Buying an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

How do you buy an ATS?

Well, the market seems pretty busy at the moment with a lot of organisations looking at buying an ATS.  Yet so often they think they know what they are doing yet based on feedback from vendors and some of the discussions I have, they haven't got a clue.  No business case, no process, no real goals, half a budget, no ROI calculation and no experience whatsoever of implementing an Applicant Tracking System.

And buying it is actually the easy bit!

I regularly get involved with implementations 12+ months post go-live either because they are not getting the expected results, or the ATS does not do what they thought it would - even though they did not define what they wanted it to do!

HR have enough credibility problems as it is, why oh why do they keep on thinking they can do it all on their own without any external help.  Still, the HR people I get to work with are smarter and get the results they want, they just let the others fail.