Growing businesses may face financial concerns about investing large amounts of capital in purchasing Applicant Tracking System (ATS).
These businesses look for a platform where they can post jobs and recruit candidates efficiently. It also saves a considerable amount of time for the recruiters.
The free ATS contains all the essential details like resume handling, reporting, and recruiting candidates onboard.
FreshTeam
FreshTeam is an Applicant Tracking System that simplifies the hiring process and finds the best candidate. It helps in handling recruiting, onboarding, time off, and employee information in one place.
FreshTeam uses multiple channels such as a career site, job boards, social media channels, emails, etc., to interview & hire candidates at $75 per month.
Zoho Recruit
Zoho Recruit is an easy-to-use applicant tracking system that helps to source, track and hire the best candidates. It helps in task automation like sending emails, updating interview status, etc. ZohoRecruit offers end-to-end hiring solutions for staffing agencies, corporate HRs, and temporary workforce.
ZohoRecruit provides a free trial period for 15 days which is limited to one job opening and does not include social media posting. It offers paid subscriptions as the Standard plan starts from $25 per month, followed by Professional and Enterprise editions. It does not provide a portal creation where people can post their resumes and contact information. Customer support is limited to five days a week.
BreezyHR
BreezyHR is a recruiting and applicant tracking system that helps to attract and hire employees at ease. It is designed to help recruiters and hiring managers by making the hiring process efficient.
The resume management system of Breezyhr is highly regarded. The basic plan is free for all. The Startup, Growth, and Business plan are priced differently, starting from $143 per month. The automation is much more complicated than other HR software.
Smart Recruiters
Smart Recruiters is an ATS and recruiting platform for small businesses. The features include applicant tracking, marketing tools, and integrated hiring plans.
Smart Recruiters simplify and bring huge hiring benefits to businesses. Smart Recruiters do not offer a free trial but offer a free version limited to 50 resumes, after which additional credits need to be purchased. It costs $10,000.00 a year.
Is a free applicant tracking system the right choice for you?
Free Applicant Tracking System comes with several features, which include efficient job posting, gathering of resumes, and communicating with employees. This process allows the recruiter to save time and money.
Although free ATS provides basic features to the recruiters that help them meet their needs, some premium features are missing in the free ATS. There are, however, limitations to free ATS, which include:
- Limited job postings: Free ATS limits the number of job postings made at a time.
- Resume storage: Free ATS limits the time for storing applicants’ resumes in the searchable database that can be accessed by HR at any given time.
- Social Media Functionality: It helps to aggregate and filter applications for the HR department. However, a free ATS cannot find candidates from their social media profiles such as LinkedIn.
- Mobile Compatibility: A free ATS does not provide all features in a mobile application.
Scalability: Free ATS is not preferable for a fast-growing business, and it is a good idea to invest in a paid ATS to handle a higher load of applications.
The need for an ATS for growing businesses
Growing businesses want to onboard great talent in a cost-effective manner. The applicant tracking system reduces the manual labor of managing resumes, scheduling interviews, maintaining candidate databases, etc all on a single platform.
With the help of ATS, a growing business can easily customize its task according to its needs. It streamlines the entire process and manages job postings, keeps track of email applicants, employee engagement, finds the top talents, etc in one single place.
Candidate 360
Candidate 360 is a complete record of the candidate’s history with the company. It includes everything from their resume, interview schedules, feedback, emails, the timeline of interaction, communication with the hiring team, etc. ATS maintains a candidate database and a single profile for multiple job postings.
Collaborating made easy
The applicant tracking system helps in collaborative hiring by incorporating more team members into the hiring and recruiting process. Colleagues from different parts of the organization are involved in sourcing, screening, and in decision-making phases. ATS allows collaborative hiring instead of individual hiring or recruiting making the process decentralized. Some of the benefits are that it reduces the stress on an individual recruiter, hires a candidate who will fit in the company’s culture better, improves candidate experience, limits bias, and increases employee retention.
Easy tracking of hiring pipeline
The applicant tracking system keeps track of the hiring pipeline even when the HR is not at the workplace or is on the move. ATS allows one to view candidate profiles, provide interview feedback, and stay updated with the mobile application version of the ATS. It eases the hiring process for HR.
Job description templates
ATS provides job description templates that can be easily used to create and share job descriptions to attract a large pool of talent. With these templates, HR managers do not need to spend hours making the job description from scratch. It can be easily prepared with the help of templates provided by the ATS.
Job description templates
Applicant tracking system assists in creating and posting the job vacancies on various job portals. It organizes the information about the potential candidates and makes it searchable. It reduces the task of maintaining multiple excel sheets for different job openings.
ATS creates job postings for every single opening and sees all the roles in one place. It thus becomes easier to find the best talent. When such needs are not fulfilled, there is a need to switch to paid ATS. For a growing company, a paid ATS offers many features. In a paid ATS, there is no limitation on the posting of job vacancies. Apart from this, many other excellent features are available on a paid ATS like resume storage, easy management and tracking of incoming applicants, and keeping data organized and accessible to all your team members to review.
Conclusion
Since the advent of the Covid19 pandemic, HR softwares are helping companies achieve greater efficiency at affordable rates. These softwares help the company to streamline the entire hiring and recruiting process by centralizing the workflow system.
These softwares manage and automate even the administrative task associated with the HR department. It also automates the administration process, consolidates the applicant database, offers flexible interview scheduling, helps in collaborative candidate evaluation, and increases the talent pool.
Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
An applicant tracking system (ATS) is software used to help manage and automate hiring and recruitment practices for an organization by providing a centralized location to manage job postings, filter job applications, sort through resumes, and identify strong candidates for open positions.
Apart from a few Free ATS Solutions like PyjamaHR, the Charges range from $4 to $7 per employee per month. This can add up for big companies, but the largest enterprises may see discounts that drop their fee to as little as $0.20 per person.