For many small businesses, hiring feels like a constant uphill climb. Limited time, tight budgets, and a competitive job market mean every hire really matters. After all, when you manage a smaller team, each new employee has the potential to shape the company’s trajectory, culture, and ability to scale in the future!
And yet, too often, recruitment in small organizations is still managed through spreadsheets, inboxes, or even piles of paper. These scattered and manual processes slow down hiring and result in missed opportunities and inconsistent candidate experiences.
That’s where Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) come in. Once considered as “reserved” for large corporations, modern recruiting platforms are now more affordable, user-friendly, and designed to meet the needs of growing small businesses.
Here are 7 ways an ATS can help SMBs not just hire faster, but grow stronger!
1. Streamlining the Hiring Process
Between posting job ads, reviewing résumés, coordinating interviews and sending follow-ups, it is easy to get lost in administrative tasks when it comes to hiring. When managed manually, these processes eat up valuable time, and there is an increased chance of mistakes or missed opportunities.
The good news for SMBs is that Applicant Tracking Systems automate much of this workload. These solutions let HR managers and recruiters publish job postings across multiple channels, filter resumes based on precise criteria, or schedule job interviews with integrated calendars… all on the same platform!
This means that instead of wasting hours on repetitive administrative work, your HR team and recruiters can focus on higher-level value tasks, such as engaging candidates or building positive onboarding experiences. To top it all off, benefiting from faster and more efficient hiring processes means that you can add the right people to your team without slowing down daily operations.
2. Attracting Better Candidates
SMBs often struggle to compete with large companies for visibility. An Applicant Tracking System made for SMBs like Folks ATS, helps level the playing field by making it easy to post jobs across multiple boards, career sites, and social platforms in just a few clicks.
Beyond reach, ATS platforms also ensure consistent branding. Every job description, logo, and employer message looks professional and aligned with your company culture, helping attract candidates who resonate with your values. What is so great about this, you ask? Increased cultural alignment means you have more chances of not only filling roles, but hiring people who can actually grow alongside your company over the long term.
3. Improving Candidate Experience
In today’s competitive job market, candidate experience is the great differentiating factor. Simply put, it can make or break your hiring success! That is why you should avoid clunky processes at all costs. Confusing application processes and long waits for updates simply won’t cut it if you want to hire the best talent.
Applicant Tracking Systems can help improve the candidate experience by facilitating communication between recruiters and candidates (with automated updates and emails or by scheduling calendars to coordinate interviews, for instance). They also provide simplified, more modern methods of application for candidates. A smoother candidate experience increases your chances of finding the right talent and supports both your employer brand and your talent attraction.
4. Centralizing All Recruitment Data
Data centralization is key to finding the best talent in a competitive market. Without a recruiting platform, information often ends up being scattered across email inboxes, multiple documents… or even printed folders!
With an ATS, you can set up effective and collaborative hiring processes by ensuring that everyone can access the same information, from résumés to candidate communications and evaluation notes. The icing on the cake? Key information is accessible at all times, and updated in real time!
Data centralization boosts efficiency and alignment across teams. It prevents bottlenecks, ensures better collaboration, and helps make faster and more confident hiring decisions, which is crucial when you are in a growth phase.
5. Supporting Fair Hiring
Unconscious bias can slip into recruitment, especially when decisions rely heavily on “gut feeling” or unstructured processes. With an ATS, you can use blind résumé review features, standardized interview questionnaires and consistent rating systems so that applications are processed objectively.
Consistency is key when it comes to recruitment processes: it ensures you are hiring based on potential and skills, not bias. As such, ATS helps you broaden your talent pool and hire more diverse talent, which is proven to drive business growth.
6. Making Data-Driven Hiring Decisions
Although human instincts and impressions are crucial when it comes to hiring, talent acquisition should prominently rely on strategic data. Most recruiting software provide recruitment analytics such as:
- Time-to-hire (how quickly you manage to fill a role);
- Source of hire (which channel brings the best candidates to strategically focus your future efforts);
- Candidate acceptance or dropoff rates (evaluate job offer acceptance rates or identify where applicants abandon the process).
There are many more recruitment KPIs to track, each one of them essential to help SMBs make smarter hiring decisions, invest in the right resources, shorten recruiting pipelines and refine job descriptions. On top of reducing recruitment costs, recruitment analytics support sustainable growth, which is a crucial asset for small businesses.
7. Preparing for Future Growth
Most small businesses start by hiring a few employees per year, but as growth accelerates and needs evolve, the demand for new talent can rise quickly. Of course, this means that the workload also grows exponentially!
Without an effective Applicant Tracking System set up to manage your recruitment processes, scaling hiring is extremely difficult. However, if you implement an ATS, you can handle any number of applications and job postings as needed at any time, which means that scaling recruitment is seamless. Automated workflows and talent pipelines are examples of key features that make it easy to stay ahead of headcount growth.
Bottom Line
For small businesses, every hire is a growth decision. In that sense, an Applicant Tracking System is more than a hiring tool, it’s a growth enabler! By streamlining processes, attracting better candidates, improving experiences, centralizing data, reducing bias, leveraging analytics, and preparing for the future, an ATS like Folks empowers SMBs to compete with larger organizations while staying true to their unique culture.
The right ATS doesn’t just help you hire. It helps you build strong, agile teams that will take your business to the next stage, and it might be the best investment you make for your business this year!
Related Categories