Automate Slow Recruiting Processes With an Applicant Tracking System for Government

by Mike Tannian on September 01, 2022

Your manual recruitment process is making public sector hiring harder than it needs to be. Learn how NEOGOV’s HR applicant tracking system can help.

Article Highlights

With high turnover rates and numerous vacancies to fill, you have more than enough on your professional plate. But rather than identifying new strategies to attract and retain public sector employees, you’re relying on the same old cumbersome, multi-step hiring processes that seem to slow everything down. With such a lengthy hiring process, you’ve encountered unsuccessful recruitment after unsuccessful recruitment.  

In this article, we’ll discuss why your manual recruitment process unnecessarily extends your hiring timeline and prevents you from hiring the best talent possible. Then, we’ll share how NEOGOV’s Attract and Insight provide recruitment process automation that can help you find better candidates – faster.

Problem: Poor Candidate Experience

Outdated, paper-based processes waste your valuable time. Sifting through dozens, if not hundreds, of applications to determine who’s eligible before you can even start the interview process is cumbersome. This process takes time away from other critical tasks and lengthens your time-to-hire. When you finally find that perfect application, your top choice candidate may have already accepted a job at a different organization.  

Without a centralized recruitment process, you can’t even rely on past recruitment cycles to source candidates and speed up the process. And the likelihood of finding contact lists from career fairs and networking events grows increasingly slim as you look at the disorganized paper files strewn throughout your office. Rather than using one central system to manage candidate information and track applicants through your recruitment system, you’re spending time searching for information from multiple sources, including: 

  • Paper employment applications 
  • Notes stored on physical papers or your preferred word processor 
  • Piecemeal conversations from others on the hiring team 

Juggling all these tasks means you don’t prioritize the most critical aspect of recruitment: candidate communication. Because of your inefficient recruitment process and limited public sector resources, members of your recruitment team are stretched thin as they complete complex hiring tasks – all while covering the job duties of vacant positions. As a result, candidate follow-up is often the last thing on anyone’s mind, causing you to lose qualified candidates to organizations that focus on more proactive communication.

Solution: HR Recruiting Software

Government recruitment software streamlines your recruitment process so you can quickly move candidates through your recruitment process. To achieve this, your software should include: 

  1. A candidate relationship manager (CRM)
  2. An applicant tracking system for government (ATS)

NEOGOV’s Attract and Insight provide a centralized, cloud-based system with built-in automation tools. The candidate relationship manager, Attract, is integrated with the HR applicant tracking system, Insight, for seamless recruitment from sourcing to hiring

Attract

NEOGOV’s Attract is a CRM for government HR that automates your recruiting communications. Using this software’s virtual recruiter, you can source candidates from past hiring cycles, events, and social media to find the perfect fit for every open position in your organization. 

You can also source candidates using NEOGOV’s candidate database, GovernmentJobs.com, to find people who are interested in public sector careers. If you connect with a qualified professional, save their contact information and keep in touch so they’re ready to apply when the perfect position becomes available. Attract also allows you to automate email outreach to past eligible applicants or set specific parameters to automate email campaigns for other types of candidate contacts. 

After sourcing candidates, engage and convert them into new hires with timely and effective communication tools. This includes contacting candidates individually with personalized messaging about upcoming events or jobs or launching email campaigns to communicate information in bulk if you want to reach as many people as possible. The best part? You can use our HR applicant tracking system for government to tag candidates and organize them into talent pools for quick searchability, so the right candidate is always just a click away

Insight

After sourcing the perfect candidates, move seamlessly into active recruitment and hiring with Insight, NEOGOV’s applicant tracking system for government HR. Once candidates have applied to work at your agency, you can use Insight’s auto-screening tools to identify the best candidates quickly. Then, generate and manage a ranked eligible list of candidates and use it to share a conversation with the hiring manager about who they might like to interview. 

Insight can automatically screen candidates based on minimum qualification requirements (using candidate answers to job-specific questions), drastically reducing the time required to screen the hundreds of applications you might receive. You can also use our government applicant tracking system to customize scoring rules and weights and rank candidates based on things like: 

  • Your agency’s screening protocols
  • Tests and assessments
  • Interview performance 

For example, our Rating Matrix feature adds an important step to the interview process, allowing your search committee to score and collaborate on candidates based on predefined criteria for the job posting.

Insight’s candidate self-service portal makes your recruiting process more efficient by streamlining applicant and HR communications. Applicants can sign into this self-service portal to check on the status of their application, monitor where they are in the hiring process, view emails you send in their job seeker inbox, and access a complete application history for all jobs they’ve applied to. 

Here are some other key features of Insight that help automate your hiring process:

  • E-References: By enabling this feature, you require applicants to add references to their candidate profile within Insight
  • E-Offers: Send electronic offer letters to a candidate’s email address and job seeker inbox. They can accept or reject the offer online, and hiring managers will be notified of their response via email.
  • PII Blinding: Reduce bias in the hiring process by blinding users from all personally identifiable information within the system.
  • Attachment Redaction: Further reduce bias by allowing interviewers to review applicant attachments with PII redacted.
  • Diversity Health: Track ethnicities, gender, and veteran status within your agency to ensure equitable hiring processes.
  • Job Application Health: Track recruiting progress for job postings so you can optimize your recruiting strategy, as necessary, to fill a position on time.

Benefits

NEOGOV’s Insight and Attract replace time-consuming, inefficient processes with automated recruiting tools. Recruitment process automation helps you screen applicants faster so you can expedite their journey through the recruitment funnel. This is vital to securing the most qualified candidates since reducing your time-to-hire also minimizes the likelihood of losing candidates in the middle of a recruitment cycle. 

Plus, Attract and Insight eliminate paper-based processes that lead to lost work and time. Rather than shuffling through unorganized papers on your desk – and wondering if you’ve misplaced an important document – you can refer to one single source of truth in NEOGOV’s software and redirect your energy to other vital HR tasks. All of this helps you attract more qualified candidates, save your limited public sector resources, and provide the best service possible to employees and citizens alike.

Final Thoughts

Are you ready to eliminate inefficiencies with an applicant tracking system for government hiring? Schedule a no-obligation demo today to learn more about how NEOGOV’s Insight and Attract can provide recruitment process automation at your public sector organization.

Mike Tannian

Mike Tannian is the Director of Content Marketing at NEOGOV. With a talented team of writers by his side, he aims to produce content that delivers real value to public sector HR professionals at every stage in the buying journey.

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