Timing is everything when hiring top talent. Hiring efficiency is dependent on a team’s ability to respond and complete tasks in a timely fashion, yet essential hiring tasks are not always top of mind for hiring managers and interviewers. What’s more, the candidate experience depends on prepared interviewers showing up on time, and sometimes the best candidate will accept another offer while your team delays the decision due to poor communication.

As the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

You can implement an applicant tracking system, but getting everyone to use it consistently is another matter. Even email notifications to complete tasks fail to get traction when inboxes are crowded with notifications from multiple systems.

Bring tasks to where users already are

For millions of people, work communication happens in messaging apps: more than 320 million people use Teams, and Slack has 65 million monthly active users. To help people get work done where they spend most of their time, more and more solutions are joining the thousands of apps already in the Slack and Teams marketplaces. Leading experts in talent acquisition see this convergence of tasks as essential for efficient hiring.

“Hiring managers are busy and don’t want to log in and learn yet another system. We need to bring the tasks to where they interact (e.g. MS Teams, Slack). Doing so will save a lot of time and reduce bottlenecks.”

– Alastair Schirmer, General Manager, Technology & Innovation, TQSolutions

How ATS integrations with Slack or Teams improve hiring efficiency

Users of Slack and Teams know that it’s the place where collaboration happens outside of meetings. For those who rarely log into email, notifications and reminders in Slack help them stay on track. The list below shares essential hiring notifications and notes on how they improve recruiting efficiency.

• Notifications to hiring/managers interviewers when an interview has been scheduled. Besides offering a heads-up, this notification builds trust by immediately informing hiring managers that viable candidates are in the pipeline and the recruitment process is progressing.
• Interview reminders shortly before the interview. Interview reminders increase the chances that interviewers will be prepared and show up on time.
• Interview feedback reminders. Ensuring interviewers complete feedback helps make more equitable hiring decisions and stay in compliance. More timely feedback collection helps speed up hiring decisions.
• Candidate communication notifications. Hiring managers stay better informed and can respond promptly when a candidate sends an email, SMS, or WhatsApp message.

Efficiency breeds collaboration

So what do all these notifications that streamline hiring add up to? We’ve uncovered six benefits of improved collaboration among hiring teams.

1. Reduced friction. Hiring managers and interviewers are more likely to complete tasks in the systems they already use every day than by logging into a system they use less often. It takes the burden off recruiters to follow up.
2. Faster hiring. When feedback can be collected faster, teams can make decisions faster.
3. Better hiring decisions. Timely collection of structured feedback from all interviewers supercharges teams to bring the right people into the business instead of making subjective or partially informed decisions.
4. Compliance. Complete scorecard data helps ensure that you make fair hiring decisions. And seamless transitions between tools keep candidate communication inside the ATS, an essential for compliant recruiting.
5. Positive candidate experiences. Speeding up the process is always beneficial for candidates, and their positive experiences during the hiring process set them up for what to expect as new hires.
6. Data for actionable analytics. With better system adoption, companies collect more data that can be used to optimize processes in the future. 

Efficiency and Hiring Without Boundaries 

Breaking down barriers between the systems where work gets done is the essence of SmartRecruiters’ vision of Hiring Without Boundaries™.  

“A platform that’s deeply connected with the technologies teams are already using breaks down barriers to hiring and helps businesses withstand change.”  

– Jim Milton, Chief Strategy Officer, SmartRecruiters

To start breaking down barriers to efficiency and unlocking team collaboration, get in touch with us for a demo today.