Remember the days of writing a letter to Santa Claus? When you’d sit down with your computer or pen and paper and make a list of everything you wanted for Christmas.

Kids all over the world send letters to Santa ever year. In 2013, the Universal Postal Union expected to receive more than seven million letters from 192 countries addressed to Santa (or his cultural equivalents). That’s a lot of mail for one man.

As an adult the days of writing to Santa ​may be over, but that doesn’t mean you stop wishing. It just means those wish lists are more…practical.

In August of this year, HR technology review company Software Advice released a study reporting the buying habits of those in the applicant tracking system market. ​This was an extensive study and included everything from the percentage of recruiters currently using an ATS to how many new buyers would soon enter in the coming year.

It also included a list of the top features buyers want in an ATS.

So with the holiday season in full swing and Christmas a few days away, lets look at the top features recruiters are wishing for in their stockings or under their tree this December and how Zoho Recruit can deliver.

Posting to Job Boards and Career Sites

Move over ​Xbox One and iPhone 6, the top-requested feature for ATS users this year is the ability to post job openings to job boards and career sites quickly and easily. In fact, this was the top requested ATS feature from more than 60 percent of recruiters.

Posting to job boards and career sites is obviously an important feature and crucial to maximizing your time and effectiveness as a recruiter. Fortunately, Zoho Recruit lets you post jobs with just few clicks of the mouse.

From within the job postings portal, you can choose which job boards you want to post to by just checking the corresponding boxes. Zoho Recruit allows you to post on the most popular job boards including Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, Career Builder and JuJu.

Additionally, you can post jobs to other websites like Facebook or Twitter by creating a unique URL for the job posting and copying/pasting it to any ​tweet or Facebook post.

You can also leverage your company website and publish all job openings in one location. Organize the jobs into categories and target a specific audience to narrow your results.

Searchable Database

The ability to quickly search your database for candidates, job postings and other records is an essential ATS feature. In fact, it was so essential that close to a third of buyers had it on their wishlist.

In Zoho Recruit, you can search records three different ways – a simple search, combination search and the advanced search.

The simple search function is as easy as choosing which module to search in and entering the text in the search box.

A combination search lets you use the “+” symbol to denote AND and the “,” to denote OR. This lets you narrow the search down to more specific criteria. For example, type “JAVA + 5 years,” to find candidates who have at least five years of experience and experience in JAVA.

The final way to search is called an advanced search. This lets you search through records by specifying your own criteria. Click the module tab, choose the module you want to search in, choose the advanced search button and finally specify the criteria.

Reporting

Rounding out the top three most requested ATS features was the ability to create and view reports (31 percent of buyers).

With the Zoho Analytics integration, recruiters and HR managers can easily look at reports from their data all within the “Reports” portal of the Recruit UI. Zoho Recruit comes with 20 standard reports along with the tools to create custom charts, graphs and reports regarding any and all data found in Zoho Recruit.

After choosing which module you would like to generate a report from – Candidates, Job Openings, Clients – you can then choose from a drop down menu which fields and data you wish to use in the reports.

Additionally, you can create your own custom views to see the reports. Inside the reports module you can choose chart, matrix, dashboard, tabular or summary view. This gives you a wide variety of options for analyzing and viewing data that best fits your workflow.​

The holiday season can be a very busy time. Shopping for the perfect gift, navigating traffic, scurrying off to a different party every weekend and visiting family can all add up to a season of stress. All of this on top of your daily work routine can be overwhelming.

Let Zoho Recruit eliminate the stress in your daily recruiting life and simplify the way you track and hire candidates once and for all.

Happy holidays!