Best Practices: Using an ATS When You Aren't Actively Hiring

If your organization isn't actively hiring, your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can still provide significant value. Rather than letting your ATS sit idle, use slower hiring periods to maintain your recruiting processes, organize your data, and prepare for future hiring needs.

The following best practices can help you make the most of your ATS even when recruiting activity is low.

Build and Maintain Talent Pools

Developing talent pools allows you to stay connected with qualified candidates and reduce sourcing time when new positions become available.

Consider using talent pools to:

• Organize candidates for future opportunities.
• Re-engage previous applicants.
• Build pipelines for hard-to-fill roles.
• Stay prepared for unexpected hiring needs.

Maintaining an active talent pool gives your recruiting team a head start when hiring resumes.

Manage Alternative Hiring Opportunities

Even if you're not filling permanent positions, your ATS can still be used to manage other types of opportunities, including:

• Internships
• Temporary positions
• Seasonal roles
• Contract work
• Other short-term opportunities

Keeping these opportunities within your ATS helps maintain recruiting workflows and keeps your candidate pipeline active.

Support Internal Hiring

Your ATS can also help manage internal recruiting efforts.

Create internal-only job postings to:

• Support promotions and transfers.
• Fill internal openings.
• Collect applications from existing employees.
• Use customized application questions for internal candidates.
• Maintain separate candidate pools for internal applicants.

Managing internal hiring through your ATS helps create a consistent process for all hiring activities.

Review Reports and Hiring Metrics

Take advantage of slower hiring periods to review historical recruiting data.

Useful reports may include:

• Time to hire
• Time to fill
• Candidate source performance
• Candidate quality by source

Reviewing this information can help identify trends, improve future recruiting strategies, and support better hiring decisions.

You can also review benchmarking data to better understand hiring trends across your industry, including hiring timelines, recruiting activity, and workforce trends.

Prepare Your ATS for Future Hiring

Periods of reduced hiring are a great opportunity to improve your recruiting processes before hiring demand increases again.

Consider reviewing and updating:

• Application forms
• Email templates
• Hiring stages
• Evaluation forms
• Job descriptions
• Recruiting workflows

Keeping these resources up to date helps ensure a more efficient, consistent hiring process when recruiting resumes.

Continue Optimizing Your Recruiting Process

Regular maintenance of your ATS can help your organization:

• Improve hiring efficiency.
• Standardize recruiting processes.
• Reduce administrative work.
• Stay prepared for future hiring needs.

Using downtime to organize and optimize your ATS ensures your team is ready to recruit quickly and effectively when new hiring opportunities arise.

Still have questions? Our team has answers! We love to talk about how Hire can make your hiring landscape much easier. Reach out to the support team or your account manager!