The power of configurable ATS reports and dashboards

March 9, 2021

 

iCIMS Staff

6 min read

Applicant tracking systems (ATSs) are essential for managing the entire candidate lifecycle from application to offer letter. You can even use an ATS to manage how your employees advance in their careers and apply for positions internally.

Like any software solution, an ATS generates and collects a large amount of data. Companies that can leverage this data improve their hiring and onboarding processes by measuring the impact of their recruiting marketing, identifying the best sources for quality hires, pinpointing which traits lead to the best employees, and more.

To use this data, you need a powerful reporting system.

Not every ATS comes with a robust and configurable reporting system that will lead you to the insights you need. But the reporting feature built into the iCIMS applicant tracking system is unique. It provides you with the most important reports you need to manage your strategy and generate custom reports.

Here’s what makes iCIMS’ ATS reporting system so powerful.

Find a happy medium between built-in reporting and third-party integrations

Often, organizations that use an ATS are restricted by two types of reporting systems: the “out-of-the-box” system inherent in their ATS product or a third-party system that must be integrated.

Many competitors offer reports within their solutions but with little to no options to configure them to your exact needs. This is unhelpful because there’s no guarantee that your company measures the same KPIs as other companies, nor is it guaranteed that you measure KPIs the same way.

For example, several organizations measure “time to hire” as a KPI. But some organizations start measuring this KPI as soon as a job listing is created, whereas others start later in the hiring cycle. With no customization in your reporting capability, you’re stuck measuring KPIs based on your ATS’s built-in parameters and metrics.

Meanwhile, third-party reporting solutions are an option, but they’re often more trouble than they’re worth. Other tools require partnerships or complex integrations with tools that need specialists to configure and use.

iCIMS overcomes these challenges by offering multiple configurations as well as reporting customization options. Not only are these capabilities powerful, but they’re also accessible. There’s no need to integrate a third-party solution. You can easily set up the reporting your organization needs to optimize the recruiting process.

Generate action-oriented reports that act as a to-do list

Reports help reveal insights about your recruiting process and spur your team into action. Using iCIMS, you can turn your reports into to-do lists by prioritizing new applicants, applicants that haven’t been contacted in several days, unviewed candidates, jobs that are pending approval, and more.

Using iCIMS dashboards, you can create lists of actionable items for each user by customizing the reports they see. This makes a to-do list for them to complete immediately upon logging in, speeding up workflows and ensuring there’s no confusion about which tasks take priority.

User admins can organize their teams based on different dashboards that are relevant to each group. This improves the user experience and ensures they see the most pertinent information to their function.

For example, a recruiter’s dashboard might be configured to provide visual reminders of tasks and fast monitoring of crucial information, such as incoming candidates, offers under management, and essential recruiting metrics. Users can organize their dashboards to suit their work style, arrange data in columns, and link to the reports they need to access daily.

Configure role-specific dashboards for each user

Dashboards are configurable based on tasks and reports. But you can also configure your dashboards based on role. This creates an easy way to scale your operations by adding preset dashboards for new team members. 

Using iCIMS, you can configure dashboards unique to the following roles in your organization: 

• Head of Talent Acquisition  
• Recruiters 
• Hiring managers 
• Sourcing specialists 
• Executives 

Read this post to see a visual example for each of these five dashboards, recommendations on how to configure for each role, and key metrics to get started.  

Recruiter dashboards

As we mentioned above, a recruiter’s dashboard can be populated with reports that feature ground-level metrics. Most recruiters will need information about the jobs and candidates under their supervision, essential action items, and frequently used reports. Recruiters can even configure personal metrics based on their needs.

All of this can be accomplished by displaying important panels and widgets on the dashboard. The iCIMS system generates these, so no third-party integration is required.

Hiring manager dashboards

Hiring managers may need some of the same reports as recruiters, but they’ll need a different set of action items each day. They may also need access to higher-level reports than recruiters who work directly with candidates daily.

For example, a hiring manager’s dashboard may contain reporting on the entire jobs pipeline. But it might not include the most granular data, as this could overwhelm them with information. In the hiring manager’s action items column—their “to-do list”—they might find a list of candidates that require review and other information related to the candidate pipeline.

Sourcing specialist dashboards

Sourcing specialists focus on building robust pipelines of talent to ensure recruiters and hiring managers always have potential candidates to review.

Like other users, sourcing specialists’ reporting can act as a list of action items. Their dashboard will focus on job forecasting, events, and source metrics. It’s their job to build robust talent pools based on the information in their dashboard, which is made easier through visualization and an arrangement of widgets that connect them to the information they need.

Sourcing specialists can link to reports like candidates by location, candidates by source, candidates by background, and more.

Executive dashboards

Unlike the action-oriented dashboards mentioned above, an executive user dashboard highlights key metrics and links to important high-level reports that are important to your organization’s leaders. You can streamline your executives’ workflows by displaying the necessary information for them to make strategic decisions.

As leaders and decision-makers are often pressed for time, configuring a dashboard for your executive users is an important step in streamlining their workflow. With the right customizations, they can view high-level reports on how many jobs were open and closed in a year, total hires, time to hire, and more.

Leverage recruitment flow reports to identify bottlenecks

With all the tools and customizations provided by iCIMS, you can configure your recruiting pipeline to help you identify bottlenecks in your processes.

Sometimes, a small step in the recruiting process, such as writing a job description or launching a digital ad campaign, can take multiple days to complete. But by generating flow reports on your talent pipeline, you can identify which tasks are slowing down your process and take steps to speed them up.

Perhaps you need a more streamlined approach to drafting job descriptions, marketing your open positions, or even reviewing applications. Once you identify these issues in your flow report, you can leverage the iCIMS platform to reduce time in the hiring process, thus improving your time to hire KPI.

Get robust support when configuring your iCIMS reporting

Upon launching the iCIMS system, many of these features are pre-configured for your organization’s convenience and based on iCIMS’ extensive experience in the recruiting field. But you are by no means restricted to a single dashboard or reporting configuration.

iCIMS has an extensive API ecosystem that’s rich in capabilities. All iCIMS customers get access to a developer API to customize their solutions based on specific data and workflow needs.

iCIMS also serves as a go-to resource for your customization needs. If you need to optimize your tool, contact a representative, and they’ll help you adapt your ATS to your specific needs.

To learn more about how you can customize and configure the iCIMS Talent Cloud, see it in action today.