Happy Wednesday my recruitment nerd Brothers, Sisters and Smizmaars....
So, I the past 8 years I've implemented 6 ATS into Pre-Seed > SeriesC tech companies.
I've learned a lot about the shared features of most ATS on the market and how recruiters can use them to make more hires with less effort.
While everyone is banging on about AI and skills based hiring, just remember there are some simple, free ways to use low tech features to make more hires.
Templates
In all ATS, you can save your Emails to templates.
Yes, you may have the odd nurture sequence templated up, but this is massively underusing the template function of your ATS.
Any email you need to send more than once should be a template!
Here is what you do :
First, write out the ideal workflow for a piece of recruitment from start to finish.
Second, write templates out for as many eventualities for each stage as possible.
For instance here are four common eventualities you want to template if a candidate replies to an outreach:
- They agree to a screen call, in which case you should have a template to schedule a call.
- They get back to you declining, in which case, a lovely stay in touch email
- They ask about salary and comp, in which case a template about your comp philosophy and an invite to a screen to discuss in more detail.
- They ask about remote work. So a template describing the working format and an invite to the screen.
These are about 90% of the replies to my outreach.
If you spend half an hour writing out really good templates for these common eventualities, you save yourself DAYS of value add time.
This isn't just for top of funnel by the way. Go all the way through your process and write up good templates for each eventuality, interview invites, interview prep calls, everything.
You don't have to have boiler plate info for every candidate, you can personalise each one, particularly at the bottom of the funnel with more specific details.
This turns writing an email into writing a sentence. Still a huge time saver.
Really Really Really focus in on your workflows and and use templates to turn admin time into value time. You will save DAYS of time which could be more hires, or it could be more time for you, the gym, your partner, whatever keeps you healthy. It's all connected.
Tags
I bet you either have an ATS with no tags or so many tags that it's a total mess.
Make a list of things you would LOVE to be able to search for in a candidate at the touch of a button. Use that list to structure your tagging system with a basic nomenclature so you can search via categories, like Sourcing, Outreach etc.
Eg. A/B testing a piece of outreach. They should tag candidates something like "Outreach - Paul's message A" and "Outreach - Pauls message B". Now you can search "Outreach" and these will come up. You would never in a million years think to search "Paul's Message A"
Write a document that is going to be your 'Tag Glossary' and keep all your new tags in there to future reference.
Reminders
This is one of the most criminally underused features in my opinion. I remember clearly about six months after I started faithfully using reminders to follow up with candidates, It felt like cheating. It was like having a personal assistant telling me who to speak to on that day.
I made so many extra hires just by keeping in touch at the right time. Good uses of reminders :
1. Candidates accepts another job + 3 months - scoop up candiadtes who were lied to about the amazing new job.
2. Super star candidate replies with a "not interested right now - keep in touch" + 6.months. keeps you on top if those superstars for no effort.
3. Candidate rejected at tech/domain for experience + 6 months - Keeps you on top of candidate who know your brand and are maybe just a couple months of a specific skill away from an offer.
Integrations & Marketplaces
Modern ATS have really easy methods to integrate other tools, you don't have to be a software developer.
You can use an API to integrate your ATS with google sheets which in turn could feed a bespoke dashboard, or maybe a CRM that has richer features for email sequencing. The sky is the limit!
Also check if your ATS has an internal marketplace. Third party tools can often be accessed and enabled from inside the ATS.
Feature Requests
One element of an ATS that is never properly utilised is the company behind the ATS.
there is an awesome bevvy of new TA Tech platforms that are currently super lean, enormously customer centric and have a development lifecycle of 2 weeks!?! That's some seriously superb software development going on and your specific needs and requests can become a reality in a matter of weeks.
So take full advantage of this. If there's a feature that would make your life easier, make a feature request to your ATS provider.
You'll be surprised how quickly your suggestions can be made into a reality (if it's a sensible request of course...don't write "make the background all pictures of Scarlett Johansson"....no matter how many times they ask...they wont do it....).
Luke Update
Next week I'll be partnering with the superb Calyptus to deliver a talk on how to implement AI in TA and HR. it will be focussed on more enterprise businesses so I'm hoping to learn a lot about the problems larger companies face when adopting AI.
If I learn anything funky, you my friends will be the very first to hear about it.
To improve your day somewhat, here's a picture of a baby otter in a Wellington boot.....
Well... that's issue fifty nine! If you have any questions about it, or any feedback on this issue of The Data Driven Recruiter, grab me on LinkedIn for a chat.
I'll see you next week!