Hiring under control: What your Applicant Tracking System should actually do

TA teams aren’t short on things to manage. They’re short on time to manage them well.

At Reach, we believe every team should be in control of their entire hiring process, not controlled by it, regardless of their organisation’s size.

Control means a system that works the way your team actually hires rather than forcing you into someone else’s, less time lost to manual chasing, a clearer picture of where budget and effort go, compliance that’s built into the process instead of tracked separately, and a candidate experience that reflects well on the organisation because nothing slips through the net.

Here’s what that looks like across our hiring platform:

• Control your process
• Control your time
• Control your costs
• Control your compliance
• Control your brand
• What hiring under control means.

Control your process, without reshaping how you hire to fit the software

It’s easy to end up with an applicant tracking system that has its own idea of how recruitment should work. You’re left to work out how to adapt to it, rather than it working to your process.

As every organisation’s hiring process is different, a rigid system creates problems fast. Some teams run a single interview stage, others run five. Some need sign-off from three departments before an offer goes out, others need one signature. When a system can’t flex to match any of that, the workarounds start piling up.

Each Reach system is built around your unique process and ready to hire before go-live. Workflows, stages and approvals are configured to match how your team already works. That includes how Reach fits alongside the rest of your HR stack. Integrations with HR, payroll, assessment and compliance systems mean recruitment data doesn’t sit in isolation from the rest of the employee lifecycle. The tools you already rely on stay connected rather than becoming yet another system to check separately.

Control here isn’t about having more settings to configure. It’s about the software fitting the team, rather than the team fitting the software.

Control your time and be sensible about AI & automation

‘Let’s automate that!’ AI and automation have moved into HR software fast enough that the question stopped being whether something could be automated and started being whether it should. Most of the value in automation is quite unglamorous. It is the pile of small jobs nobody misses once they stop doing them.

There are plenty of parts of recruitment that people should not have to repeat by hand. That is what recruitment automation is for: interview scheduling, reminders, routine candidate messages, references and workflow actions are good examples. Reach takes care of much of that in the background, which leaves recruitment teams with fewer small jobs to remember and chase.

But saving that time should not cost you judgement. Adding AI capabilities into automation needs careful consideration. Reach includes AI-assisted tools for areas such as writing job adverts and candidate communications, setting key criteria and skills matching and analysing reports, that we see as support for a recruiter working through information. The context, the conversation and the decision still belong with people. And, importantly, the decision whether to use AI features is down to the organisation’s HR admin.

The same principle applies to empowering hiring managers. If they can review candidates, approve requisitions or check interview activity themselves, HR does not have to be the go-between every time the process moves forward. The dedicated Hiring Manager portal and Reach mobile app are part of that thinking. Ensuring hiring managers can complete the actions they need to in the simplest way possible.

Control your costs, and look beyond the licence fee

Recruitment cost is easy to reduce to software licences, advertising spend and agency fees. Anyone running recruitment knows the real picture is messier.

There is a cost when a recruiter spends two hours rebuilding information the system already holds, or when hiring managers need chasing three times before they give feedback. There is a cost when several pieces of software overlap because the main system cannot support part of the process. Some of those costs sit neatly on a budget. Others simply disappear into the working week.

This is why flexible reporting matters. Reach gives teams a clearer view of pipeline stages, time to hire, source of hire and recruitment activity, so HR and Talent Acquisition can see where hiring is moving well, where it is slowing down and where the resource is going.

An ATS system earns its place in the budget when the people using it can see where time, effort and money are going, not when somebody produces an impressive savings figure.

Control your compliance, without turning recruitment into a box-ticking exercise

Compliance has always been part of recruitment, but the amount HR teams need to keep track of has grown.

Different roles can require different documents, approvals and pre-employment checks. Candidate data needs to be handled carefully. Decisions need a clear record. And after the offer, there is usually another set of actions before somebody is genuinely ready to start. The danger is that all of this becomes a process of its own, running alongside recruitment instead of inside it.

We have tried to keep more of that work connected within Reach. Onboarding stages can form part of the recruitment workflow. Documents can sit against the candidate record. Approvals and actions stay visible as part of the history of the hire. Our compliance integrations follow the same thinking, with Right to Work and eligible DBS checks triggered through the Reach process rather than handled as a separate exercise somewhere else.

Reach does not remove an employer’s responsibilities, and we would never pretend software could. What it can do is give the people managing those responsibilities a clearer place to work and a better record of what has happened. Compliance is easier when it is considered while the process is designed, rather than remembered at the end because somebody has a checklist to finish.

Control your brand, because candidates experience more than your careers page

Employer brand usually gets discussed in terms of job adverts, careers pages, social content and employee stories. All of those matter, but once somebody applies, another part of the brand takes over. The recruitment process itself.

Candidates notice when an application works properly on their phone, when communication is clear and when interviews are easy to arrange. They also notice when they have already provided information and are asked for it again, or when a process that started warmly suddenly goes quiet.

Reach includes branded candidate journeys, mobile-friendly applications, candidate communications, self-service interview booking and configurable onboarding. Those are product features, but they shape how somebody feels about the organisation while they are deciding whether to join it. The candidate experience is often just your internal hiring process, seen from the other side.

For Talent Acquisition teams, that makes the recruitment ATS part of employer brand whether you intend it to be or not. The tone of the email, the ease of booking an interview, the application form and the gaps between stages all say something about the organisation. Behind every status, workflow and candidate record is someone making a decision about you too.

What hiring under control means to us

These areas overlap more than the headings suggest. A better process gives people time back. Better visibility helps teams understand cost. Well-designed workflows make compliance easier to manage. And when the internal process works properly, candidates usually get a better experience.

So hiring under control is more than a line we use to describe Reach. It gives us a way to decide what the platform should help people do.

Can the team shape the process around how they recruit?

Does the technology give useful time back?

Does the experience reflect the employer well?

Those questions matter more to us than adding a feature just because another ATS has it.

The thinking does not stop when Reach goes live either. Organisations change, recruitment changes and the system has to move with them. That is why implementation, training and ongoing human support sit alongside the technology. Sometimes control means changing a workflow yourself. Sometimes it means having someone at Reach who understands what you are trying to do and can help you get there.

The tools inside Reach will keep changing as hiring changes. The thinking behind them should stay much the same. Help people stay in control of hiring, without making hiring feel controlled.