Meet the the Author ✍️

I’ve spent the last several years working closely with leaders in the Talent Acquisition space, specifically those in Recruiting Operations.  Changing your ATS (or purchasing your first) is one of the most significant decisions a talent leader can make.  While hiring has evolved over the years, the Applicant Tracking System remains a key investment central to any talent tech stack.

This article assumes your team has made a thoughtful decision about what ATS is right for you based upon your goals and priorities or, if not, that you have read Jacob Miller’s Questions RecOps Folks Should Ask During Their ATS Scoping.  Today, we’ll focus on how to collaborate throughout implementation and onboarding to ensure a successful experience.

Without further ado, what should you expect from your implementation and onboarding?

Clear Stakeholder Identification

Your company and the ATS should have defined swimlines and clarity into ownership.  

It depends on size and scale – but for a mid-market organization, your key players might be defined as follows:

• Recruiting Operations Leader – 

• Leads hands-on configuration work

• Defines implementation strategy

• Responsible for process design

• Project Manager – 

• Facilitates kickoff, project planning, timeline & milestone collaboration, stakeholder management

• Ensures critical decisions are made on a timely basis, removes bottlenecks

• Enablement & Change Management Resource – 

• Collaborates on documentation and enablement assets

• Creates training guide creation for different user groups across your organization

• Responsible for user enablement

You can expect your ATS to outline several resources for you as well.  These vary by organization but. at a minimum, they should include the following:

• Your Customer Success Manager – 

• Serves as your main point of contact

• Provides training and rollout strategy support

• Offers best practice sharing and incorporates your product feedback

• Technical Support – 

• Available for troubleshooting

• Helps with your integrations

• Self-Service Guides & Documentation – 

• A help center with training resources for distinct user groups in your organization

• Chapter-sized enablement at the ready for various stakeholders

• A multitude of resource types (text, video, guides, etc.)

In addition to insight into the teams themselves, you should have clear methods communicated to you in terms of:

1. What types of inquiries go to each resource

2. How to contact each resource

3. What to expect in terms of response times across each resource

An Exploration of Your Goals and Defined Business Objectives

You’ve invested in your ATS because you have business objectives (potentially aggressive hiring goals) that you intend to achieve!  It’s the function of your ATS to help you get there and the responsibility of the CS team to ensure you’re set up for success.

During your kickoff conversation, you can expect to have your stated objectives revisited and discussed.  Your CSM should be privy to why you purchased, but at this time, they’ll be keen to partner with you to shift your broad objectives (e.g. hire quickly) to specific targets (e.g. hire 10 engineers per month across the next 6 months).  Throughout onboarding, the CSM is now empowered to surface the most relevant parts of the software to ensure you meet your goals.  

It might look like this – we know you want to hire quickly, specifically with a goal of 10 engineers/month; as such we’ll examine pass-through rates to understand bottlenecks in the process and deploy alerts for time-sensitivity.  In sum, your CSM will ensure the tactical recommendations for setting up and leveraging the ATS to align with your strategic targets, ultimately leading toward your broad business objectives.  

In short, the CSM’s goal will be to ensure that renewal is a straightforward decision because the value you’re deriving exceeds your investment.  Renewal is a 12 month conversation!

Healthy Dialogue and Discussion

As long as you’re open to it, expect to have the status quo challenged!  CSMs work across dozens of customers (sometimes greater than 100 depending upon the segment) and have seen tried and true best practices.  They’re aware that what may seem like a trivial decision now (e.g. do we set up shared or custom interview plans) may have greater impact later on.  They’ll partner with you, understanding your intentions to scale and ensuring the setup suits the present state as well as sets the necessary foundation for the future state.

You as the RecOps leader most certainly know your organization best, while the CSM (likely) knows the software best – the union of your org-specific knowledge with their technology expertise is an exciting, collaborative partnership.  I find that the most successful customers tend to partner closely with their CSMs for shared strategic counsel – particularly in key areas such as aligning on migration best practices and ensuring data integrity for future dashboards and reporting.

Clarity into the Implementation Process 

You should expect a defined project plan with milestones and timelines.  There should be broad phases (i.e. implementation, onboarding, adoption and optimization, iteration, etc.) with specifics across each step.

For example, at a high level, the data migration phase here at Ashby looks like this:

• Define data strategy

• Outline admin training & application configuration

• Align on roles, permissions, access model

• Implement integration strategy

Each bullet should have a checklist or corresponding specifics to strategize and execute on.  

🚨 Pro Tip – If you are still in the process of evaluating your ATS, many organizations will share specifics into the implementation process in the pre-sales cycle so you can have clarity into what the onboarding journey will look like once you are a customer.  This can help demystify both the level of effort and the resourcing required for a transition.

A Refined Onboarding Model

Enablement and roll-out cannot be neglected – these are key components to a successful transition!  Strong leaders know that change management is an important part of the process to prevent business disruption.  Knowing cross-functional folks such as Hiring Managers have competing priorities, it is important your ATS partners with you to ensure a smooth transition for the broader team – minimal disruption is key.

Enablement itself could take various forms, such as:

• Train-the-trainer (RecOps leader partners with CSM for training)

• Regular Office Hours for live Q&A

• Collateral and supporting resources for on-demand content, customized for your organization

I recommend unifying what your ATS recommends with what you have found to be successful at your organization in terms of change management.  For example, if your team tends to prefer shorter Looms rather than a 45-minute in person trainings, this is something your CSM can partner with you on so that your internal stakeholders are well-positioned to learn in the method that best suits them.

Continued Ongoing Engagement

Graduating from onboarding is not the end, it is merely the beginning!  

Your ATS should continue to help you meet your Talent Acquisition goals on an ongoing basis.  You can expect recurring strategic conversations to move forward the collaboration.  Your priorities undoubtedly will shift throughout the year (maybe even the quarter) – it is, therefore, important the CSM stays up to date on these so they can continue to ensure their recommendations align with your strategic targets and broad objectives.  

Whether dashboards and reporting are top of mind, improving the candidate experience is your priority, or operational efficiency is key – your ATS and the Customer Success team are ready to help!  We’re eager to show up for you and to help you unlock the total value of your ATS.