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(July 15, 2003) - The underlying trends remain unchanged. The competition for talent, however you define that locally, will consume increasing amounts of organizational resources. Ready access to the right players at the right time will define the difference between good and great.

Yesterday, we pointed out a couple of key conversation threads in the blogs that underline the inadequacies of using Applicant Tracking Systems as recruiting tools. Designed for process standardization, ATS systems are marvelous tools for tracking compliance. They fail when they are used for Recruiting purposes.

Applicant Tracking Systems are all about being comprehensive and inclusive. That's what you need to demonstrate compliance. Recruiting tools are all about concentration. They take chaotic data and "funnel" it, shedding irrelevancies and producing order from chaos. The two tasks are mutually opposed.

Applicant Tracking is powerful and important. It just isn't a Recruiting Tool.

The real issue, the one that is two-thirds below the surface, is the fact that Applicant Tracking and Recruiting are worlds apart, and that Recruiting is the much higher value, less traditional, and more difficult operation to support.

ATS buyers from the corporate side nearly always underestimate the dimensions involved with actual recruiting. They see applicants as just that, and imagine that the only organization that they need to track is their own. When they go shopping for software, they generally reject anything that has an "agency" feel (in other words, a system that tracks multiple organizations, roles, and opportunities) or anything that is not "user-friendly" (in other words, anything that reveals or recognizes the complexities of people and organizations).

I mean really, people are still paying good money for systems that treat every "application" as a separate event, requiring all data to be re-entered for another to occur for the same candidate. Believe me, you can do applicant tracking with any number of recruiting systems, but you cant really do recruiting with a number of leading brand ATS systems.

In almost six years in this business,I have learned a few things about this topic. I truly believe that recruiting will be the more important discipline going forward, and that many companies that have invested heavily in ATS technology will find themselves equipping recruiters with dedicated recruiting technology as well.

An ATS system should have much more in common with a CRM application than an HRIS application. There are many ways to track, count, quantify, present, and otherwise control hiring data.

There is only one way to induce a person to join your organization- via the arts of persuasion.

That requires salespeople, and they require applications that are easy, open, and offer comprehensive and variable methods to meet sales goals. I'm not even talking about the culture and infrastructure need to support sales, just the mere software tools.

Martin Snyder, CEO Main Sequence

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