I realized recently that in the previous 60 episodes of this podcast we’ve had hardly any discussion about Applicant Tracking Systems. I’m very keen to rectify this. ATS systems are crucial to so many employers as a key part of the recruiting process. Many people feel that they have not kept pace with the changing nature of recruiting and the expectations of their users. This is certainly true of some systems but there have been some recent innovations in the ATS space that I was keen to get some opinion on.
My guest this week is Jess Hayes, Talent Manager and HR Lead for Lost My Name. Jess has worked with a number of different types of ATS during her career and I wanted to get her views on the changes in the space.
In the interview we discuss:
• How the purpose of an ATS has developed over the last few years
• Expectations of the ATS and why software should adapt as user requirements develop
• The responsibility of the recruiter
• Limiting the administrative burden so recruiters can spend more face time with candidates
• Why integrations are so important
• The potential of nurturing workflows
• Advice for anyone changing ATS or purchasing one for the first time
Jess also tells us which of the new breed of ATS is her favourite and gives her thoughts on the features and functionality that will be needed in the future.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Lever. Providing a modern take on the applicant tracking system. Lever combines ATS and CRM functionality into a single, powerful platform to help you source, nurture, and manage your candidates all in one place. What’s more, Lever’s deceptively simple interface means that hiring managers and applicants love it too. To find out how Lever can help you both accelerate and humanize hiring, visit www.lever.co recruit. That’s www.lever.co recruit. And Lever is spelt L E V E R. Lever. Where ATS meets CRM.
Matt Alder [00:01:07]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 61 of the Recruiting Future podcast. I realized recently that in 60 episodes of this podcast, we’ve had virtually no discussion on the topic of applicant tracking systems. I’m very keen to rectify this, firstly because ATSs are crucial to so many employers, and secondly, because there’s been a lot of recent innovation in the ATS space. My guest this week is Jess Hayes, Talent manager and HR lead for Lost My Name. Jess has worked with a number of different types of ATS in her career and I wanted to get her views on what employers should be doing to get the most out of their software. Hi Jess and welcome to the podcast.
Jess Hayes [00:01:58]:
Hi Matt.
Matt Alder [00:02:00]:
So could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about you, what you do and the company you work for?
Jess Hayes [00:02:06]:
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Jess Hayes. I am currently heading up technical talent and all of HR here at Lost My Name in London. Lost My Name is a personalized gift children’s books publishing company. Technically, it’s a bit difficult to explain what we do. Basically, we make very, very personalized children’s products with a full stack dev team behind them. So we’ve been running here since about 2012 and I fairly recently joined the team in April. Prior to that I was working at another London based startup called Yieldify. Before that a company called Box, which is a US based SaaS company. And other kind of roles in my history have been Goldman Sachs, bhp Billiton.
Matt Alder [00:02:52]:
Cool. Okay. So, you know, very much sort of focused on tech recruitment. What kind of recruitment challenges are you facing at the moment?
Jess Hayes [00:03:03]:
So I think the biggest thing for us is kind of almost a unique challenge in some respects. It’s that the offering that we have for marketing and design is very clear and I think people kind of see our product and instantly want to work for it. From that perspective, but for engineers, that path is a lot more foggy. And I think even, even up until sometimes interview stage, our engineering talent can be a bit confused about what exactly they’d be doing in a book company. So that’s kind of a unique problem for us. And we have to kind of get their attention sometimes in kind of novelty ways so that they actually do end up reading our job descriptions and understanding how they kind of fit into this big technical puzzle that we have developing this platform that kind of creates our products. So that’s a really big one for us.
Matt Alder [00:03:48]:
Yeah, that’s cool. I think you kind of answered it there, but I had to ask the question, how does a developer fit into a children’s book company?
Jess Hayes [00:03:57]:
Absolutely. We are incredibly proud of the books we create. But what we’re really creating behind that as a business is actually the platform that we use in order to manufacture these physical products. And basically what that platform is, is first of all, the E commerce platform, which is where you can all see just by going to the website, but then what you actually interact with the rendering engine that we’ve created. The real time kind of displays, the graphics, and also all the code that speaks to the back end of print houses around the world that distribute our print and distribute our books, as well as the code that kind of develop how expose the code that registers the algorithm that figures out essentially where you live based on the print house, how long it’s going to take to ship that. So there’s a lot of logistics behind the scenes, and that’s kind of what the engineering team is building, basically the very, very powerful platform to create almost any kind of personalized printed in a kind of beautiful way that it’s the front end to a consumer, is very sleek and, you know, very, very fast and very efficient.
Matt Alder [00:05:03]:
Yeah, no, I’ve seen the. I’ve seen the product, actually, and it’s. It’s absolutely, absolutely beautiful. And what, you know, what you do is very, very, very cool. And I’m sure that, you know, there are some sort of big sort of tech challenges behind that. What we’re sort of talking about on this episode is at. It’s really funny because I look back through the 58 episodes of this podcast that I’ve done, and very, very little discussion about ATS is so far. So I kind of wanted to sort of rectify that, and I. I wanted to sort of get your opinion on, you know, what, what is a. What is an ats? What is an ATS for? Why have you implemented one in your organization? And. And how do you think across the sort of roles that you’ve had? The role of the ATS is changing.
Jess Hayes [00:05:58]:
Yeah, absolutely. So the first question is, what do I think an ATS is for? I think for me, because I kind of came from a very traditional big company hr, corporate background. For me, a huge part of it is about boring stuff like compliance, boring stuff like reporting, and all the kind of nitty gritty of making sure that you’re doing a really good job efficiently. I think for me, that’s a very big piece. I really like being able to see the data in a great way. I like having a system that’s up to date that can kind of assist big teams and hiring managers working collaboratively. Having this kind of centralized point is for me a big win. I know, for a lot of people as well, I think. Definitely me to an extent, but not what I see. The most integral part of the ATS is kind of just to make life easier, to be able to build things like workflows in, to be able to have kind of a centralized point where interviews can be run almost without any assistance from the internal talent team and hiring managers kind of know what path it is to go on and that kind of thing. So it’s a simplicity kind of thing, I think, for a lot of people as well, just being able to have that structured center point. So the first ATS I used was at BHP back in Australia. It’s a small, I guess, program called Paid Up People. I have never seen it since or heard of anyone else that’s using it. But that was the first kind of time I ever had a system that for me, I was kind of really excited about to a certain level. It just made my job a lot easier. And I was like a grad recruiter at that point. So kind of anything that bones I was being thrown from the business was helpful. But I really liked that I could kind of see the individuals that were being put through the process. I could see everything with their profile. I could email them easily. Kind of just made my life a little bit less administratively burdened back then. I guess in retrospect now it was a terrible. Not terrible, but it definitely wasn’t slick. It was also about seven years ago, so that probably makes a big change in the technology. But I really, really liked it and I was really glad to have it. And I can remember my manager at that point having a big argument trying to get the budget to implement this ATS as well. So I’m very glad that she ended up winning that argument and implementing into the team. And then I moved to. I started as a consultant recruiter in a team that had no ats. They didn’t have any budget to implement it. So I was basically running some kind of shoddy shambles ATS from an Excel spreadsheet, which was just a nightmare before I moved to Goldman Sachs. And Goldman did this really, I think, crazy thing. They decided to try and build in house, like build their own ATS with their engineering team in house. Like that decision definitely didn’t play to Goldman’s strengths. I don’t really know what they thought was going to come from that. I think about compliance. They ended up building two separate tracking systems, one especially for graduates and one especially for lateral hires that didn’t speak to each other at all. And it was actually more of a pain to use the tracking system than it was to just not. It was so clunky, really difficult to put people into the system, difficult to communicate with them. So the majority of the time I think we’re basically putting people into the system just so they can offer them. But before that they were never in the tracking system. So our reporting was super manual. Just had so much man hours and extra work and extra administrative debt on top of what already is quite an administrative kind of role if you’re working in HR and talent. So I was incredibly disappointed with that system and then started working for Box and I got Lever for the first time. And just like the change between Excel spreadsheet or an in house built, clunky old school kind of almost Ms. DOS type system to what is now, I think a very modern SaaS platform basically that you can use to manage talent was just like it was worlds apart. It completely revolutionized the amount of time it took me to do things. I was so happy when I first started using Lever just because I saw within the space of three days of starting the new business how different the new school of applicant tracking system is to anything else that I’d ever really had the opportunity to use. I suppose since then I’ve used a couple of the competitors. I’ve used Greenhouse, for example, workable. And I just don’t, I don’t mind them. I think they’re definitely in the new school, but I don’t think they’re as user friendly and as kind of schmick. But that, that change has been so dramatic.
Matt Alder [00:10:38]:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean it’s, it’s interesting to see these, the, the sort of new breed of tools, you know, coming along and addressing, certainly addressing some of the user experience problems of the, of the past. Just, just before we sort of talk about that in a bit more, in a bit more detail, um, someone who’s worked for, you know, a large organization on some of the more traditional ATSs. Do you think that part of the problem might be the level of expectation that people have of their ATS in terms of what it’s supposed to do? Because you’ve, you’ve very much spoken about, you know, the ATS being something that can help you run the recruitment process, but more and more they’re, you know, there’s a candidate facing element to them. You know, they’re being asked to kind of work harder and harder as, you know, digital recruitment methodologies develop. Do you think people have unreal expectations, unrealistic expectations of the software, or do you think the software should be developing to, you know, meet the, the new demands of the industry?
Jess Hayes [00:11:45]:
I think the, the latter. I don’t think you can really have unrealistic expectations of a piece of software as long as there’s a really, you know, solid engineering team and a solid company building a piece of software. I think it’s ridiculous to say that, you know, they should have a LIM functionality that’s good. I think the expectations are there because it’s something that’s really badly needed in the industry. And I think kind of a space in software that hasn’t been fully explored yet. And I think just now, like with kind of Lever and greenhouse, for example, coming to kind of the peak, I guess at the moment, right now, the beginning of a couple of years of them being formed or being worked on, we will start to see a lot of changes very, very rapidly in the same way we did with like CRM systems kind of recently. And that’s just as it’s an expectation, it’s the way that we do work now. And we need that software to have really, really multifunctional capacity.
Matt Alder [00:12:47]:
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that makes, I think that makes perfect sense. And I think that there’s a, there’s just an interesting sort of dynamic between, you know, some of the, some of the legacy systems and some of the newer are on the market sort of moving, moving on to sort of talk about, you know, lever and greenhouse and, and workable and the, you know, this whole sort of emerging generation of ATSs. What, what do, what else do they do? Do you think that’s different from the ATS’s you’ve worked with in the past? I mean, how do they fit into things like, you know, sourcing or other aspects of other aspects of your job.
Jess Hayes [00:13:23]:
Absolutely. I think that the concept of integration, integrating with things like slack, integrating with LinkedIn, recruiter, integrating with Connectifier and Intello, whatever sourcing tools you use, is one of my favorite things that comes with modern ats. It just limits all that, again, the administrative burden. But also make sure that you can accurately track very easily what tools are using that are successful, what tools you’re using that you’re getting a large amount of sourcing from, which tools are you underutilizing, and gives you just a much clearer picture of how you’re doing work. I also really like that lever’s starting now with lever Nurture, which is integrating workflows into the process as well, which again, takes a lot of the administrative time out of a recruiter’s life, where they can spend more time doing what I think recruiters really should be doing, which is spending face time with individual people rather than spending facetime with a piece of software. So if those workflows can be created kind of seamlessly, then that takes the piece of software to a whole new level.
Matt Alder [00:14:35]:
Yeah, and I think that sort of nicely sets up the next thing that I wanted to talk about, really, which was one of the things that I hear from some ATS providers sometimes, is to kind of blame the recruiters for not using, using their system properly or having, you know, not kind of setting things up in the way that they, the way that they should. Do you think that’s. Do you think that’s a valid criticism? Do you think recruiters have a kind of an equal role to play in getting, Getting, getting these systems and processes configured properly?
Jess Hayes [00:15:10]:
So I don’t want to throw everyone under the bus, but yes, I mean, I’m a stickler for the system and I’ve worked with a lot of people before that don’t like having, like, don’t like changing their processes and using them. But in the end, it benefits everybody. But I think also part of that is, I mean, if you haven’t got somebody in your team that’s integrated, integrated, implemented one of these newer systems with all these crazy cross functionalities before, and it has experience working with things like external tools to your ats, I think it is really difficult to conceptualize what you can do with a piece of software that you’ve only seen a legacy version of. I think if you were to give my old manager at BHP four years ago lever, we would have been using it to 12% of its capacity. It just wouldn’t have been used, probably because we Just didn’t know what we could do with it because no one had ever said, hey, now you can do all these crazy things with this piece of software now. So I think part of it is just lack of knowledge and lack of experience ever having used all this kind of new stuff. If you’ve been working with legacy systems before. And part of it as well, I think it’s just kind of a little bit of change resistance and not really wanting to be so reliant on a piece of software or be so integrated with a system and a metric and reporting and all that kind of stuff. But in the end you need to be, I mean, I don’t really take excuses in that respect. You have to run things through the system or not at all, basically.
Matt Alder [00:16:34]:
And so what would your advice be to someone who is either putting an ATS in for the first time so they could be a startup, or equally, I’ve seen some very established 500 people, businesses who don’t use recruitment software. So people who are putting something in for the first time, or someone who’s moving from one of the more traditional systems to one of these newer systems, what would your advice be to them in terms of how they might do that and do that brilliantly?
Jess Hayes [00:17:05]:
I think the first thing is always listen to your implementation consultant. In the end they are the expert and if they say I think that’s a silly idea, I can almost say with 99% accuracy that it’s probably not going to work or it’s going to be a silly idea just as much as if they say things like I know this might take extra time, but you should do this, you should do that as well because in the end that’s probably going to save you time and money. So yeah, always listen to your implementation consultant. They are the expert in their field and also feedback, suggest changes, suggest new ways to do things, ask questions at I don’t know if we can do this, but how could we? And those kinds of things. Because in the end, especially companies like Lever that still very much is kind of in this launch iterate, launch iterate process, they do take that feedback on board. And the more people that open their mouths and ask the question, especially during the implementation phase, the more likely those changes and upgrades will happen. So you really can be involved in the creation of this piece of software just as much as you are involved as just using it.
Matt Alder [00:18:09]:
Yeah. Okay. And so the final question, where, where do you think this is kind of going in the future? We obviously seen a, a sort of big leap forward in terms of the new breed of ATS for the companies that can, the companies that can use them. What’s next, what, what kind of sort of features and, and technology are you looking forward to that’s going to really sort of help you over the next few years?
Jess Hayes [00:18:35]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think, like I mentioned before, lever nurture and more complicated and complex workflows and automated workflows is going to be a huge, huge one, which takes a lot of the fat out of the sourcing process through to, you know, interviewing and beyond. And I also think integration with HRIS systems and working to kind of smooth out the onboarding experience, I think that is a big space in talent that’s kind of being either ignored or not. Very many companies are doing particularly well. I can’t really think of a single place or team I’ve ever joined where the onboarding experience really successfully used the data that they gathered during the interviewing process and brought that into the first couple of months of someone’s employment. And I think there definitely could be some kind of system overlap with the ATS and HRIS to make that a better part of what we do.
Matt Alder [00:19:30]:
Jess, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jess Hayes [00:19:32]:
No problem. It’s been such a pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:19:35]:
My thanks to Jess Hayes. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. Just search for recruiting future. You can also find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
