An effective, efficient, easy-to-use application tracking can have a huge impact on your recruitment process.

The problems recruiters face are threefold: resumes keep piling up, there are interviews to be conducted, and there’s always a constant pressure to outperform the competition. In this environment, recruitment solutions must not only save time, but also ensure quality.

Many recruiters struggle to find the best ATS to suit their needs. It may be tempting to keep switching from one to another; the ones that have too many features end up being difficult to use, and the ones that are easy to use may be lacking critical features.

The trick is to find the system that strikes the right balance. While each recruiter’s needs are a little different, everyone can benefit from considering the three E’s: effectiveness, efficiency, and ease of use.

How effective is your ATS?

An effective ATS gets you the right candidates when you need them. To accomplish that, it should help you position your job openings on the most relevant job boards, and use quality job descriptions to attract the right talent. It should also give you a wide reach; an ATS that integrates with multiple job boards will ensure that you won’t miss out on great candidates.

Your ATS should also enable social sourcing so you can engage quickly with the right talent. An effective system helps leverage your company’s social profiles to interact with potential recruits.

How efficient is your ATS?

An efficient ATS will have features that allow recruiters to handle complications easily, instead of letting them throw the hiring process into chaos.

Imagine that you’ve zeroed in on a finalist after multiple rounds of screening and interviewing. When you’re ready to offer them the position, you realize that they are unwilling to relocate. This is where your ATS features can save you a lot of trouble by helping you plan ahead. With a pre screening assessment, you can make sure candidates answer crucial questions at the time of application, giving you time to find solutions or identify red flags.

How easy to use is your ATS?

Many recruiters have found that a poorly-designed ATS actually eats up their time instead of saving it. If it takes a lot of steps to perform routine activities like scheduling interviews, adding resumes to your database, or updating a candidate’s status, then your ATS isn’t really helping you. An easy-to-use system can perform those functions in a few clicks, or, better yet, do them for you automatically.

The three E’s are just different aspects of the same basic idea: that a recruiter’s time is valuable and an ATS should help make the best possible use of it. An easy-to-use system frees up time that you can use to develop efficient recruitment strategies, which result in effective searches and successful hires.

If that’s not happening, start by asking yourself: does your ATS pass the 3E test?