This advent calendar presents 24 practical suggestions on how to learn from candidate behavior to improve your HR marketing, based on early results from Potentialpark's upcoming 2024 Talent Comm study.
This week's special is "Easy Apply". Every day this week will be about how to make application processes more competitive and lose fewer candidates.
This is a message of encouragement: why it's not so important which Applicant Tracking System (ATS) your company has. You'll need to customize and develop it anyway.
Let's be honest, candidates don't love applying online. And online application processes are where employers lose the most candidates. But there are a few myths around the question which ATS provider is best for candidates.
Earlier this week I mentioned how I once joked in front of an employer branding crowd "we should really found a self-help group for SAP Successfactors", and instead of laughing, everyone asked "where can I sign up?" Thus was their frustration with this software.
I didn't say how the story continued. In fact, a new series of events was born that day. The "self-help group" became reality. Not just for SAP, but Workday, Avature, Smartrecruiters, Oracle Taleo, and others. Over the course of a few events we saw around ten different cases with HR teams reporting on how they had implemented their ATS.
At the end of the event series, three things had become obvious:
No ATS is candidate-friendly in its standard version. In fact, all systems seem to be equally user-unfriendly, just in different ways.
Every team that implements an ATS thinks about retiring early at least once during the project and has considerably more grey hair than before.
And every employer with a great, talent-friendly ATS got there by investing heavily into additonal customization, often by building an entirely new candidate front-end on top of the standard ATS.
Just to summarize in plain English: no matter which ATS your company chooses to buy, it will be painful to implement and equally painful to optimize, and if you don't customize it, it will be a pain for applicants. Sorry to say.
The good news: each and every one of your competitors has the exact same challenge. And there is hope: it's possible to make applying online candidate-friendly and competitive, almost no matter which ATS you have.
This all makes it a true employer branding challenge, one that will need a mix of creativity, tech-savviness and lobbying to solve. Which almost makes it fun again. If ATS implemented themselves perfectly, who'd need smart employer branding professionals?
Which employers do it best?
In a few weeks, Potentialpark will publish its new Applying Online ranking (see link at the end to be informed).
Every year, it ranks the top employers worldwide based on how candidate-friendly their online application is (among several categories).
Today I can already reveal that the following things will be true for that new ranking:
The Top in each region will be employers with totally different ATS providers.
An ATS provider that is represented in the top of the ranking will usually also be represented at the bottom of it.
All of the Top 10 will have custom job searches, job ads and application forms. No vanilla.
Thus, there is not the one "right system". The same was true in the last ranking. The winners in 2023 included ams Osram with Successfactors in the US, Axa with Taleo in France, and Fresenius with Workday in Germany, among others. All of them had put lots of effort into custom front-ends.
Why it's not up to the providers, but the employers
Historically, it's been commonplace that the business model of ATS providers was not to make applicants happy, but decision-makers: meaning the managers who decide which ATS to buy, and, to a lesser extent, the recruiters. Factors like costs and compatibility mattered. Candidates often came last.
It might be premature to blame this on the providers. It's not unusual that software companies deliver what decision-makers want.
And every employer has different needs and requirements. It's simply impossible to put an ATS on the market that fits all needs. The only path to profit is obviously in selling standard systems and charging extra for customization.
Personally I have done research on online application solutions for over 20 years, and my conclusion is: it's not on the provider, but the employer. The customer sets the expectations. The online application is a reflection of the employer's priorities.
What's your priority? If it's the candidate experience, you can't stick to a vanilla version of an ATS. It will require extra efforts and a candidate-first approach when selecting, implementing and adopting the ATS and all the steps the applicants go through.
There's hope
Over the last five years, there has been a remarkable surge in online application systems that check all the right boxes (see the winners mentioned above). They're quick and easy, branded and beautiful, offer transparency at every step, and feature smart job alerts along with even smarter data parsing.
So it is possible!
Yet, it's important to note that each of these systems owes its success to an HR team that embarked on a mission with a "candidate-first" approach (as Bosch called it). They dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to crafting a tailored solution.
Over the next days, I will share more tips and data from Potentialpark about what actually makes an online application talent-friendly. I'd be happy if it helps.
Because if choosing an ATS is like a wedding, then we know that it's not only about choosing the right partner, but the ongoing effort to ensure the marriage remains enjoyable for all sides.
BONUS: Would you like to receive the results of Potentialpark's new Talent Comm 2024 study in a few weeks? Sign up on the Potentialpark website to secure a free research expert talk (no strings attached) and tickets to Potentialpark's events to meet peer HR marketers.
Oh and if you don't want to miss anything on here, sign up to the free newsletter at the bottom of the page.