Why You Should Stop Using Email and Spreadsheets and Start Using an ATS

All multi-location retail companies depend on consistent products and services to build a positive brand. However, they don’t always rely on a consistent hiring process. Managers often lack the resources to recruit effectively; after all, hiring is usually a secondary responsibility to running a store. The result: sub-par hires and high employee turnover.

Attracting and hiring employees who will help you achieve growth and stay with the company requires specific skill sets and technology. Applicant tracking systems (ATS), a type of recruitment software, can help businesses attract and hire employees and turn their hiring into a competitive advantage.

4 reasons every business should use an ATS

I. Make store-centered recruitment efficient

In retail and branch-based companies, finding and attracting candidates is the responsibility of many people — a mix of recruiters, talent acquisition specialists, and often the store managers themselves. This makes the process store-centered and manager-driven.

By giving your store managers the right technology, you empower them to make better hires and grow quality teams without losing focus on daily operations. With an ATS that’s easy to learn and use, you can encourage managers to adopt the technology and recruit efficiently for their stores. It’s easy to design a consistent process that leads to better hires, and by making it structured and easy to follow, managers spend less time recruiting while reducing turnover and increasing sales performance.

An ATS gives store, district, and regional managers access to their jobs, candidates, and stores, and encourages easy collaboration with head office. Your managers follow a standardized process and the company’s best practices across the whole organization.

II. Free up time and resources for your managers

While a store manager’s main role is to sell and grow profitability, they also play a key part in attracting the right candidates to hit their targets. They need simple, streamlined tools to recruit on the go. With an ATS, each manager has a dedicated, easy-to-use portal. Built-in screening and automation give them more time to interview top candidates, while the ATS sorts and ranks applicants, contacts them by email, and archives their details in a searchable database.

III. Provide a better candidate (customer) experience

Whether in-store or online, a great customer experience is vital — and recruitment is no different. Quite often your customers are also your potential candidates! A user-friendly, streamlined experience improves your brand image. With the right ATS, you can seamlessly integrate the candidate journey into your website or careers site.

IV. Make faster, smarter decisions

An ATS lets you collect valuable data and insights to make smarter, faster decisions about your recruitment and your business. With personalized analytics, you can continuously optimize your hiring strategy.

Key ATS features

Personality screening — Rate candidates’ personalities, important when employees interact directly with customers.
Employee referrals — Organize a referral program so employees can recommend people for open positions.
Seasonal planning — Use historical data to plan for seasonal shifts and post jobs proactively.
Data-driven decisions — Real-time reports by store, district, region, or user type.
Store career site — A dedicated section per store to publish related jobs instantly.
Store dashboard — Instantly view the status of all jobs and applicants and track pending tasks.
Job creation and management — Create jobs from scratch or templates and publish instantly to the career site and external boards.
Candidate search — Search and compare candidates by keywords, availability, or assessment score.
Automated communication — Bulk-select candidates and send automatic emails (rejection, acceptance, interviews).
Interview management — Schedule interviews and send automatic reminders.
Offer management — Track offers pending approval and start onboarding for accepted ones.
Onboarding — Use personalized email templates to prepare new employees for their first day.
Web-based ATS — No software to buy or hardware to install; log in from any browser.

Things to consider when implementing

Knowledgeable deployment team — A decentralized rollout needs a skilled implementation team. Collect detailed business requirements early and validate them throughout; include field representatives (store and district managers) on the design team.
Ease of use — Create job templates for each store and job type to pre-populate fields and provide the right candidate-selection workflow, vastly improving managers’ ability to hire quickly during peak season.
Security — Use multiple user groups so no manager can access jobs or candidates outside their store, and configure the ATS to meet the HR team’s security requirements.

Conclusion

Your business is unique, so it deserves an ATS that caters to that uniqueness. Take the time to research solutions, view demos, and compare options before committing. You don’t need a big budget to make big improvements to the way you manage hiring.

Ready to get started? Request a demo and start hiring better talent, faster.