What is the Difference Between a Recruitment CRM and ATS?

The success of a company is fully dependent on its ability to find and place top talent within the organization. Whether it be through an in-house recruitment team or an agency, acquiring the right talent is essential. However, it isn't easy to find, manage, and engage candidates through conventional recruitment channels. Luckily, certain innovations have sprung onto the scene that enable recruiters to seamlessly manage and track their talent pipelines. Both the Recruitment Customer Relationship Management System (Recruitment CRM) and the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) are powerful tools to help recruiters effectively manage their workflow. With so many different platforms boasting these functionalities, let's take a deep dive into the differences between an ATS and a Recruitment CRM: What's an ATS? The ATS (or applicant tracking system) helps optimize the hiring process and ensures no candidate falls through the cracks. It creates a streamlined workflow that centralizes your talent pipeline and takes the headache out of parsing through resume after resume. An ATS acts as a central location where hiring managers and recruitment teams post, manage and track the job openings they are looking to fill. Serving as a source of truth for your job pipelines, the ATS is essential to maintaining organization and transparency within your recruitment efforts. With an ATS, you can:

• Post ads for specific jobs through job boards.
• Sort applications and filter them.
• Collaborate with your team before hiring candidates.
• Track where candidates are within the recruitment and hiring pipelines
• Automate your onboarding process to allow less time spent on mundane tasks.

What's a Recruitment CRM?

There is no question that tracking applicants through your job pipeline is essential. However, it is also vital to maintain a strong talent pool of candidates for future roles needed to be filled. This is where a Recruitment CRM comes into play and helps you manage long-term candidate relationships. This tool can be powerful in helping recruiters keep top talent readily available for any new positions that may come in the future. A Recruitment CRM gives recruiters the ability to stay connected, nurture relationships with passive prospects, and keep talent engaged. Therefore, you can come to them with a new position as soon as a suitable job becomes available. With a Recruitment CRM, you can:

• Source candidates.
• Communicate with and build relationships with candidates
• Create an organized talent pool on a streamlined platform.
• Keep candidate information updated and readily accessible.

What's the difference between an ATS and a Recruitment CRM?

A Recruitment CRM is essentially your talent pool of all candidates you have engaged with or sourced in the past. These candidates may be active or passive, previous applicants, or just been previously sourced for past positions. It's a complete consolidation of all candidates within your database - readily available for you to reach out when the right role arises. Applicant Tracking Systems are tailored to your open jobs and the talent pipeline within them. The ATS helps streamline your workflow, ensure compliance, and manage applicants through the entire hiring process. ATS's make hiring less labor-intensive by offering automated features to help save time on mundane administrative tasks. They also make it simple to track essential recruitment hiring metrics, like the cost of hiring, budget, and time to hire. As you can see, the two tools offer different functionalities but also indirectly support one another. Both are essential. Since they are so complimentary, doesn't it make sense to combine them into one comprehensive recruitment system?

The best of both recruitment support systems

Both an ATS and a Recruitment CRM are valuable tools for effectively managing both your candidate pipeline and your talent pool. But integrating the two systems so they work together isn't always easy as it should be.The recruitment process would be far more simple and streamlined if the two functions could live under one easy-to-use platform. From finding the right candidates in your Recruitment CRM to tracking their progress through your ATS, it becomes far easier and more organized when the tools start working together. Loxo's Talent Intelligence Platform puts both the Recruitment CRM and ATS under one roof, giving recruiters a holistic overview of their business health under one centralized system. No longer will you need clunky integrations and disconnected systems, the Loxo platform gives recruiters everything they need to effectively do their job under one platform. With added innovations such as AI and machine learning, Loxo can help automate AND streamline your recruitment workflow, all at a fraction of the time and costs. Finding ways to manage candidate relationships and streamlining hiring processes efficiently makes life easier for recruiters and is essential for success. See our site for a live demo of Loxo's AI-powered recruitment CRM and ATS. You can also learn more about Loxo here.