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Updated: July 2, 2025
If you’re hiring at a larger enterprise, you already know the talent landscape can be complex. Many workers—even those satisfied with their jobs!—are open to new opportunities, which can be exciting for recruiters but worrisome when it comes to making a hire that sticks.
You’ve probably had the thought, “I wish I could clone myself!” Maybe you’re yearning to be able to get back to each candidate in a more personalized way, build stronger relationships with your existing talent pool, or revamp your interview process. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to do every task manually. That’s where the right talent acquisition software comes in.
In this blog, we’ll discuss how the right system can support your work, take repetitive tasks off your plate, and help infuse every step of your work with best practices. Let’s get started!
3 Benefits of Talent Acquisition Software
Before committing to a platform, it’s time to do some due diligence.
Your goal is to make more of the right hires with ease, and your ATS can help you or seriously hinder you on your way to meeting that milestone. From identifying the most time-saving functionalities, to understanding a vendor’s philosophy around responsible AI governance, to seeing how they do (or don’t) practice innovation, asking the right questions will help you reap the most benefits.
Here are four questions to ask yourself when scoping talent acquisition software.
1. What Are This Talent Acquisition Software’s Most Helpful Functionalities?
Taking on repetitive or mundane tasks is one of the most useful things an ATS can do for busy recruiters.
A June 18 report from Robert Half revealed that 93% of hiring managers said the hiring process takes longer and is costlier in 2025 than just two years ago. That’s over 2,000 of the total 2,200 respondents surveyed for the report.
That can be tough news to hear for recruiters, who are likelier to be asked to do more with less than they are to receive more time or staff resources for locating talent, interviewing candidates, and helping their entire organization succeed at other essential tasks. Every TA team is a little different, but adding these functionalities to your talent acquisition software wish list can ultimately help you streamline your processes and make great hires more often.
Pre-Screening and Screening
Vetting your applicants is a can’t-miss step in the hiring process. But manually, it can really eat into your time. Ideally, your recruitment software should empower you to:
- Screen candidates seamlessly. No more wasting time dedicating a million clicks to screening candidates. The right technology should help you identify candidates that will make a good fit—and those who won’t.
- Enhance the human aspect of hiring. This means communicating with your candidates where they’re most comfortable, whether that’s email, texting, or a different preference they’ve designated.
- Save time with recorded video screenings. It can be tough on candidates and hiring managers alike to repeat the same interview over and over again across teams.
Efficient Interview Scheduling
Once upon a time, recruiters had no choice but to manually email back and forth with each individual candidate to find an opportunity to connect in real time. Thankfully, now that better options for more efficient interview scheduling exist within talent acquisition software, those days are over.
Just a few helpful capabilities to look out for include:
- Calendar syncing. Skip the back-and-forth and compile your hiring teams’ calendars together into one view. That way, you can get interviews confirmed with fewer barriers.
- Self-scheduling. Automated scheduling helps your candidates book interview times that suit them. It also ensures you don’t lose interview requests among your team’s inboxes.
- Consolidation of interviewer feedback. With a little help from your software, your team can rank candidates based on set criteria. After the interview, reviewing and comparing is a breeze.
Candidate Tagging and Organization
Taking a look at your universe of candidates shouldn’t feel like reaching into your kitchen junk drawer. The right talent acquisition software should help you organize and parse your applicants with features like tagging, so you can easily revisit your existing talent pool as needed.
Paired with whole-team adoption of excellent data hygiene practices like proper data formatting and naming conventions, this feature is critical to your success—especially in situations where you need to move through the hiring process quickly.
2. How Does This Talent Acquisition Software Approach Responsible AI and Governance?
TA pros know that day in and day out, people are at the core of hiring. That’s a quality AI can never replace.
That said, there’s more and more potential for AI to support rather than replace busy recruiters, especially when it comes to creating an equitable experience for candidates. Workplace training can be incredibly helpful for educating recruiters on identifying and tackling bias, but a few built-in reminders never hurt anyone.
Here are a few ways your recruiting technology of choice can help you mitigate bias, create a more useful hiring process, and offer each and every candidate a more equitable experience:
- Create a standardized interview experience. AI tools designed to create a standard interview experience can help recruiters reduce their reliance on gut feelings or first impressions. In doing so, you can make better hires while also staying accountable to your organization’s bias reduction goals.
- Automate interview summaries. Make multi-tasking a thing of the past. Now, with AI tools designed to take notes, you can focus your full attention on the candidate.
- Embrace skills-based interviewing. Despite promises to pivot to hiring practices that focus on concrete, real-world experience, Harvard Business School and The Burning Glass Institute found about 45% of companies struggled to make the switch and implement meaningful differences in hiring behavior. Timely nudges from your talent acquisition software can help your organization follow through on these plans.
- Set and adhere to a people-first AI philosophy. We know from this year’s Job Seeker Nation report that most candidates still trust HR staff over AI to guide them through the hiring process. Your talent acquisition software should be able to convey how their approach to AI gives careful consideration to the human element and to ethics—it’s an essential ingredient for a long-term partnership with this kind of vendor.
3. Which Features in This Talent Acquisition Software Can Help Recruiters Speed Up and Strengthen Candidate Outreach?
This year, we surveyed over 1,000 job seekers and they revealed that the number one way for an employer to make a positive first impression on them was a communicative, timely hiring experience.
This doesn’t mean dropping all your other responsibilities to message a candidate back the moment they ask a question. What it does mean is investing in your communications infrastructure so you’re equipped to keep top talent engaged at a steady clip while educating them on your organization.
These talent acquisition software features can be especially helpful:
Automated Nurtures
A drip campaign of emails or texts to candidates might sound at first like a lot of work, but it’s a practice that pays off.
As candidates enter your orbit, you can enroll them in an email or text series, whatever channel they prefer. Little by little, this steady stream of messages can help them get to know your company, receive answers to frequently asked questions, and keep you top of mind for the weeks and months to come as they embark on either an active job hunt or a passive one.
Pre-Crafted Templates
When you’re drafting a message to someone (or multiple someone’s) in your talent pool, few things are as daunting as a blank word processing document, with nothing but that little cursor blinking back at you on the empty page.
Banish writer’s block with helpful, expert-built templates that come pre-loaded into your talent acquisition software. And remember, a template is just a starting point—you can customize outreach to your heart’s content while feeling secure that your message will hit the important points.
Intelligent Messaging
Response rates for text messages are over seven times higher than email, with respondents often replying within 90 seconds. Don’t leave this channel off the table!
Intelligent messaging, such as SMS text messages, can help you engage candidates more quickly. You can even help candidates get answers quickly to basic questions with a chat bot or pre-set responses.
Ultimately, this means you can screen candidates even when your talent acquisition team is off the clock.
Making Your Final Talent Acquisition Software Choice
If you’ve made it through your checklist of functionalities you know your team needs to succeed at meeting your TA goals, you’re close to the finish line! You’ll likely want to seek out a few references from similarly-sized organizations. Review sites can be useful here, but there’s no harm in asking for a reference from a salesperson with a vendor you’re considering.
In order to pick a talent acquisition software solution that benefits your overall hiring processes, you’ll need to make sure each feature aligns with your needs, from candidate communications to AI to the overall efficiency of your team. Because when your team can meet the needs of each applicant and focus on getting to know them well, you can help your entire company succeed.
Looking for new talent acquisition software to incorporate into your tech stack? Look no further than Jobvite’s AI-powered ATS for enterprises like yours.
