Overview

Your recruitment software will, for many, be the first experience your prospective employees have of working for your brand. It needs to represent you well, striking the right balance between authentic tone of voice and effective, well-run business. Recruitment software is often known by the acronym ‘ATS’, which stands for Applicant Tracking System.

ATS was once the preserve of vast organisations with the volume of applications (and resources) to warrant specialist software to keep track of work. Nowadays, even the smallest hospitality company can take advantage of powerful software that simplifies and streamlines the recruitment process.

Critical functions

There are many recruitment software applications out there, but hospitality brings a certain set of requirements. Here are the critical functions to look out for:

• Ability to handle a high volume of applications, often for ‘standing’ or multiple roles (e.g. if you’re constantly recruiting for waitstaff, baristas etc)

• If applicable, the ability to manage multi-site operations (e.g. recruiting for several roles in multiple venues, or reporting by operations area as well as group-wide)

• Handling right-to-work checks as part of the recruitment process

• Supporting succession planning, to maximise opportunities to recruit and promote from within

Important integrations

Recruitment software is typically web-based, and will either integrate with your existing brand website, OR exist as a standalone website. If the latter, you’ll want to ensure it can be styled to reflect your brand identity.

Your recruitment software should also seamlessly hand off to your employee relations software, so you don’t need to manually create records for your new starters. Similarly, it should automatically create a record for new employees in your payroll software.

If you use job boards, like Indeed or The Caterer, you’ll want to ensure you recruitment software can push adverts to these boards automatically. Sometimes, you might not want to push a role to your usual job board, so make sure this feature can be overridden if needed.

Users

• New starters

• Existing staff (if looking for an internal transfer / promotion)

• Branch managers

• Head office staff (e.g. to draft group-wide job adverts, pay for job board accounts, produce reports)

When assessing potential providers, ask to see the user interface and user journey for each of these types of users. You might want to ask about access controls, which would let only approved users access sensitive information or make system-wide changes