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How Recruiting Software Can Help You Make the Right Hire

In Hiring Software & Tools — by Charles Settles

Woman working on recruiting software program

According to a 2013 hiring study from CareerBuilder, 66 percent of U.S. employers have been affected by a bad hire. Besides wasting your recruiters’ time and your company’s money, bad hires can profoundly affect the long-term viability of your organization. Recruiting software, when used correctly, can help you make the right hire to grow your business.

If you were to ask your talent acquisition team for suggestions on how to improve your hiring process, you’ll likely hear as many different ideas as there are stars in the sky. However, it all boils down to two main problems:

    • Too many applicants
  • Not enough applicants

Simple, right?

Sure, there are other concerns, but the root of most recruitment issues is applicant volume. Thankfully, a well-designed (and properly utilized!) applicant tracking system (ATS) like Trakstar Hire can alleviate issues surrounding applicant volume — both too much and too little.

First, let’s discuss too much applicant volume. Consider the following scenario:


Your company, a well-known international marketing firm, is opening a new office. As they’ve always done in the past, your recruiting team posted the job openings on various career boards, asked your employees to leverage their personal networks for referrals, identified prospective candidates on social media, etc.

Now, the applications are pouring in and you can barely stay ahead of the flow — much less respond to each applicant. You’re at risk of letting good applicants get away while simultaneously wasting too much time interviewing people that are only a good fit on paper.

What do you do now?

If you’re using an applicant tracking system like Hire, this is just another day at the office. The email filtering capabilities automatically pull candidates’ resumes into your ATS, while the resume parsing functionality will automatically extract relevant information in order to create candidate profiles – all without anyone lifting a finger. Even better, the software can automatically reply to each email, thanking the candidate for taking the time to apply and informing them of the next steps.

If you weren’t using an ATS, the sole task of replying to candidates would take a solid day, unless you want to send a single form email that makes it seem like your company doesn’t have the time or energy to give candidates the attention they deserve. As venture capitalist-cum-hiring guru Eric Feng told Fast Company, “You’ve got to be a human. Maybe you’re going to use mail merge. You’re going to do a lot of automation. You’re going to copy and paste. But try your best to come out of it still sounding like a human, because that’s the number one filter for candidates.” It’s this humanity that will separate your firm from the competition when you’re wooing that high-value candidate, and it is a well-designed ATS that will allow you to automate while maintaining your humanity.

Of course, that’s not the only issue when dealing with a high volume of applicants; someone has to sort out which ones are going to merit an interview. Thankfully, Trakstar Hire offers customizable questionnaires that allow you to filter out candidates based on their answers. For example, a candidate who’s applied for an entry-level position, filled out a questionnaire, and identified their salary requirements as being way above your range can be quickly and easily eliminated from consideration, saving both parties time.

Now let’s consider the opposite problem: too few applicants.


As in the first scenario, let’s say you’re at that same marketing firm, but now you’re looking to source candidates for your development and engineering team — a much taller order than staffing a new office full of entry-level positions, at least in today’s competitive technology hiring marketplace.

Thankfully, there are just as many automation tools to help grow applicant volume as there are tools to limit applicant volume. Systems like Hire provide a turnkey solution for setting up a careers page on your own site, so that you can accept electronic applications. They will also cross-post your position openings to multiple job boards, saving you time and diversifying your candidates sources.

Trakstar Hire even allows you to purchase premium job listings or paid placements on various recruiting sites, all from within the software’s interface. Lastly, if you’re still having issues sourcing enough candidates, the best ATS solutions provide multiple user permission levels, so you can collaborate with third-party recruiters — without giving them access to your entire recruiting back-end.

Despite the myriad issues faced by today’s recruiters, too few — or too many — applicants doesn’t need to be one of them.


Trakstar Hire is considered the most user friendly hiring software on the market. If you’re ready to take your recruiting and hiring to the next level, request a Trakstar Hire demo today.


Who is Trakstar?

Trakstar is a multi-product HR software provider helping organizations put the people back in people management. Develop and align your staff through better recruiting and applicant tracking, performance management, and learning management. For a more integrated solution to talent management, check out our website and request a live demonstration today.

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