By Barbara Kovacs, Senior Business Development Manager
It’s time to rethink talent acquisition.
It may sound provocative, but there is a crucial issue in many of today’s top companies: leaders are often unaware that their company's internal recruitment ethos and employee branding are not consistently implemented."
In today’s competitive hiring environment, recruiters face a lot of pressure. They’re asked to do more with less, find qualified candidates, and use multiple platforms, all while upholding what the company says it stands for.
Ultimately, this can often lead to a disconnect between a company’s internal messaging and its actual recruiting practices. But how can you address this?
It all comes down to process.
Common Challenges: Why Recruiters Look Beyond Their ATS
Today’s recruitment landscape is characterized by candidate scarcity—not in terms of the number of candidates, but in terms of qualified candidates. Ask a recruiter about their biggest challenges, and they’re likely to mention the difficulty of finding candidates who are qualified for the roles they’re trying to fill. And yet, despite having vast internal resources like an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) filled with candidates who have shown interest in the company, recruiters still turn to external job boards for "fresh" candidates. Why is this?
In part, it’s because there’s a common belief in recruiting and talent acquisition that:
- Past applicants aren't worth revisiting: Why look at them again if a candidate wasn’t hired for a previous role?
- The company database is stale: Candidate profiles are outdated and irrelevant.
- Speed of search: Job boards often have familiar, intuitive filters, making it easier to find candidates fast.
- Niche skill sets: Specialized job boards may seem better suited for locating unique talent.
Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Today: A New Approach
While these points may be true in specific cases, here’s the reality:
- Better candidate alignment: Candidates in your ATS have already demonstrated interest in your company, making them more likely to align with your values, mission, and industry.
- Compliance and data protection: Using your ATS ensures compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR. Your company likely already has consent to use candidate data that’s in your database, which reduces the risk of violating data privacy laws
- Cost efficiency: Job boards and external databases can be costly. Utilizing your ATS costs nothing, maximizes the ROI from your past recruitment efforts, and helps make sure you can optimize and target any external database or job board spend more accurately.
- Pre-qualified candidates: Your ATS contains applicants who have been pre-screened and vetted, saving time and reducing risk when compared to sourcing untested candidates externally.
- Existing relationships: Recruiters have likely already contacted candidates in your ATS, allowing for more personalized and effective outreach, often reducing candidate ghosting.
- Faster time to hire: Engaging candidates who are already familiar with your company or may have been interviewed in the past can lead to quicker hires.
Why Data Integrity and Candidate Engagement Are Important
Another critical aspect of talent acquisition is data integrity. Data integrity is important because the quality of data in your ATS directly impacts the effectiveness of your recruiting process. To put it plainly, you can’t engage candidates if you don’t have accurate information.
But with good candidate data, recruiters can regularly engage with candidates and enrich their databases with more up-to-date, relevant information. Regular engagement allows a recruiter to build a relationship and capture a candidate’s evolving work experience, new skill sets, and preferences— all of which ensure that their data remains current and useful.
This kind of effective engagement with candidates enhances the value of your ATS. By automating this outreach and updating candidate information, you ensure that your database is not only comprehensive but also reliable, eliminating the need to look elsewhere for talent.
Fortune 1000 companies invest heavily in branding, marketing, and creating a strong employee value proposition (EVP). So, why not leverage these efforts fully by continuing conversations with past candidates who have the necessary skill sets and cultural fit?
Why Optimizing Your ATS Can Improve Your Talent Acquisition Strategy
Optimizing your ATS can improve recruitment processes and outcomes.
AI-driven technologies can stack-rank candidates, allowing you to push relevant profiles to recruiters even before posting a job.
When your ATS is optimized, it’s also easier to track sources of candidate data. Accurate sourcing is essential for analyzing ROI, and an ATS with accurate data and easy data entry processes can help encourage recruiters to use and maintain your internal database.
Optimization can transform your ATS from just a database to your recruiters’ most powerful tool. And a well-functioning database is well worth the time it takes to maintain it.
An ATS-first approach to recruiting can decrease time-to-hire, ensure brand consistency, and foster meaningful, ongoing engagement with candidates in your database. Additionally, recruiters can rely on it as a primary resource by ensuring that your ATS remains a living database enriched with accurate data, reducing dependency on external job boards.
Thorough, effective recruiting doesn't have to be slow or costly. By prioritizing internal resources, streamlining processes, and maintaining meaningful outreach, Fortune 1000 companies can make their recruitment more efficient, cost-effective, and aligned with their corporate ethos.
The result?
Faster, more aligned hires that reflect your brand values while reducing unnecessary spending. Make candidate engagement a priority and show applicants they matter from the moment they enter your database—not just when they fit a specific role. Doing so will preserve data integrity and brand value while ensuring your recruitment strategy is thorough and future-proof. When better recruiting processes are in place, it’s easier for companies to bridge the gap between their employer branding, candidate experience, and recruiting efficiency—building a better experience for candidates and recruiters alike.
