Having spent the last 8 years of my career working with enterprise HCM software, a big chunk of my time is focused on helping companies use applicant tracking, or recruiting systems.
There are many SaaS recruiting systems out there, and most enterprises don’t need all the clunky features that these mature (aka old-school) recruiting tools have.
I decided to build an ultra-light recruiting system.
By streamlining the system down to only the key elements, I’ll be able to help businesses reduce their spend on SaaS systems.
Plus, a lot of small businesses don’t have an ATS at all. An ultralight platform will ensure that companies with lower budgets have access to recruiting software.
More on the product at the bottom of this. But first, a little background for those who are new to applicant tracking systems:
What is an ATS?
Also known as an “applicant tracking system” or ATS, a recruiting system is a type of software that lets the company accept job applications from candidates.
These tools often have a public-facing career website where the company can post jobs for candidates to view and apply to.
There’s also a recruiter portal, where your recruiters can view information about candidates that have applied, and post new jobs to the public-facing career site.
An ATS usually integrates with a business’s HRIS (the system that maintains employee data). Once a company decides to hire a candidate, the relevant candidate data is “converted” or moved over to the HRIS system from the ATS. At this point, the recruiting process ends, and the official hiring process begins.
The War on Talent
For an enterprise that needs to hire employees, an easy to use career website helps the business get more candidates.
With recruiting, it’s a numbers game. The more candidates that apply, the greater your chances of finding the best talent.
Candidate experience is crucial to get more candidates. If the career website is user-friendly and optimized, the conversion rate goes up.
A few ways you might improve the candidate experience:
- Reducing the number of elements on the page.
- Simplify the job description.
- Reduce the number of initial fields that a candidate must fill out.
- Gather additional information after a phone screen if they’re a good fit, for example
An easy to use careers website can help you find better talent.
Introducing Espresso Hire, the Ultralight Recruiting System.
Here’s a short demo video:
A quick look: The home-page. Yep, that’s really it.
The career website is a list of jobs. Radically simple.
The job posting page needs some work. I will add a few more fields to the database so that companies can display additional info like specific skills required, job duties, etc.
- Candidates can apply right from the job posting.
- No need to login or create an account.
- No lengthy application process.
- Just a name, email, LinkedIn, and resume.
The recruiting dashboard. The recruiter can add a new job posting, download each candidate’s resume, and schedule interviews. That’s about all you need if you go ultralight.
This is all sample dummy data.
By far the most difficult feature to build has been “resume upload” during the application phase, and “view resume” from the dashboard. Each took about 2 or 3 days to figure out. I finally got them both working on July 9th.
I started this project because I thought it would be fun, and as a way to learn PHP and SQL. I doubt if any company will actually be bold enough to go ultralight. But hey, who knows. Maybe someone will prove me wrong.
p.s. I will implement responsive design once I get around to playing with HTML and CSS. But scope creep is real, and it can be a slippery slope. How much designy stuff should I add?
p.p.s. My hypothesis for this tool came from the fact that we still use Craigslist and that website has a purposefully outdated look and feel.
p.p.p.s. Also inspired by r/ultralight.
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