Lets Crack Open the Problem
Remember that old anti-drug PSA? The one with the frying egg? ‘This is your brain on drugs.’ Now imagine that egg as your hiring process: sizzling, smoking, and overcooked. That’s what happens when your ATS is poorly optimized.
When your ATS isn’t well optimized, your hiring process will struggle, resulting in poor candidate experience, flawed data, and negative hiring outcomes.
Read on to learn how you can identify if your ATS is fried, and what you can do if it is. Now, let’s crack on…
Table of Contents
Signs your ATS is Fried
Is your organization hitting the wall with recruitment? Do you know that your hiring process is struggling, but aren’t sure what the underlying problem is? It can be difficult to distinguish between an overcooked ATS and the normal challenges of a difficult labor market. Here are the top five signs that your ATS has been on the stove too long.
The Slow Sizzle
Everything takes too long. Job postings take too long, the first interview takes a month instead of a week, critical project deadlines get missed, and your hiring cycle seems to stretch endlessly with no obvious choke-point.
A fried ATS will harden every part of your recruitment cycle, leading to lost opportunities at every turn.
The Sticky Pan
Are your candidates getting stuck in the process? Are you seeing lower volumes, and even lower conversion rates? Confusing application forms, poor login workflows, and a lack of mobile compatibility may be grabbing your candidates, and not releasing them.
A ‘sticky’ hiring process will lead to high drop-out rates, a poor candidate experience, and over time a lower quality of hire.
The Burnt Edges
Have you ever had to give (or receive) a presentation and thought, “wait, these numbers aren’t right”? Does chewing on the numbers leave a bad taste in your mouth? Have you struggled to provide meaningful data to your stakeholders?
If your ATS isn’t optimized for data, you will struggle provide the data you need. Your analysis won’t match your lived experience, and you’ll struggle to make informed decisions.
The Smoke Alarm
It’s all-hands-on-deck when your HRIS starts calling. If your Compliance team warns you of an audit, alarm bells should already be ringing. Compliance and integration issues can decimate an organization, regardless of size.
If you’re seeing critical errors in your hiring and onboarding workflows, and legal red flags are being caught (or reported), your ATS is failing, and you may be cooked.
The Hard Yolk
Are your users having trouble moving through the system? An unresponsive system may take the form of a clunky UI, click-heavy workflows and processes, limited collaboration tools, or poorly conceived user-roles.
The signs from your users of a poorly optimized system are always the same: poor adoption, unhappy team members, and vital work being done of the side of their desks.
You Can Uncook an Egg
You’ve figured out where the burning smell is coming from: you’ve fried your ATS. Before you panic, get it off the heat; stop tinkering with your processes, adding new forms, and tweaking your configurations.
You might think that at this point you’re stuck, but don’t toss it in the bin. You can un-cook the egg. By optimizing your existing system, you can get the workflow you need, and the hiring outcomes you want.
What comes next? An optimization can take many forms, but will usually involve the following:
- Audit your current workflows — identify bottlenecks.
- Engage your users — gather recruiter and hiring manager feedback.
- Clean your data — purge duplicates and standardize fields.
- Integrate smartly — connect HRIS, job boards, and communication tools.
- Automate thoughtfully — use triggers for repetitive tasks but keep the human touch.
- Measure and iterate — track time-to-hire, conversion rates, and satisfaction scores.
Conclusion (A Better Recipe)
Your ATS shouldn’t look like an overcooked fried egg in a pan; smoking sputtering away, burnt at the edges, and dry and chalky in the middle. You now know how to spot an ATS that’s overcooked, and you know the recipe to cook it properly… but what if you’re just not the right cook?
Fortunately, the personal chefs at Velocity know this recipe like the back of their hands. A quick, complimentary health check from Velocity can help you to understand where your ATS needs work. Request one today, and let’s start cooking!