Best Practices: Using an ATS when you aren't actively hiring

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is essential for any business - ensuring collaborative, fair, and easy hiring. It is also the perfect place to build talent pools for future openings, ensure an easy workflow for internal promotions and role changes, and even keep an eye on vital hiring trends throughout your industry.

Build a Talent Pool

Hiring is all about speed - it's essential when filling a gap in your company. As your team grows, hiring becomes a continuous action instead of a "just when we need someone new" activity. You can stay ahead of the curve and be ready to fill a spot anytime by creating talent pools in your Hire account.

Talent pools are lists of candidates qualified for various roles in your company. This allows you to leverage candidates you have already sourced or applied to your openings to have a big head start when you're ready to fill a new position. 

Ready to start building talent pools today? Check out this best practice guide to learn more!

Offer Alternative Opportunities

Your ATS isn't just for permanent, full-time positions. Suppose you aren't looking to fill full-time, permanent spots. In that case, you can also use your ATS to offer alternative job opportunities - internships, temporary work, seasonal positions, contract work, or other opportunities that could lead to future job openings.

Facilitating Internal Mobility

Often when a company isn't outwardly posting roles for hire, they are still using their ATS to facilitate internal moves: promotions, lateral moves, and backfilling positions using internal staff. Creating a separate internal role is valuable when:

• You'd like to ask different application questions of internal candidates. 
• You'd like to display a different job description for internal candidates. 
• You'd like a clear and entirely separate candidate pool inside of Hire for your internal candidates.
• You are only considering internal candidates for a particular role.

Use your ATS for internal mobility - Read our best practices on this topic here!

Powerful Data with Insights & Analytics

Trakstar Hire has built-in reporting, as well as our powerful Insights. Insights include two dashboards - one packed with valuable data points that help you evaluate future hiring plans and the benchmarking dashboard, which shows how your hiring metrics stack up to your peers.

You can look at this data when considering how early to post an upcoming position - based on your time to hire and time to fill data. Reviewing your historical candidate sources and the quality of the candidates from each source will help you know where to advertise for your next role.

You can even use benchmarking to stay on top of hiring trends in your industry, such as the amount of time it's taking others to fill roles and the number of remote positions offered.

Staying in touch with hiring trends helps you be prepared for your next open role. Learn more about Insights & Benchmarking here and reporting in general here.

Streamline the Hiring Process

Frequently we hear teams talk about how it's difficult to streamline and determine best hiring practices - because they're just so busy hiring. A slowdown in open positions is the perfect time to update policies, procedures, and processes inside your ATS - reducing cost and increasing hiring speed when you begin hiring again. Other than your internal company policies and procedures, some of the main areas to focus on inside of your ATS:

• Application forms
• Email Templates
• Hiring Stages
• Evaluation forms
• Standardizing job descriptions

Not sure where to start? Watch our webinar on general account cleanup, or head over to our Best Practices guides to find specific suggestions!

Still have questions? Our team has answers! We love to talk about how Hire can make your hiring landscape much easier. Reach out to the support team or your account manager!