests in security. Moving forward in this ATS evaluation toolkit, let us look into the final parameter: Support.

Support

Finally, you need to make sure the ATS vendor provides round-the-clock technical support to instantly resolve any issues you might face while using the tool.

Checking reviews in industry-leading publications and reading online customer reviews is one of the easiest ways to find out how the vendor fares when it comes to customer support.

You should also ask the vendor if they are willing to develop features and functionalities tailored to your needs and to make your user experience better. If the vendor leaps to grab the opportunity to work with you on developing custom features, you know you’ve found your match.  

Making your choice

Ultimately, this question of how to buy an ATS is relatively straightforward. By focusing on the five factors that we discussed above, you and your colleagues will be in an excellent position to choose the best ATS for you.

Finally, if you just started the hunt or have been looking for an ATS for some time, we recommend that you check out Oorwin ATS. 

Oorwin is an integrated ATS, CRM, and HRMS that helps solve many business problems with no hassle.

We provide one platform for many of your business needs, which can help you save both time and money. To learn more about our company and how we can help you, you can check out our official website.

Recruitment automation is the process of augmenting and enhancing recruiter productivity through the use of smart tools designed to improve the hiring process.

In recent years, automation has become more and more prevalent across various industries. However, the staffing industry has fallen behind when it comes to deploying the latest technologies. The use of automation in hiring has several benefits for recruiters and employers, let’s examine these in detail.

Recruitment Automation

For an industry that is entirely about people, it may seem counterintuitive at first glance to emphasize the need for automation. However, automation opens up new opportunities to transform the hiring process for the better.

• • Enhancing Recruitment Process
  • Recruiting at Scale
  • Retaining Competitive Advantage
  • Eliminating Bias

Enhancing Recruitment Process

It’s no surprise that hiring talent is among the top concerns of CEOs. Recruiting top talent is crucial for propelling innovation. The increasing skill gap started what much dub as the ‘talent wars’. Here is what it means for recruiters:

It is no longer enough to just find the right candidates, which might we add, has become a feat by itself. Recruiters cannot rely on the candidate to show off his or her skill to win a job opportunity. Passive and social hiring strategies make attracting and engaging talent just as important.

The increasing pressure on companies to attract and hire ideal job candidates demand an enhanced hiring process and practices. Recruitment automation rises to the challenge.

Recruiting at Scale

Corporate job offers attract 250 resumes on average. Of those 250, four to six get called for an interview, and only one gets the job, according to a Glassdoor report.

The sheer amount of information about candidates, from online profiles to inbound resumes, tests the ability to recruit teams to process. Most hiring teams simply don’t have enough time to adequately source, assess, and screen candidates. Personalized job searches, digital job boards, only add more data to handle.

Recruiting automation systems can help companies analyze candidate data quickly to help them make better decisions, fast. The hiring teams manage the processes while making the hiring experience better and more human.

Retaining Competitive Advantage

A while ago, we would have said recruitment automation was inevitable for companies looking to increase their competitive advantage in hiring. That is no longer the case.

Today, a candidate’s hiring experience is just as important as the process. This calls for a need to automate mundane and repetitive tasks so that the recruiters can focus on more quality tasks.

As more and more companies use automation in their hiring process, several others are adopting to stay up to date and relevant to retain their competitive advantage.

“Machine learning and AI will be embedded in 50% of the jobs by 2020. So if you as a recruiter or a Talent Acquisition professional, are not incorporating AI into your process, you are behind the game.” – DK Bartley, Senior VP, Head of Diversity and Inclusion, Talent Acquisition SME, Dentsu Aegis Network

The lockdown and social distancing measures have also played a hand. The use of digital technologies skyrocketed in every walk of life be it education, business, medicine, or recruitment. With companies concerned about the safety and health of their employees and candidates, most recruitment processes have shifted to virtual platforms boosting the use of automation.

Eliminating Bias

Unconscious bias continues to be on top of the minds of talent acquisition leaders. Recruiters believe that the biggest barrier to hiring diverse talent lies in the sourcing and qualification process.

Recruitment automation systems have the ability to address this challenge. By adding a layer between recruiters and candidates in processing applications, companies can work around the unconscious bias. In fact, 61% of talent acquisition professionals believe recruiting automation can help reduce unconscious bias within their hiring process.

Benefits of Recruitment Automation for Staffing Firms

• • Productivity
  • Efficiency
  • Consistency
  • Quality

Productivity

Over 80% of recruiters agree that recruiting automation can help increase their productivity. By effectively leveraging automation technologies, hiring teams can streamline a number of repetitive and manual recruiting activities. 

Efficiency

HR managers spend an average of 14 hours each week on tasks that probably could be automated. An increase in the overall productivity of the teams also makes way for recruiters to handle high-priority tasks which drive significant business results within the shortest possible period of time increasing efficiency.

Consistency

Automation also leads to more consistent hiring decisions, as it removes many variables that are not predictive for job performance. As mentioned, it also removes unconscious biases in the hiring process promoting performance and merit and increasing diversity.

Quality

Recruiting automation not only increases productivity and efficiency but it also improves the quality of hiring for both recruiters and candidates. By automating manual tasks, recruiters can focus more on building relationships, which in turn enhances the candidate experience.

Implementing Recruitment Automation

The room to implement recruitment automation technologies can be found throughout the recruiting funnel, from job specifications to candidate sourcing to the final hiring decision. It supports both candidates and recruiters through the hiring process.

Here is where companies find recruitment automation software the most useful:

• Sourcing – 39.6%
• Candidate qualification – 15.8%
• Interview scheduling – 15.8%
• Engaging candidates – 11.9%
• Team collaboration – 7.9%
• Candidate nurturing – 6.9%

1. Sourcing

From creating and amending job specifications to advertising them across the multitude of platforms, automation is a godsend for sourcing talent in the modern-day.

It is easier to make lists of mandatory and desired skills, qualifications, and experience that recruiters are looking for in the candidates.

Automation accelerated job advertising too. Posting open positions to the countless job boards is not just a tedious task but time-consuming too. Having the ability to automatically post new positions to job boards is a must for every hiring team. Using an automated system also reduces errors and cuts down the time spent to manually post all of the job openings.

2. Pre-screening

More than 50% of companies perform background checks to improve the quality of their new hires, according to SHRM. Recruiting automation can reduce the need for background checks as well as make it easier to send background checks as needed. 

By deploying AI solutions or automated skill tests, hiring teams can bypass the need to independently verify a person’s credibility. Skills assessments give candidates the opportunity to showcase their talent in a real challenge making the results more valuable to a hiring manager than say a reference check.

There are also tools that can scan online databases for verifying a candidate’s background information while keeping complying with employee rights and protection. Some reference check tools also scan consumer credit reports, social media, national security databases, and education records to verify a person’s identity. Recruiters receive automated reports that they can follow up on if necessary.

3. Screening

Up to 88% of resumes received for a role are unqualified. A recruiter spends 23 hours on average screening resumes for a single hire. Resume screening is still one of the biggest bottlenecks in recruitment.

From keyword parsing software to artificial intelligence and predictive analysis models, recruitment automation has an array of techniques at its disposal for candidate screening. Intelligent screening software can automate the resume screening process. It can also generate suggestions and reports based on candidate ranking or past hiring decisions.

4. Assessments

Assessment platforms are extremely valuable to evaluate relevant skills and characteristics, automatically rank candidates based on their scores. They also mitigate any potential hiring biases that might skew candidate selection.

Some assessment platforms focus on measuring technical skills, whereas some others gear towards measuring cognitive ability, personality characteristics, and situational behavior.

These often allow recruiters to combine different assessments into one online experience, providing them with a holistic view of a candidate. Most skills assessment platforms also integrate easily with an applicant tracking system to ensure up-to-date information is available on applicants as they move through the hiring process.

5. Scheduling

Recruitment management software can track the progress of candidates’ applications in the hiring process. There are systems that can automatically place successful applicants into open interview slots, with the help of a pre-built scheduling module that is capable of syncing with the schedule of all line managers.

This is a great way to make the best use of time and fill up slots with candidates across a shorter period to allow a more precise and more accurate comparison of their interview performance. Recruiters can also send automated reminders to keep candidates up-to-date on the next steps like upcoming scheduled interviews and assessments due. This, in turn, makes the candidates more prepared for the upcoming steps too.

6. Nurturing

Candidate nurturing is an important aspect of building and maintaining an employer brand. Employer branding is a company’s ability to promote and differentiate its identity to prospective employees. Everything that companies do (and don’t) adds to the candidate’s experience with the company.

It is therefore important to maintain a relationship with candidates throughout the entire hiring process. Recruitment automation makes way for candidate nurturing tools that allow companies to engage candidates through email automation.

A lot of communication between recruiters and candidates can be automated to ensure that candidates stay informed about the updates and engaged in the hiring process. Automated email flows engage the candidates throughout the hiring process so they don’t lose interest in the position.

Introducing Oorwin’s automation-ready ATS

Oorwin’s intelligent ATS can automatically harvest resumes, screen candidates, test applicants, schedule interviews, manage the hiring process, check references, and complete new-hire paperwork. With Oorwin ATS, you can reduce your time to hire by 70% and cost per hire by 60%.

Identifying and hiring the right candidates is key to the success and growth of any business and maintaining a track of the recruiting metrics is very important. In this article, we will look into 8 recruiting metrics that every company must monitor.

We are now living in a world where human capital is one of the most sustainable competitive business advantages. No matter the sector or industry, businesses are made up of people. Everyone from the CEO to the newest entry-level employee must work together to accomplish the company’s goals. 

While human capital is a company’s greatest asset, it is clear that some companies do a much better job of attracting and retaining quality talent. There are also companies like Alphabet or Facebook that do a phenomenal job of identifying the right individuals who can make a significant impact on their business. Along with creating a positive workplace culture and retaining these stellar employees, these companies consistently lead their sectors and create immense value for their customers.

Every company wants to become a sector leader yet finding the right human capital that can get the company ahead is much harder to identify. It is, therefore, worthwhile to explore different recruiting metrics that companies should monitor. 

Keeping a close eye on the following metrics can help any business get better at hiring. 

8 Recruiting Metrics that Every Company must Monitor

1. Time to Hire
2. Yield Ratio
3. Application Complete Rate
4. Applicants per Opening
5. Cost per Hire
6. Hiring Diversity
7. Offer Acceptance Rate
8. First – year Attrition

1. Time to Hire

Time to hire is a useful metric that provides insights into your recruitment process as a whole. Essentially, it is the average number of days that it takes for a candidate to proceed from applying for a vacant position to accepting that position with your company. 

From a candidate’s perspective, a low time to hire is often preferred. This signals that there are few internal delays and that your company aggressively wants to hire him or her. 

Ultimately, time to hire is a useful metric for identifying inefficiencies in your hiring process. If your time to hire is above your ideal level, think about identifying bottlenecks when you are considering candidates. Removing those bottlenecks and having a crisp time to hire can satisfy candidates and bring in new talent in an efficient manner. 

2. Yield Ratio

While time to hire was a good measure of how efficient your organization is in hiring employees, the yield ratio is more focused outward. Mostly, this recruiting metric shows the percentage of candidates from a particular recruiting source that proceeded to the interview stage.

The yield ratio is an excellent gauge of whether a particular source is forwarding high-quality candidates.

Ultimately, with the yield ratio, you want to be sure that you aren’t wasting time with potential candidates who consistently fail to make it to the interview stage. The yield ratio can help you identify those poorly-performing sources so you can avoid them in the future. On the other hand, you can use the yield ratio to identify excellent candidate sources and continue to rely on them.

3. Application Complete Rate

The application complete rate is an important metric that can provide more context on the applicant’s journey. This recruiting metric tracks the number of applicants who have completed your company’s application form. If you don’t have a universal application form, you can modify this metric to account for all of the parts of your “application.” Things like a resume, cover letter, and CV are fair game.

Your company’s application complete rate can reveal how your applicants are thinking about your application process. If you find that your company’s application completion rate is low, you may discover that a technical glitch is preventing candidates from submitting their applications. It may also signal that your application process is seen as too lengthy by some candidates. While you may have chosen your request to be deliberately protracted, the application complete rate can nonetheless provide some interesting insights about the application process.

4. Applicants per Opening

Applicants per opening are one of the more basic metrics out there yet it can provide a wealth of information. As you can guess, this metric tabulates the number of applicants who apply for a particular job opening.

This recruiting metric can show the popularity of individual job openings. It can also be a signal of the current macroeconomic environment. If there is a high unemployment rate, for instance, you likely notice that your applicants per opening will increase. That being said, applicants per opening can help you see which one of your job posts is resonating with applicants. 

5. Cost per Hire

Also called cost to fill, cost per hire is a great recruiting metric that measures the return on investment for your recruitment efforts. It does this by determining how much of your budget is being spent on new hires. 

Let’s face it: hiring new candidates is an extremely time-consuming and expensive process. From reviewing CVs and cover letters to conducting in-person interviews and reference checks, the costs of recruiting can add up quickly. When computing the cost per hire, you’ll want to account for all costs, including things like recruiter fees and ad campaigns. 

Like any other expenditure, it is critical to ensure that you are meeting your recruiting goals while staying within your recruiting budget. Tracking costs per hire can help you accomplish this objective.  

6. Hiring Diversity

Hiring diversity is another essential recruiting metric that you should track. The simple reality is that more diverse organizations tend to be more successful. This is for a variety of reasons. For instance, diversity among your team leads to more innovation. A team with different backgrounds and experiences can identify compelling gaps in the market. Diversity also creates a better work culture.

There is no universal formula or way to calculate diversity. This lack of method provides an excellent opportunity to craft a diversity policy to accomplish your organization’s specific hiring goals. Focusing on variety throughout your hiring process is a great way to unlock many of the benefits listed above. 

7. Offer Acceptance Rate

Another insightful recruiting metric is the offer acceptance rate. Your company’s offer acceptance rate is the number of candidates who accepted an offer divided by the number of offers that are actually made.

Offer acceptance rates can vary depending on the company. That said, there are some general principles when looking at this figure. A low offer acceptance rate is a signal that there is something that is holding applicants back. One potential reason is compensation. If you are offered a lower salary compared to your competitors, you will find that applicants will decide to work somewhere else. 

In the end, pay close attention to your offer acceptance rate. It is frustrating to see stellar candidates work for a competitor, so closely monitoring this metric will help reduce this outcome.

8. First-year Attrition

Finally, the first-year attrition or candidate retention rate monitors new hires who leave your company in one year or less. 

While there may be many reasons for their departure, a high first-year attrition rate is often a warning sign. It can signal that you and your colleagues are using a flawed hiring process or are failing to identify candidates with longevity. 

Companies prefer a low first-year attrition rate. Achieving this shows that the company is doing an excellent job of retaining new hires. 

Get Tracking

Ultimately, the recruiting metrics listed above can go a long way in helping your company identify and retain the right talent. Better yet, many of these metrics are mutable. In other words, you can create modified parameters to support your company’s specific needs. 

Whether you use these “out-of-the-box” metrics or modify them for your own needs, we encourage you to start tracking them today. Doing so will help you identify and retain the best possible talent for your organization. With this, we come to an end to the top 8 recruiting metrics you must monitor.

Automate your hiring process by using integrated ATS, take a look at Oorwin ATS HERE

Our first impressions working at the company, that is., the onboarding experience we have, can heavily influence how we feel about the company and how effective we’ll be at our jobs.  In this article I will take you through the 6 ways to deliver the best onboarding experience for new hires.

In those initial days, we’ve already made up our minds on whether the company’s worth your sticking around. If you look at the top reasons why people leave, bad onboarding processes make it to the top five. Yet, many companies drop the ball the moment they sign on great talent. 

When your best people start leaving, it takes a toll on your business costs, which directly impacts your revenue. For instance, some studies predict that every time a company needs to find a replacement, it can cost the company at least six months’ worth of pay. 

“For a manager making $40,000 a year, six to nine months’ pay is $20,000 to $30,000 in recruiting and training expenses.” – PeopleKeep on the real cost of losing an employee

What can companies do to retain their best talent? 

Start by analyzing the existing onboarding processes. The consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG) lists onboarding as one of the 22 HR activities that have the highest impact on business growth.

6 Ways to Deliver the best Onboarding Experience

Right from the moment you send a candidate an offer, here are six things you can do to reimagine the onboarding experience. 

• • Deliver a delightful experience
  • Document the entire onboarding process
  • Add a personal touch
  • Do frequent check-ins
  • Engage more
  • Automate the mundane

1. Deliver a delightful experience

“From a sheer tactical standpoint, you’re never going to have the same opportunity to impact people that you do on their first day. Everyone’s feeling great and psyched to be there, they’re willing to sign their lives away. You have to be organized enough to make them feel even more awesome and reaffirm their choices.” – Carly Guthrie on employee onboarding

That’s why your onboarding experience cannot be an afterthought. It should be your core focus and an integral part of how your company operates. 

For an onboarding experience to be delightful, it should start even before the employee officially joins your company. 

HelpScout achieves this by sending a welcome email campaign two weeks before the employee officially starts working. Their four-part campaign includes:

1. A welcome message
2. HelpScout values
3. Quick check-ins 
4. Remote work tips

Even small gestures such as setting up someone’s workstation, system login credentials, and a clear briefing of job duties help enhance a new employee’s Day 1 at work. 

2. Document the entire onboarding process    

People read faster than they listen. 

Also, if you forget something, you can always go back to the document and revisit the concept. That’s why you should document the entire onboarding process as it simplifies everything not just for the new hires but also for their managers. 

In times of lockdown and remote work, documentation is more important than ever for a smooth virtual onboarding experience.

Besides, when the documentation is meticulous, it also takes care of any gaps in context or knowledge exchange. So even if the current hiring manager leaves your company, their knowledge and approach are safely documented. Documentation is available 24*7, whereas people aren’t.

How you document the onboarding process is completely up to you. Percolate uses an 18-page Day 1 document covering the company’s history, culture, values, and practical advice on effective meetings or strong passwords. 

Others like Trello use an onboarding template that includes step-by-step instructions on activities for the first week and month.

Lastly, companies like LinkedIn use a different approach by documenting the onboarding schedule to make the remote onboarding experience easier and smoother.

No matter the format, make sure that your documentation covers all the essential information a new hire needs to get started. 

3. Add a personal touch

Onboarding isn’t just the responsibility of a manager or a recruiter, but everybody. Even small, thoughtful gestures (i.e., personal touches) such as everyone in the team knowing the names and roles of the new employees can earn a lot of brownie points. 

Another simple gesture is pairing the new hires with a buddy or team member for lunch so that they aren’t left wondering where they’ll eat lunch. 

Some companies go the extra mile and send a hyper-personalized welcome letter. 

Others include gifts, company swag kits, handwritten notes, office plants … the list is endless.

At Birchbox, new employees get a “Say Hi, I’m new” flag to spark team interactions and conversations.

Such gestures might sound small, but they aren’t trivial. 

They help break the ice and remove minor obstacles in the way of new hires, and such efforts don’t go unnoticed as they reflect a degree of thoughtfulness that most companies don’t show.

4. Do frequent check-ins

Initial days at a new company with lots of new faces can be overwhelming for anyone. Frequent check-ins to know how your new hires are doing can help you make their lives easier, and show that you care. 

Check-ins also provide excellent feedback on the effectiveness of your onboarding process and identify aspects to improve. They also help managers detect problems (disengagement, low morale, low engagement, manage expectations) at the workplace and take steps to fix them before it’s too late.

Besides, most new hires value their one-on-one sessions with mentors, managers, and even experienced colleagues. 

“If the new hire is joining the sales team, set up a 20-minute coffee meeting with the most tenured sales team member to talk about how things have changed over time.” Liz Hall, former VP of People at Trello.

Companies such as Google, IBM, and Qualcomm make this process easier by assigning mentors or buddies to their new hires, as a way of improving productivity and integration within the company. 

5. Engage more

The level of engagement you have with a new hire is directly proportional to their interest in your company. 

Even before day 1, keep engaging with the new hires and encourage them to ask questions. 

Once they’ve started their journey with you, use gamification, microlearning, all-hands meetings, and team lunches to increase engagement and build rapport within teams.

As they get used to working at your company, send them surveys after the first week, month, and year to understand:

1. Whether they enjoy their job role and work environment
2. Whether they feel prepared to assume all of their responsibilities
3. Whether they have all the support and resources needed to do their job well
4. Whether the onboarding process was successful and the onboarding experience, delightful

Since new hires have a fresh perspective on everything, gathering and incorporating their feedback is one of the best ways to improve your internal processes.

6. Automate the mundane

HR isn’t just for hiring, but also for adding business value. However, most administrative tasks such as paperwork, scheduling meetings, follow-ups, answering questions on company policies are draining and time-consuming. 

That’s where automation can come in handy. If the onboarding workflows are automated, HR doesn’t have to chase after managers or new hires to ensure whether they’ve completed all their tasks as the system will take care of that. 

Similarly, automated notifications act as reminders for employees on everything from updating documents and leave policies to filling up Pulse surveys.

As a result, HR has more time to focus on the strategic, and human aspects of HR, such as:

1. Doing periodic check-ins
2. Designing personalized onboarding and learning experiences
3. Performing regular assessments of the onboarding process and new hires to spot red flags

Rounding up

According to Forbes, almost 20% of staff turnover happens during the first 45 days of employment. 

That’s why delightful onboarding experiences are so important for talent engagement and retention. 

Use these six tactics to improve your current onboarding process and deliver memorable experiences that make your new hires fall in love with you.

Want to give Oorwin a try? You can request a product tour here.

Staffing industry experts agree the recruitment scene is undergoing a significant change with the new technology impacting the way recruiters source, hire, onboard, and manage candidates. The only way to stay updated is by participating in a lively discussion happening across the staffing ecosystem. But, when you have limited time on your hands, it’s hard to scour the internet for relevant, refreshing content in your sphere. Let us look into the top 5 blogs for staffing professionals.

Top 5 Blogs for Staffing Professionals

That’s why we bring you the best five blogs every staffing professional should follow.

1. Undercover Recruiter:

The Undercover Recruiter, a leading career and recruitment blog in Europe, draws in readers with its insightful and trending content bucketed into talent acquisition, employer branding, and the workplace categories. The articles, which are easy-to-read and visually appealing, cater to a diverse audience – job seekers, recruiters, and employers. You can look forward to a new post every day too!

And the Undercover Recruiter website also takes you to amazing 20-minute employer branding podcasts from the best in the industry, case studies, and an employer brand index – all definite must-visits from Link Humans. Sign up for the Undercover Recruiter newsletter, and you’ll see why we have given it the top spot on our list.

The posts from The Undercover Recruiter that we liked:

• Strategies for Attracting Top Talent in a Competitive Industry
• Getting the Most from Flexible and Remote Working

2. Unlocked:

Unlocked advertises itself as “the office management blog” and they deliver exactly that. The blogs follow distinct storytelling focused on various business functionalities catering to the recruiters, HRs, and senior management.

The blog has three sections — people operations, office operations, and management tools. You can find topics covering everything related to employee communication, engagement, and hiring, onboarding, development,  candidate engagement, and office management. Their insightful guides help you better manage everything, from boosting the productivity of a remote team to ensuring physical security at the workplace.

Resources that we liked in Unlocked:

• 5 Simple Tips to Make Your Employees Happier
• How To Manage a Team Across Time Zones
• Fact or Fiction: Does Fantastic Company Culture Really Start at the Top?

3. Oorwin:

As the provider of an integrated platform made for staffing and consulting firms, the Oorwin blog is the best option for staffing professionals to gain industry insights, get familiar with new trends, and find out about upcoming technologies. 

The Oorwin platform provides end-to-end resources to streamline your sales, recruitment, and human resource function. Naturally, the blogs cater to the problems faced by these professionals and how to overcome them. The blog is not only rich with interesting articles on innovative technologies but also strategic solutions aimed at the growth of a staffing business. Even though the product is only a couple of year old, the people behind it have wide experience in the field and the same reflects in the blog. Their tips are really relatable and can be easily implemented to get the desired outcome.

The Oorwin blog has been identified as one of the top HR blogs by Feedspot. 

Here are some of the most popular blogs on Oorwin:

• AI In Recruitment: The Case For Enterprise Adoption
• Surviving the COVID slowdown as a staffing firm

Moving forward in this blogs for Staffing Professionals, let us look into The Staffing Stream.

4. The Staffing Stream: 

The Staffing Stream is the official blog maintained by the Staffing Industry Analyst (SIA). SIA has been acting as the global advisor for all staffing and consulting business since the late 1980s. The blog offers an in-depth analysis of temporary staffing, contracting, and other issues faced by staffing firms, recruiters, and outsourcers. 

The blog is a great tool for all those professionals to take business decisions related to hiring, expansion, technology integration, or overall workforce management. As the pioneers of the staffing industry, they are at the forefront of issues, challenges, and opportunities popping up throughout the world. By following The Staffing Stream, you can stay updated on any technical and administrative changes happening in the industry. They have devoted a whole segment directed to help staffing firms and other IT professional businesses cope up with the current developing situation associated with COVID 19. 

 

5. TLNT:

TLNT blog is managed by ERE media, which claims to be an online gathering place for recruiters to network, learn, and share best practices. The content is filled with news, analysis, and reports relevant for the staffing industry professionals. 

Additionally, with informative webinars on every Wednesday and Thursday, TLNT is the go-to platform for recruiters around the world. ERE media also offers a library of free educational courses to anyone interested in learning more about sourcing, hiring, and managing talent. With a popular guest forum, they feature astute write-ups by prominent HR professionals and staffing stalwarts.

Posts we liked to read from TLNT:

• Human-Centered HR in Today’s Business Environment: Moving From Results to Outcomes
• Considerations for Companies With H1B Employees During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• 4 Ways to Keep Employees Engaged While Facing a National Crisis

When it comes to talent management and recruitment, you must develop business strategies in accordance with your employees and clients. However, all of these blogs offer something unique and are great to strengthen your knowledge base. 

Tell us in comments what you think of these blogs. And let us know if we’ve missed any must-follows.