According to Aptitude Research, 58% of us companies are currently dissatisfied with their ATS provider.
One in four are actively looking to replace their tech.
This dissatisfaction comes from a phenomenon known as overstacking.
Put simply, companies over invest in a raft of HR technologies, throwing big dollars into solutions that don’t provide clear benefit or ROI.
The thinking is this: “Everyone has an ATS. If I implement one at my company, I won’t get fired.”
But obviously, as Aptitude’s research shows, most ATSs are not doing what they’re expected to do – they don’t provide enough efficiency, and they don’t solve for things like quality of hire and time to hire; the metrics that CFOs look at very closely.
So what’s the real problem?
Augment your ATS, don’t replace it
The dissatisfaction is due not to an inherent fault in ATS technology, but a fundamental misunderstanding of what an ATS is supposed to do.
Look at it this way: an ATS is like your laptop computer. It has all of the parts that make up a good (or bad) computer: chips, CPUs, keys, a screen, and so on. In this sense, an ATS is more hardware than software. You need it, but you need more, too.
What you add to your ATS – your computer – is what transforms it into a tool that can be used to produce and extract value. If you bought a computer and tried to create documents on it without installing Microsoft Word, for example, you can hardly blame the computer for the missing functionality. It’s not fundamentally designed for word processing – it’s the platform that facilitates it.
Therefore, if your ATS is not helping to improve key performance indicators like quality of hire or time-to-fill, the ATS isn’t the problem. The problem is you don’t have the ATS plug-in designed specifically to satisfy those KPIs.
So, without first considering what a good ATS is, and what a good ATS should do, spending big money to replace it will not solve the problem – only delay it.
How to know if your ATS is salvageable
First, you need to ask yourself (and your business) the following questions:
- Is your HR tech stack actually providing value, and in a way you can prove?
- What do you actually need your ATS to do, that it isn’t?
- What are some better, more cost-effective ways to make your ATS work better for you?
By partnering with your existing ATS, Sapia.ai’s smart hiring automation solution can help you achieve 90% completion rates and 90% candidate satisfaction rates – and you can even achieve a time-to-fill of as little as 24 hours.
We’ve even helped one customer, Spark NZ, achieve a near-complete removal of hiring bias.
This isn’t a case of simply throwing good money after bad. It’s about making your ATS into a solution that actually works for you – and in ways that you can prove.
You could replace your tech and call it job done. Maybe you’ll be gone, off to a new business, in the three or four years it will take for the cycle of dissatisfaction to repeat. But that is not a good solution.
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