Implementing a new applicant tracking system can be a daunting task. Even the most user-friendly ATS can be a disaster if the proper care isn’t taken to ensure that all processes and procedures are appropriately configured, and users find it easy enough to adopt and master. And by users I mean recruiters, hiring managers and candidates themselves. That’s a broad group of stakeholders with varying requirements for success. Luckily there is a new ATS implementation best practice that can help ensure every ATS migration goes smoothly and achieves the proper outcomes.
The latest ATS implementation best practice involves continuously engaging users by automatically gathering feedback before, during and after the roll out. This practice helps ensure that you’ve gathered proper requirements prior to roll out, while helping identify what’s working and what’s not after the implementation.
Enter Survale
Survale is a “first of its kind” application for gathering full 360 degree feedback from all users of an applicant tracking system. Survale is commonly used by leading organizations to increase candidate satisfaction by engaging candidates on the career site, through every step of selection, through onboarding and on to the employee engagement process.
Survale can also be used to measure the value of other programs and services within the enterprise like benefits administration, training effectiveness and much more. As such, it is a slam dunk for taking the risk out of an ATS implementation. Best practice? Here’s how:
- Begin before the switch. Embed Survale’s “Always On” component into your career site and application pages. Survale will gather quantitative navigation data and combine it with candidate feedback gathered through their process of researching and applying for jobs. This not only identifies potential pitfalls of your current and future processes, but also serves a baseline to measure how your new system stacks up. Survale compiles metrics like overall satisfaction, NetPromoter score and many more. You can tie questions to specific processes so it can get as granular as you want. Survale also lets you create your own indexes that combine and compare multiple metrics like time to apply, application drop off rate, application satisfaction, etc. Plus Survale’s “always on” surveys gather qualitative data like employer brand affinity, and suggestions about what’s working and what’s not.
- At the same time, Survale can be configured to send surveys to candidates, recruiters and hiring managers every time a status is changed within your ATS. These quick pulse surveys can gather satisfaction metrics for both process and technology. Did hiring managers receive notifications on time. Were instructions logical? Was the login process smooth? Were the submitted candidates qualified? Survale lets you gather this data before, during and after implementation of a new ATS.
- Use this same approach for recruiters. Each time candidates are dispositioned, Survale can be triggered to gather feedback from system users about how easy and logical the system is. What was the easiest part of this stage? What was challenging? Why? Survale gathers the feedback and organizes it by hiring stage. This includes free form text that can be easily mined for ideas for improvement. Again: Before, during and after the implementation.
Now, you have gathered what will serve as baseline usability scores for your current system, and identified areas of need for the new system with candidates, hiring managers and recruiters.
Set ATS Implementation Goals
Perhaps the most important ATS implementation best practice is having clear goals for your project. You can use Survale to help identify these goals as well as to guide your feedback collection. If you know what you want to accomplish, and then gather specific feedback about how these goals were being met before, during and after the implementation, then you have a clear picture of how successful you’ve been. Plus you’ll get clear data to guide you in correcting mis-steps or faulty assumptions as the present themselves after implementation.
Sometimes, the most effective ATS implementation best practice is understanding that you can’t get everything right straight out of the gate. You will have bad assumptions, oversights and, let’s face it, sometimes you can’t understand the full scope of a complex software platform until you use it. It’s best to have a system in place to catch issues before they become the kinds of problems that destroy user adoption.
And here’s the best part, you’ll be delighting candidates, recruiters and hiring managers while you are perfecting your system and your processes. Not bad.
Want to learn how to utilize Survale to make your ATS implementation go smoothly? Check out our video demo here.
