A Dialogue with Greenhouse
We recently had the opportunity to meet with the folks at Greenhouse to talk about ATS implementations. We chatted about the things that went into a successful (or unsuccessful) launch of an Applicant Tracking System; starting with keys to choosing the right vendor all the way through to handling post-launch support and maintenance. They wrote an excellent article covering the full range of the discussion, but today we want to narrow down the conversation to a few key principles:
- Stakeholder Engagement
- Integrations & Data Governance
- Change Management
Organizations that focus on these areas tend to be successful when implementing an ATS. Organizations that don’t struggle, and often come away from the project with a damaged HR brand and broken hiring process.
Table of Contents
Stakeholder Engagement
A lot of organizations view their ATS as a single-discipline piece of their tech stack. You’ve probably heard something like, “Oh, that’s just what the recruiters use,” around your C-Suite offices. This is myopic. The reality is that your ATS (and recruitment generally) touches a lot of different disciplines in and out of HR. Talent Acquisition, Payroll, Accounting, IT, Performance Management, Vendor Management all interact with people and systems across the organization. To successfully build, launch, and maintain your ATS requires an approach that considers the wide-ranging impact of the system.
When your organization first contemplates implementing an ATS, the first question asked internally should be, “who needs a seat at the table?” Stakeholder Engagement is more than just getting approvals to spend money. Stakeholder Engagement is about ensuring that everyone who has a vested interest in the outcome of a project has the opportunity to participate in the right way, at the right time. To achieve this you need:
- A clear project leadership structure
- Executive sponsorship
- Representation from every discipline and jurisdiction that is impacted by the final product
- A clearly defined process
Lastly, the engagement has to be engaged. It’s not enough for an executive sponsor to just show up at meetings to sign-off on milestones (for example). Project sponsors must understand the project’s importance and buy-in to it, empower project leadership, and drive that care and diligence downwards to the other participants.
Integration & Data Governance
Just as your TA practice doesn’t exist in isolation of your other disciplines, the ATS itself sits in an ecosystem of HR and IT tools. An ATS’s ability to store/share, and transmit information amongst those systems is critical. The true value of an ATS (and ultimately TA) is unlocked when it can seamlessly offer up key business data, and connect with other parts of the business and key vendors.
To do this successfully first requires active Stakeholder Engagement, but with an added emphasis on stakeholders for the data itself. Your HR and TA data ecosystem is a shared responsibility. It’s important that the project team includes appropriate representation for Compliance and Data Privacy issues, as well as the usual suspects from IT, HR, and Vendor Management.
Next is to consider integration and data requirements. Don’t just get the API specs from your systems and dive into mapping; work with your end users, system owners, and other stakeholders (e.g. Compliance) to ensure that everyone’s business and technical requirements are understood. When paired with thorough documentation (data flows, ownership, logic), these inputs will ensure strong outputs and allow you to scale, adapt, and maintain these integrations.
The last consideration we’d like to call out is Data Governance. Any project to build out your ATS (core system and integrations) should include development of a data governance process and procedures. It’s critical to work with the relevant stakeholders to implement processes that ensure the company (and regulatory) requirements for data and privacy compliance are satisfied. This usually involves regular (e.g. annual) reviews of internal and external requirement changes, along with corresponding audits or analyses of data, systems, and processes.
Change Management
The third part of an ATS implementation that is often overlooked or under-emphasized is Change Management. Put simply, organizations often fail to invest the resources necessary to prepare their users for the changes upcoming. This leads to poor adoption, an erosion of trust, and long-term underutilization of the system.
The best organizations handle Change by involving their end users before the system goes live; they do exhaustive User Acceptance Testing (UAT). UAT is the forgotten step-child of the testing process, because it tends to surface usability and process issues as opposed to system and integration failures. These issues are obviously important, but are usually outside the scope of the IT team that often leads testing, and the people running the test program may not be able ingest the results effectively. A well run UAT, conducted early enough in the process, can ensure that the system not only works, but works for its users.
Equally important for effective Change Management is providing sufficient time, training and resources at launch. Smart organizations ensure that there is enough time for training, that strong materials are prepared and easily accessible, and that resources have been committed for training. The best organizations go one step further, and prepare themselves so that future hires get the same positive training and development experience.
Conclusion
An ATS implementation that has a heavy focus on Stakeholder Engagement, Integrations & Data Governance, and Change Management is well set-up for success. Ensuring that the right people and processes in place, and the flanks of your implementation project are well in view gives you the confidence to implement without any oversights or forgotten requirements.
If you’d like to know more about how you maximize your ROI when deploying an ATS, drop us a message or give us call.