ATS VS Recruiting Software: What’s the Difference?

Hiring is a common requirement in any organization. An organization can come up with job openings at any time during their business operations. In order to fill those job openings, the HR team of the organization has to sift through numerous candidate profiles. This is not only a time-consuming process but also a stressful task. To make the best use of the time and to minimize stress on the HR team, many organizations may choose online tools like Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or Recruiting Software.

These two software tools are used interchangeably, and most people interpret them as if they are similar in function with just a matter of terminology and semantics. In contrast, both the tools have their own functions, features and sharply differ in definition as well. In this blog, we will unveil the differences between ATS and Recruiting Software.

What is the Applicant Tracking System?

Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a software that accelerates the recruiting process and simplifies the time-consuming challenges of the hiring cycle.  With Applicant Tracking System, you can post a job on different job boards and company’s career page with less effort, source candidates from different job boards in minutes, review resumes, and track the status of the candidates at any stage without any hassle. It helps you to make notes, trigger notifications and send automated emails to qualified candidates.

Though Applicant Tracking System is designed to simplify and speed up the hiring process, it is still not a complete hiring solution. It is effective but confined to certain functions of the hiring process. Unlike Recruiting Software, Applicant Tracking System never allows you to perform many important recruiting functions like managing passive candidate profiles in your talent pool, attracting top talent, maintaining client details or devising email campaigns. But still, the Applicant Tracking System can be an excellent choice for small and startup companies, especially if their hiring requirement is limited to managing jobs, culling the right candidates, and tracking their status throughout the hiring cycle.

Here are some features of ATS that makes your hiring process easy:

  1. Job Posting:

An Applicant Tracking System helps you announce your open positions on your company’s career page and different job boards with little to no extra effort. You can even publish your open positions on social media where most of the professionals love to hang out nowadays. With Applicant Tracking System, you can receive all the applications in one place from different job boards and organize those applications in the order that helps you weed out unqualified candidates.

  1. Candidate Tracking:

Tracking candidate is the most vital function in ATS. It helps you track the number of candidates you have considered for each open position and it enables you to track their stages in the hiring process as well. This function not only simplifies the burden that you face while managing the promising candidate profiles for each job but also lets you keep track of the personnel who is responsible to process the candidate profile for the open positions.

  1. Parse Resumes:

The resume parser plays a critical role in the Applicant Tracking System. It is one of the most important factors which decide the quality of an Applicant Tracking System. The more efficient resume parser technology an Applicant Tracking System has, the more accurate data it can extract from the resumes. The resume parsing technology extracts information like skills, experience, contact information, etc., from each resume and enters it in a unique format so that you can create the candidate profiles in the talent pool and evaluate the qualifications of each candidate for a job easily.

  1. Import Profiles:

ATS relieves you from the stress of maintaining a stack of resumes on your desk and having a huge amount of emails with file attachments in your inbox. With ATS, you can easily import resumes directly from files, folders and emails into your talent pool as soon as you receive an application from the job-seeker. ATS also helps you organize and make the profiles searchable with the click of a button.

  1. Career Page Integration

The career page is like an outlet for your organization where you can showcase your jobs to the potential talent and sell them to the candidates who best fit the job requirements. Nowadays candidates are more interested to know the culture of the company, benefits, values, and perks that they enjoy if they accept the position in an organization. Career page integration is one of the most important tools in the Applicant Tracking System that help you convey the company’s credibility.

  1. Boolean Search

The most critical step in the hiring process is identifying the right talent for a job from the large pool of database. Boolean Search can make recruiter’s life simpler and much easier. With Boolean Search, you can find candidates faster than you ever dreamed of. Many ATS applications have a Boolean Search feature.  It enables you to use a combination of keywords with operators like AND, OR, NOT. This will limit or broaden your search and help you get an array of relevant candidate profiles from the large pool of talent matching the keywords that you have entered.

These are the six important features that you may find in a good Applicant Tracking System. Based on the business requirements, people either purchase an Applicant Tracking System as a standalone system or choose to implement it with broader software suites like Human capital management system, Recruitment CRM or Recruiting Software.

What is Recruiting Software?

Recruiting Software is an end-to-end solution for all aspects of the recruitment cycle. It takes the broader context of the hiring process into account, unlike ATS. Recruiting Software looks at the Recruiters’/HR team needs as a whole rather than being focused on the mere functions of hiring system like posting jobs, sourcing candidates and tracking their status.  With Recruiting Software, you can manage client details, maintain passive and active candidate profiles, send bulk emails, plan email campaigns and so much more in addition to ATS functions. In fact, ATS is a subset of Recruiting Software. To make it simple, Recruiting Software is a suite of modules that allow you to manage jobs, candidates and clients as well as engage potential prospects and top talents.

Let’s take a look at some of the functions of the Recruiting Software:

  1. Applicant Tracking System

Recruiting Software offers all the functions of an Applicant Tracking System along with a few more modules that leverage the performance of your recruitment team. If you buy a Recruiting Software, you can enjoy all the benefits of ATS. With Recruiting Software, you can post jobs, source candidates and track the various stages of the candidates in the hiring process. You can also perform other important functions of the ATS like importing resumes from files and folders, extracting the information from each resume and then entering that information into a standard format.

  1. Recruitment CRM

Good relationships can win you more business. Customer/ Candidate Relationship Management is the greatest feature that a Recruiting Software brings for the HR team. It helps you build talent pool with active and passive candidates, maintain accurate information about each candidate who has previously applied to your company, manage client details at your fingertips and sustain a good relationship with the clients, candidates, and vendors.

  1. Bulk Emailing

Bulk Emailing enables you to communicate job openings with your vendors and potentially suitable candidates. It is the most cost-effective way to hunt the candidates that are qualified for your open positions. Bulk Emailing comes in handy when you have to attract, nurture and convert the potential talents into the successful hires. With this feature, you can bulk email your open positions to the candidates and vendors as well as promote your brand image among the candidates, clients, and vendors.

  1. Tight Integration with Email Client and Calendar

Recruiting Software brings seamless efficiency to the users who struggle with scheduling the interviews. Its ability to integrate with Outlook and Gmail helps you sync inbox and calendar so that you can check the availability of the team, schedule interviews and communicate interview timings to both candidate and interviewer directly from the Recruiting Software. You can even follow-up emails and reschedule the interview if the interviewer or a candidate has put a request to schedule the interview again.  The email client and calendar integration with Recruiting Software centralize the complete process of scheduling interviews.

  1. Other System Integration - Vendor Management System (VMS), Human Resources Information Systems(HRIS), Single Sign-on (SSO)

Scale the functionality of the Recruiting Software by integrating applications that you think will leverage the productivity of your hiring process.  You can integrate VMS, HRIS and many other applications with your Recruiting Software without any hassle. Recruiting Software allows you to implement a single sign-on so that you can have access to all applications integrated with your Recruiting Software with a single login. The VMS integration extends the functionality of the Recruiting Software and enables an organization to manage the details of their vendors, share open positions and acquire candidate applications from the vendors, whereas HRIS lets an organization manage employee information like payroll reports, paid time off requests, W2’s, balances and much more.

  1. Smooth Onboarding

The Recruiting Software simplifies the on-boarding process of your organization. It makes sure the candidate feel valued and engaged even before he joined the organization. You can complete all policy sign-off and relevant documents online. With Recruiting Software, HR recruiters can be sorted when it comes to generating the offer letter and shooting the welcome email to the new employees.

  1. Engaging Candidates and Employer Branding

Everything that you do from posting jobs to scheduling interviews and on-boarding candidates may reflect back on your brand. The social media integration with Recruiting Software helps you announce your job openings to a wider range of networks, connects you with qualified professionals and allows you to build strong brand awareness. Automated notifications from Recruiting Software at every stage of the hiring cycle can reduce the uneasiness among the candidates, which usually may arise when there is no response from the employer after the interview. Besides notifications, the Recruiting Software comes with so many templates, reports, and checklists that help you streamline various onboard tasks and retain the candidates’ faith in you.

With this break down of the ATS and Recruiting Software, you might get answers to all the questions that keep lingering in your mind till now. We believe that knowing the functions and abilities of both Recruiting Software and Applicant Tracking System may help you differentiate each of them. Though it is evident that both the software are designed to simplify the hiring process, ATS focuses only on speeding up your hiring process after you receive an application from a candidate, whereas Recruiting Software is an all-inclusive solution that allows you to attract, connect and engage potential talent, clients and vendors as well as it enables you to perform all other functions that ATS usually does.

Where does Talent Pathway Stand in the spectrum of ATS and Recruiting Software?

Talent Pathway is a suite of highly flexible and effective features that can deliver supreme Recruiting Software solution beyond the hiring capabilities of any other Applicant Tracking Systems. Talent Pathway is a comprehensive recruiting platform that may give intense competition to various leading Recruiting Software. With Talent Pathway, the hiring team can identify the most qualified candidates for their open positions, track candidate profiles through every phase of the hiring cycle and manage clients, business partners, and applicants, even after you close the open positions in order to meet unforeseen needs that may come later in time.  Users can parse resumes, send emails, generate reports, enrich candidate profiles and manage many other key functions of the recruiting cycle.

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