Excel sheets are used by almost all white collar workers to do some part of their work. From making a list of leads, tracking revenue, managing to-do lists & pretty much anything you can think of.

Excel sheets have been a recruiter’s best friend for the past 20+ years. Tools for recruiters have gotten a lot more advanced today, maybe its time to move on to something better than excel. We spent a while surfing discussion boards to do some research & we learnt that a lot of recruiters jump between 4-5 tools to source candidates, set email triggers, scheduling appointments and so on.

As you can imagine, this is pretty painful and a lot of data gets lost in the cracks. Whats worse is you end up delivering a bad experience to both your clients & candidates!

Today, there are better ways to run your business & improve productivity! All you need is a modern Applicant Tracking System, basically some awesome Recruitment Agency Software that unlike excel, is designed especially for an agency recruiter.

A specialised Recruiting Software is always a game changer.

The big difference between using excel sheets and a dedicated ATS system is that you get everything you need at one place. This reduces the pain of juggling multiple tools, learning Excel formulas like the slope formula, asking analysts to help with Excel VBA, and helps you stay much more organized.

Difference Between Excel Sheets & ATS System

Features Excel Sheets Recruitment Agency Software
Applicant Tracking System No Yes
Customer Relationship Management No Yes
Boolean Search No Yes
Invoice Management No Yes
Resume Parser No Yes
Email Client No Yes
Jobs Management No Yes
Integrations(G Suite, Zoho, Outlook) No Yes
Reports & Dashboard No Yes
Team Management No Yes
Customizations Yes (Limited) Yes
Jobs/Careers Page No Yes
Request Updated Resume No Yes
Hiring & Sales Pipeline No Yes
Radius Search No Yes
Customer Support No Yes

For a few bucks a month, using a modern Recruitment Agency Software will save you hours of data entry every week. Over the course of a year, these hours are worth thousands of dollars!

This is the main reason why you should switch to a dedicated ATS.

Recruiters are moving away from spreadsheets like excel sheets or Google Docs because they weren’t designed with a recruiter needs in mind.

Here’s An Example For You

We will take a look at one example where you can see recruitment agency software in action.

So, Ryan owns ABC Search and they have 4 recruiters. Unfortunately, they are still using google docs or excel sheets to manage their candidate database.

Scenario 1

Ryan wants to know who placed a candidate named “John Doe”, but since they are using excel s
heets, Ryan has to do some digging in order to find out. After searching through multiple files, he eventually finds what he was searching for.

Time wasted – 15-20 mins.

Solution – With an ATS system in place, Ryan would have easily got hold of the details by just typing John’s name in the search box and checking his candidate profile.


Scenario 2

After following up for 3 months, Ryan got a new client (Apple) but since Ryan doesn’t use any type of CRM, he can’t keep track of all conversations that happened between different hiring managers at Apple and him over the last 3 months.

Ryan ends up digging through his Gmail account to pull up emails from months ago.

Time wasted – 10 mins

Solution – With a Recruitment Agency CRM (like Recruit CRM….couldn’t help the plug)  in place, Ryan would have easily read all the conversations he’s had with recruiters at Apple on one page.1


Scenario 3

ABC Search receives a ton of email from candidates with resumes since they have no database in place, Ryan’s recruiters spend a lot of time going through resumes and entering data in Google Docs.

Time wasted – Hours every week, depending on the number of resumes.

Solution – With software in place, Ryan would have parsed & stored the resumes directly into his company database from his email inbox.

Just like the above scenarios, there are many more scenarios where a recruitment software would have come in handy and saved Ryan’s team a lot of valuable time and helped them be more productivity!

Read More: Check out 5 major productivity tools for recruiters

This Is Why Recruitment Software Exist!

Dedicated Recruitment ATS & CRM systems are helping firms all over the world get more productive by reducing data entry and keeping the team in sync. Each ATS system is designed for a different set of use cases. We’ve built Recruit CRM to make recruiting more organised, stress free and fun.

So if you want to try an ATS today, give our free trial a shot. Click here to signup.

Don’t be Ryan and start taking your business to the next level today. Leave your comments below on whether you’re enjoying our blogs.