Whether it’s your first, second, or fifteenth, integrating a new applicant tracking system (ATS) is one of the most critical decisions for your hiring tech stack — but the sheer volume of options can be overwhelming.
Before you get distracted by fancy features, you need to understand one thing: Will this system, or any system, actually solve our most pressing hiring challenges?
Your evaluation needs — yes, needs — to include everything from security regulations and user-friendliness to workflow customization, integration capabilities, and candidate data management, and by asking targeted, strategic questions upfront, you can ensure the ATS you select truly supports your hiring process and your organizational goals at large.
Here are 8 strategic questions to ask BEFORE you sign an ATS contract.
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Key Takeaways
- Start with Pain, Not Features: The most crucial first step is to identify and quantify your team’s biggest recruiting challenges. An ATS should be selected as a targeted solution to these problems, not merely as a repository of fancy, unused features.
- The Cost of “Low Lift” is High: The true cost of an ATS is not just the sticker price, but the internal resource lift required for setup and implementation. You must assess your team’s bandwidth and prioritize a hiring system that offers the right level of automation to reduce manual workarounds, thus ensuring a stronger return on investment (ROI).
- ATS is a Strategic Data Tool: Selecting an ATS is a major strategic decision that governs your ability to capture and analyze critical hiring metrics (like conversion rates and time-to-hire). Choosing a system with robust, easily accessible analytics is essential for aligning recruitment efforts with overarching organizational goals and justifying future budget needs.
Key Questions to Ask Before Investing in an Applicant Tracking System
1. What are our biggest challenges as a hiring team?
Identifying the main pain points in your current recruitment process (e.g., losing candidates to competitors, interview scheduling issues, high volumes of unqualified job applications) will help you select an ATS that specifically addresses these challenges, rather than simply feature loading on features you really don’t need — and certainly don’t need to pay for.
Why is it important? This question targets your specific issues, making the ATS an effective solution rather than a generic tool that basically serves as overpriced candidate storage software.
2. How big a lift is adding an ATS, and what is our bandwidth right now?
Implementing applicant tracking systems requires various levels of effort based on your requirements.
With some vendors, you have to build out each job you are hiring for, including job descriptions, requirements, workflows, screening questionnaires, interview question sets, email templates, and more.
With other vendors, AI and automation come into play, helping to ease much of this manual work, but every system is unique.
Start by understanding the technical capabilities and bandwidth of your team to ensure the decision to implement or switch your ATS will align well with your team.
Why is it important? Ensuring the team is prepared for the potential workload and transition period associated with an applicant tracking software integration, ensuring you have enough support to properly set up and use it, must be a priority. It’s most effective when the result of your hiring challenges can be directly correlated to the organization’s ability to meet its core objectives.
3. How important are automated data and analytics for us?
Data and analytics are crucial for decision-making and efficiency improvements, especially in small to medium-sized organizations (SMBs) where resources and budget are less. If analytics is important to your company — and it should be — you need an ATS that offers robust data capabilities without the hours of manual work to pull them.
Why is it important? Access to hiring data within your ATS aligns recruitment with the organization’s needs, enhancing strategic decision-making. By tracking data, you can see what you’re doing well and uncover gaps to help improve your team’s performance over time. For example, it can provide insight into conversion rates so you can evaluate efficiency.
4. How unique is our hiring workflow?
Understanding the uniqueness of your hiring workflow helps determine the level of customization needed in an ATS. If your processes are standard, less customization may be required, which can simplify implementation and use. However, depending on your company size, industry, hiring volume, etc., you may require more flexibility and customization on a role-by-role basis.
Why is it important? This is an important distinction to make before you begin exploring ATS options, as it ensures the ATS you select fits seamlessly into existing processes without overcomplicating them and doing to reverse by adding more work to your plate.
5. How much manual work are we doing to compensate for our current ATS or lack of an ATS?
The primary purpose of an ATS platform is to eliminate manual work and tedious workarounds. If your current hiring system requires a lot of manual intervention, a new system or the addition of your first ATS should address and reduce these inefficiencies.
Why is it important? This question highlights your specific inefficiencies and focuses on the level of automation you may need to enhance overall team productivity, reduce manual tasks that may be redundant, and improve ROI.
6. What is our budget, and what is efficiency worth from a budget perspective?
As any SMB or Mid-Market HR leader knows, budget considerations are crucial. Assessing the ATS’s cost-benefit ratio, including potential savings and efficiency gains, helps justify the investment. Efficiency may mean different things (e.g., faster hiring, better candidate quality), and you need to quantify its value.
Why is it important? Balances financial constraints with the benefits, ensuring a cost-effective investment in applicant tracking system features and benefits. This also helps you convince the financial gatekeepers that the investment will pay for itself.
7. What do I need to present to convince key decision-makers?
If you’re not the final decision-maker, you need to be able to articulate key hiring metrics and outcomes to your leaders or whichever stakeholders make the final budgetary decisions, whether that be cost savings, efficiency gains, or better quality hires.
Why is it important? All the above questions mean nothing if you can’t get approval to add an ATS. This question ensures alignment with organizational goals and secures necessary approvals by demonstrating clear benefits of how to choose an applicant tracking system. It also showcases that you’ve done your homework and are prepared to truly quantify what an ATS is needed for.
8. What are our candidate sourcing needs?
Here are a few sub-questions within this question to consider:
- Does it offer seamless job posting within boards and communities where you get the best-fit candidates?
- Can you post on niche job boards?
- Does the ATS software make it easy to work with external recruiting agencies or give you the ability to reduce reliance on them, if needed?
- Does it help you re-engage former candidates who may be a great fit for future roles?
To attract top job seekers, your ATS must be able to distribute job postings effectively; this means they are landing in front of the best potential candidates, not just a generic pool of candidates that will result in piles of unqualified resumes.
Your ATS needs to support job boards most relevant to your industry and allow posting to specialized job boards for candidates with specific skills, if required within your industry. You also want to consider how it facilitates collaboration by providing access to candidate profiles. The ability to internally and easily manage sourcing channels may reduce the need for external agencies, cutting recruitment costs.
Finally, don’t overlook the importance of your talent pipeline. The best ATS should allow you to maintain a talent pool of previous applicants for seamless review of candidate information and re-engagement opportunities.
Why is it important? Ensuring your ATS meets these criteria will enhance your ability to source qualified candidates in the present and future. It supports strategic decision-making regarding job board utilization, agency collaboration, and candidate reengagement, ultimately improving your recruitment process’s effectiveness and cost-efficiency.
Asking the Right Questions Will Yield the Best Hiring Results
By posing these critical questions to yourself, your hiring team, and key players in your decision-making process, you ensure that the applicant tracking system you choose not only meets your immediate hiring needs but also supports your long-term recruitment process and organizational goals.
Remember, ATS software doesn’t solve problems; people do. The right ATS will enhance your hiring process, providing valuable insights through organized candidate data and robust analytics, reducing manual tasks, and offering a customized solution to fit your workflows. The result? You have more time to spend on strategic efforts.
Further, the goal is to enjoy the benefits of an optimized recruitment strategy for years to come, not run the same vetting process again just a few months later, so take the time to strategize first before rushing to add applicant tracking software that will only make your life harder.
Ready to explore the benefits of Spark Hire’s comprehensive hiring software, which includes not only an applicant tracking system, but several built-in assessment tools?
