Small Recruitment Agency Seeking New ATS?

As the Director of Membership for NPAworldwide, I get many questions from independent recruitment firms looking to join our split placement network. One that I am hearing quite often is, “What ATS do most of your recruiters use?” Some criteria I hear from firms that they rate an ATS by include: ease of use for applicants, company size and field, social networking and job posting capacity, search functions, and user support services. Since I am not a recruiter or expert myself, I took to social media to see what other firms are saying about their ATS, and here are some good bullet points I pulled out:

• Maxhire works great and integrates well with Outlook to keep track of conversations with candidates.
• Itris is not the most aesthetic user interface, but it is efficient and interrogative, as well as straight forward.
• Crelate has positive reviews and is the cheapest one user found, predicting vast improvements in the next 6 months to a year that will allow for email integration among other things.
• Bullhorn is a highly customizable and user-friendly system that allows all members of the recruiting team complete access to recruiting processes via its cloud-based ATS and CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) technology. Two of Bullhorn’s strengths are in its candidate sourcing and recruiting software. Bullhorn is pulling some complaints on lack of customer service, seems that general consensus is that it takes a while to get running smooth due to the company now going after larger business. However, they do have some of the best functionality, at a price.
• PCRecruiter’s biggest strengths are in organization and ease of use. It also allows you to customize reports and pull reports in a variety of different ways. This customization, however, does not extend to the user interface and the program as a whole, as some functions are not useful to companies in their current state. For managing a large number of candidate and company files, however, PCRecruiter is among the best.
• JobDiva is a cloud based system. This system pulls resumes automatically 24/7 to match with the job boards, which it keeps synchronized. Combined with its compatibility with either Macs or PC’s and its mobile applications, JobDiva allows almost instantaneous updating and searching of job boards and resumes. Another key feature is the ability to search resumes by years of experience, cutting down on the many hours needed to manually check resumes for that information. Only came across positive remarks.

A good way to determine if it’s time to move on from your current ATS according to recruiting.com is to pay attention to these warning signs:

1. It sends your applicants on a wild goose chase to find the job that’s right for them.
2. No clear way to track social initiatives. Without a way to track which sources each candidate came from, all the Facebook posts, tweets and LinkedIn connections recruiters send out are basically worth nothing.
3. No platform for communication. A high performing ATS should allow you to centralize communication within the platform in order to stay connected and on track with your fellow colleagues.

Any thoughts on your current ATS? Have one you love or dislike? Sound off below!