How does ATS Affect Time Cost Savings and Team Productivity?

One of the most valuable assets in today’s business world is time, and the ability to manage it effectively while ensuring high-quality work is crucial. Balancing the act of saving time with maintaining excellent employee management is a significant challenge. As a result, various strategies and technologies are increasingly employed to streamline employee management tasks. Efficient management of employees not only improves productivity but also directly affects cost savings, reducing the need for additional hires, overtime expenses, or outsourcing. By optimizing employee management, businesses can allocate resources more effectively and enhance overall operational efficiency.

In the previous blog post, we touched upon the fact that hiring a recruitment agency increases the cost of hiring for a company compared to implementing an ATS solution. In addition to that, this blog will focus on how much time you will save hiring by implementing an ATS solution while making your entire HR Team more productive.

We invite you to keep reading the following paragraphs to get a complete understanding of all the aspects that could be affected by the implementing ATS solution and how this is directly reflecting on your ROI.

Let's Talk Numbers

Is your company is already performing in house hiring instead of hiring through a recruitment agency? But, your system still entail a lot of different excel spreadsheets combined with receiving applications to your email? In that case you are in for a treat!

First step is defining how many people are working on hiring new employees and how much time they spend on hiring on average. Let's assume there are two people in your HR department and your CEO overlooks every new hire.

Now, let's say HR department members spend around 20 hours per week hiring (more or less depending on the needs). If you multiply that number with the cost of their hourly rate. You will get the exact amount of money your company spends each month only on hiring. If we say their hourly rate is 20$, the monthly cost of hiring becomes the following:

2 HR department members hourly rates = 40$

2 HR department members total hours in a week spent on hiring= 40

20$ x 20 x 4 = 1600 - cost of hiring per person per month

1600 X 2 = 3800 - cost of hiring per month for your entire HR department

This equation shows that you are spending 3800$ a month only on working fees for the members of your HR department to spend on hiring. And that is without the work that your CEO is doing, and the time he or she is spending on taking part in every recruitment process.

On the other side, the research has shown that implementing an ATS has significantly reduced workload for the recruiters. Some suggest that recruiters spend up to 20% less time on hiring when using an ATS solution. If we take this into the equation, here is what happens with the cost of recruiting.

If the recruiter now spends 16 hours weekly on hiring instead of 20, it means that both of your recruiters are together spending 128 hours monthly (2 x 16 x 4= 128 ) on the hiring process. By multiplying this number with 20$ of their hourly fees, we get the total of 2560$. To this, we now have to add the amount spent on your ATS - which is approximately 150 $ per month. That brings us to the total of 2710$ spent each month on hiring processes instead of 3800, which makes your hiring costs lower for one third of what you were spending prior to implementing an ATS solution.

By simple math we calculated that by spending less time on the recruitment processes and giving your recruiters time to spend it on other tasks, you can save up to 12000$ yearly.

How can an ATS make your team more productive?

Your savings don't end here. Sometimes it's not easy to translate increased productivity into actual savings for your business. So here are some estimates on how you can look at your productivity improvement from an ROI perspective.

As the Harvard Business Review writes in one of its articles, large companies are obsessed with productivity, not efficiency. So what is the difference between the two?

While you might think that efficiency is considered a measurable metric and productivity not so much, this is actually not the case. As HBR explains in their article, efficiency is basically about doing the same thing with less, while productivity is about doing more with the same.

Though seemingly quite similar, these two can deliver some very different results for a company's success and ROI.

As their research suggested, employees are on a mission to be more productive, but companies often get in their way of being just that. The survey they conducted among 300 senior executives from large companies worldwide suggested that accepting the productivity mindset set apart the most successful companies from the rest, becoming more than 40% more productive!

Team Productivity Translated into Savings

Having more productive HR departments and recruiters not only increases their satisfaction but also makes hiring efforts more focused and leads to higher outreach for recruiters.

ATS solution simplifies the hiring process and gives the proper assistance for everyone involved in recruiting new talent. Here are all elements of ATS that make your recruiters more productive by saving time on hiring:

1. Team collaboration

By collaborating with your team members and exchanging thoughts and ideas about each candidate in one place, each person involved in hiring will increase their productivity.

Here are some ways in which you can do it thanks to ATS:

• Assign different roles to each of your team members:

You are able to control who has access to what information, which enables the entire HR team to avoid overloading each team member with unnecessary details. In that case, everyone can focus on their tasks and responsibilities.

• Sharing candidate profiles:

Asking team members for feedback and easily sharing important information about candidates can be incredibly insightful and helpful when making critical hiring decisions. Without an advanced technological infrastructure, sending candidates resumes via email and all your previous interactions with them can be a hassle. By having all your activities within one place you will improve the quality of hiring and your hiring decisions by ensuring more different perspectives in just a few clicks.

• Assign tasks to your team members

Ensure that all critical tasks get done by assigning tasks to your team members and being automatically notified when they complete them. This way, you will avoid time-consuming status update meetings with your hiring team members since everyone will be in sync about each task completion.

• Ensure quick and smooth collaboration

Team collaboration is quicker and more efficient when your whole recruiting team is more productive. For that reason, write notes to each other, leave comments and tag your team members in your ATS and make the hiring as smooth and transparent as possible.

2. Structured evaluations

Becoming more productive is all about optimizing all time-consuming and data-driven tasks. Let's say there are a hundred applicants for a position and another hundred for another job at your company. Each of them needs to be evaluated through different tests depending on the role they applied for. By creating customized evaluation plans or using built-in interview kits and scorecards to evaluate candidates on predefined criteria, the entire hiring process becomes more productive, faster, and collaborative!

3. Strategic reports

Finally, today's hiring practices require a robust analytical approach. In a world in which the job market is so competitive, candidates are becoming increasingly influential in shaping companies' hiring efforts, and competitors are trying their best to "steal your talent," it is essential to look into your hiring data from a strategic perspective.

Having numerical insights into hiring team members' productivity levels based on real numbers and rewarding and motivating them when needed helps HR departments learn what are the most productive hiring strategies and increase the productivity of each of their team members.

Ready to Let Technology Help You Improve Your Hiring?

Being able to spend more time building a plan and a strong strategy for recruiting and hiring in the upcoming period is something that all companies would benefit from. For that reason, it's become increasingly important to minimize the time spent on sorting, organizing, and other administrative tasks and let the technology help you in that aspect while leaving the space for you to strategize.

If you think that implementing an ATS solution can help your company save money and grow faster by making your HR department more productive, learn more about IceHrm and try out all the perks of modern hiring practices.