ATS conversion - Lessons Learned

Just completed another ATS conversion from one vendor to another.  It's never fun, I really didn't want to go through it, but there are a number of steps and "clean up" that must be done.

Data - I broke this down into two separate steps.  Candidate data and financial data.  On the candidate side, I had the recruiters get into the new system and check out their previous activities, personal data and notes.  On the financial side, there were more problems.  Because of file issues, not all the bill/pay rates came through correctly.  Instead of going through the hassles of another data upload, we inputed the rates again manually.  This was tedious, but it did give us an opportunity to double check employment status and we did find a couple of mistakes that were in the original data.

Work Flow - Every system I reviewed, would have required some changes in our work flow.  This actually played a very big part of my decision on the new vendor.  We did make some changes but I don't think will have any negative impact.  It's important to document the new process and have meetings with the recruiters and sales folks to make sure everyone understands the changes.  I also plan on creating cheat sheets that I'll post in their cubes.

Reports - In the final stages, we walked through the new vendors reports and compared to our needs.  We did find some differences, but because most were exportable to EXCEL, this will allow us to resort and delete any fields we don't need.

In summary, I couldn't be more pleased.  A complete conversion of data and new system training in 1 week.  Again, the basic concept of our industry using a ATS model verses the enterprise options can't be better displayed.  I hope that I won't have to go through another conversion too soon, but even if we did, I feel comfortable it can be handled orderly and safely.  You data is your life blood and must be protected, usable and valuable.