JTalent: An ATS That Is Much More Than an ATS

An ATS, or Application Tracking System, a tool which allows teams to centralize and organize their recruitment efforts. With small teams, this can help make recruitment a vertical which doesn’t interrupt central workflow, and with large companies it can help organize staffing efforts by department, allowing talent teams to have control over candidates, openings, redundancies, etc, so there is no time wasted, connections missed, or mistakes made in the vital processes of recruitment and staffing.

Because Jobsity works in the staffing space -- handling staff augmentation across all sectors of technology -- we became familiar with the challenges that ATS systems faced when dealing with remote teams. There are many ATS systems available for hiring, but there are few which are set up to handle hiring and team management across internationally dispersed teams, and that are 100% natively remote.

We knew from our experience working with hundreds of top tech companies throughout the US, and developer talent throughout Latin America, that an ATS can mean the difference when teams hire, manage, and staff remote workforces, workforces which need to be flexible, powerful and adaptable -- and that in order for an ATS to truly serve these companies, they ended to be more than just collect applications and schedule interviews. But that would need to be able to drive a team forward in staffing by setting up scheduled calls, presentations of offers, rejection of candidates -- and even allocating staff across all sectors of a business, handling HR and management capabilities, and ensuring an international remote business could run right.

We couldn't find a tool that did that. So we built our own.

In order to unpack what exactly JTalent is and what it does, we spoke with Mauricio Lopez CTO of Jobsity. Curious what it’s about? Keep reading.

• What did Jobsity use before JTalent and why wasn’t it working?

Before JTalent, when we started our recruitment efforts, we didn’t even have sophisticated tools like LinkedIn, so we relied on spreadsheets and the data was scattered -- we had different people, no determined workflow, and it was very hard to scale because it was not centralized. Duplication of data, missed steps, and disorganization. The opposite of what makes for efficient workflow!

• Why did Jobsity develop its own ATS?

We analyzed the market; we reviewed 20 ATS solutions and realized something interesting. In our business model -- staff augmentation -- the tools we analyzed were made by companies that were hiring for themselves. But in our case we have a caveat: we don’t hire for ourselves. We hire for clients. So we realized at some point that it would be best to have a tool more accustomed to the staff augmentation business. We took everything that was good with ATS and focused on remote working, hiring people out of the US, and hiring people not for our company but for other companies. This made sure that JTalent not only did something well, but did something different than every other solution.

• What are the specific benefits of an ATS when managing a nearshore team?

Having an ATS is important. The kind of regulations and steps in the US are not the same ones you’ll use in other countries -- there are other steps you’ll need to take to process candidates to other countries. When you open the pool to recruit in the whole world, you’ll have 100x candidates, so flexibility and centrality of the system are key because you’ll get more people. And you’ll have to separate the wheat from the chaff, because you’ll have so many more candidates to sort through when dealing with a remote team.

• What are the most important features of JTalent?

JTalent is not only an ATS, per se! It’s more than that. JTalent has a big ATS component. But it also has entire HR functions, and these are especially beneficial for internationally dispersed teams. Once you recruit your team and get them on board, how do you manage them? Once you have people, how do you assign them to different positions? How do you allocate them and ensure they are thriving in their new role?

JTalent tackles all of these functions.

When a big enterprise acquires someone, our system allows them to create different openings -- project manager, UI/UX, etc -- and JTalent provides links to move candidates into openings, and it provides steps for managing this process (internal interviews, preparing CVs, completing challenges/assessments) and this is all tracked and provides metrics.

Then, once talent is placed in a role, JTalent also allows a company to use the system to manage openings inside the company and see candidates move throughout these openings. Are there enough candidates and spread of talent? Are people stuck in certain steps? Are they spread out across different needs, etc? JTalent will determine this and let you know.

Later, when the team is working, JTalent can help manage all the HR functions necessary: payroll, international employment issues, work management, and performance reviews.

It’s really an entire talent stack all in one app!

• How does JTalent help Jobsity stand out in the field of nearshore staffing?

It’s helped us dramatically. If we didn’t have the right tools to process and recruit the amount of people we’re working with, the time in which we needed to send the first candidate to the client, we’d miss the right time. Because of JTalent we can be confident in our processes.

In fact, we’re so confident of our systems that we can send 1-2 candidates to a client, because we know well what the piston is about and JTalent helps ensure we send the exact right person at the right time for the right role. Because our system is fast, centralized, reliable -- and the data is reliable. We’re confident to send 1-2 because we know those are the right people. And it’s almost always true (other companies will send 30, but we don’t need to!). Without this technology, I don’t think we could do this -- and definitely not at scale.

When we created this software it was made for our specific needs. But not many companies are staff augmentation companies! But now we see organically that it can help anyone manage remote companies. This is the right tool for managing remote teams -- and it’s adaptable for that. So, if that’s what your company is doing, we recommend you check it out!

--

If you want to stay up to date with all the new content we publish on our blog, share your email and hit the subscribe button.

Also, feel free to browse through the other sections of the blog where you can find many other amazing articles on: Programming, IT, Outsourcing, and even Management.