ATS vendors - where next?

Following on from the Stepstone acquisition of Mr Ted what else may be on Mr Parkers shopping list? Is it just acquisition for growth or acquisition to expand the depth of their product offering. The likes of Amazon and Tesco have expanded way beyond their roots and Stepstone appear to be following suit. But the focus for most of the ATS vendors has been downstream of the application process into the talent management space whilst the likes of Success Factors are trying to push upstream. But I think their is a massive gap upstream for the ATS vendors.

The candidate experience of an ATS vendor i.e. the search and apply process is in the majority of cases poor. iGRasp has always had one of the "nicest" experiences whereas Talent Link (Mr Ted) has way to many pop-ups. Or try out any of the US vendors or worse still check out an SAP candidate interface. Poor would be being nice to SAP!

Often employers will invest in a decent career site only to have a really poor integration with the ATS. The likes of Jobs2web have recognised this and look to plug the gap; as have we with the career site product Hire Strategies offer via our technology partner. But this is only part of the upstream process. The ATS has become a lot better over the years at processing applicants and I think they should focus hard on making candidate collaboration easier within the ATS. Salesforce have done exactly this by adding in their Chatter module but what Salesforce don't do, is try and be a marketing system. There are many products out their that do it extremely well such as Pardot which integrates really well with Salesforce.

The focus for some of the ATS vendors may well be to look at the upstream products. For example products such as Avature CRM, Talent Spring and Talent Drive do a lot of the grunt work of candidate sourcing and in some cases build talent pools etc. This to me is a key missing point for any direct resourcing strategy and the ATS cannot do this. They may claim they can but trust me, they struggle. But we also need far, far easier integration with the ATS. We have integrated with 4 different ATS products for Tesco Careers and every time it is hard work to carry out quite a simple technical process. Sometimes the ATS Vendor just doesn't get the point of what we are doing. But by getting the jobs out of the ATS we can then customise the search process, integrate with social networks, offer RSS feeds, post to job aggregators, OPTIMISE the jobs for search engines and so much more. Absolutely nothing radical and all stuff the ATS vendor should be able to do but don't!

So how far upstream should an ATS vendor go? I think quite far as so many of their customers kind of think by having an ATS they will become recruiting experts yet this is so far away from reality. Yet they often blame the technology for their failings rather than their recruiting incompetence. I know technology can be a pain but that is too easy to use as a reason for failure. I think we will see some of the bigger ATS vendors swim all the way to the shore and start to offer attraction activities such as Google Adwords, candidate marketing, talent pool technologies etc and stray into the Ad Agency world. Buying an ATS is a small part of a direct resourcing strategy but online is about 85% of the total programme so it needs people with an online/technical mindset. Of course the Ad Agencies will have their digital offering as could the ATS vendors but I reckon there is a massive piece of battle ground between the two and shed loads of money being spent on attraction - most of which is wasted.

I'd suggest the likes of Stepstone and Taleo may want to look at how much is still being spent on attraction and maybe, think about getting a big slice of that pie. The more embedded you are with the client the less likely they are to kick you out!