Testing your company's application and various job listings is an important part of using your Applicant Tracking System.
Here are a few of our favorite tricks that can make this process quicker and more effective.
First, create a 'dummy' email account as a pseudo-applicant that you can reuse. We suggest that you create an email account solely for this purpose. This way you can check the email for notifications from your ATS site and also test your email templates.
Once your quasi-applicant email account is ready to go, apply for one of your company's job listings as an applicant would and create an imaginary applicant. The name and basic information used will be stored within the ATS and will auto-populate to any future applications you submit for other jobs in the future. Please note, however, that some fields in the application need to be revisited each time you apply for a position, such as the job specific questions, reference information, and any disclosures such as EEOC, the source declaration, and the applicant statement.
Now you can easily proof your new job listings with the same account. Some of the things to be aware of while testing your applications:
- Did you have trouble completing any sections of the application?
- Did it take too long to complete?
- For two-step applications: Did you invite yourself to take the second step? Were the instructions clear and was the link working?
- Did you have any questions that were duplicated?
- Were the multiple choice questions listing the proper answer options?
An important part of testing your own applications is having a consistent internal response for answering those EEOC and source questions. To prevent skewed reporting, we suggest choosing the option “I do not wish to answer” for the EEOC and VEVRAA questions. We also chose the client's company website as the source. Whatever you choose to use, the most important part is to be consistent as a company. As a best-practice, we also put a note in the applicant record, change the status to not qualified, and archive our mock application when testing for our clients.