ATS can assist with recruiting process

"The focus of ERP software is on processing applications. It assumes the candidates are approaching the organisation. However, recruiters are required to go and look for talent. Recruiters will also only hire a small percentage of the candidates they look at and given the intensive nature of data capture into an ERP system, large amounts of man hours are required to input all the potential candidates' information for very little reward," he says.

Frustrated with the challenges of the ERP system, many recruiters return to spread sheets and job boards. However, this manual solution is almost as intensive as an ERP solution and is difficult to manage when large numbers of candidates are being looked at.

Arduous process

Recruiters fall back on posting to job boards and sifting through the plethora of responses, placing potential candidates into spread sheets which they then try and shortlist down to candidates the company would consider hiring. Given that shortlisted candidates can be as little as one percent of submitted CVs, it's an arduous process at best.

An ATS, like Graylink's Neptune platform, allows recruiters to be proactive and easily create jobs on the platform, which can then be published out on social media networks along with targeted job boards using the ATS. The ATS allows recruiters to screen candidates, move them through the workflow process and keep all the documentation in one place.

Furthermore, Gray says it provides detailed reporting on where the candidates are coming in from, which recruiters have high placement success rates and takes into account compliance requirements and legislation. An ATS can also provide companies with their own recruitment site which they can then use to manage candidates who approach the company directly.

Platforms with many visitors

"Job boards have had a strong presence in South Africa but are high volume sites with large numbers of inactive members. However, an ATS such as Neptune enables companies to push relevant jobs out onto platforms with large numbers of passive candidates, like LinkedIn. Candidates on these networks are not necessarily looking for a job, but may well respond to a job post should it be relevant to them, and displayed in their feed," he says.

Neptune also integrates with job aggregator portals like Indeed, enabling companies to publish out to a wider audience and pull responses back into Neptune.

International ATS solutions are problematic for several reasons. "First off, Neptune is up to 90% cheaper to implement than international ATS solutions and Graylink have people on the ground who understand the dynamics of the local market," he says.

This avoids the challenges associated with a box dropping scenario. Neptune is also built to be extremely configurable to the client's needs and we host locally, which means the system works faster than international cloud-based ATS solutions, Gray concludes.