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Manatal Review 2023: Features, Pros & Cons

Manatal’s core features include the career site, job post syndication, enriched candidate profiles and more.

Career Site

Manatal enables you to create a customizable career site that’s compatible with WordPress, Wix, Squarespace and other leading content management platforms. You can embed dynamic visual and video media and custom application forms with custom fields. Best of all, you don’t need any coding skills to curate an engaging job site that reflects your company’s brand.

Alternatively, you can integrate your existing career page via application programming interface (API) for streamlined integration with Manatal’s ATS.

You first have to enable the career page under “Administration.” After doing that, you’ll see “Career Page” in the main menu bar. You can select one of three basic layouts for your page, choose one main color, edit headers and more.

We were able to add a new form easily to our career page that comes with default required fields for a name, email address, phone number, cover letter and resume. These default form fields cannot be deleted or edited, but you can add new fields. All fields are general text boxes, so you can’t choose different field types.

You can insert custom fields into application forms that appear on your career site.

While the career page setup was simple, you’re limited in your layout, color and field formatting options.

Syndicated Job Posting

One of Manatal’s call-out features is its AI-powered Job Description Generator. You input the title and it generates a job description.

Enter a job title, and Manatal will automatically generate an editable job description for you.

However, in the process of testing, we learned that you have to go through quite a few steps to access this feature. You must first become a paying subscriber, essentially ending your free trial. Then, you have to enable Manatal AI under “Administration,” where you’ll be prompted to email the support team. Then, for security purposes, the security team will email you to verify your account. Overall, it took about two days to get access to Manatal AI.

When we created a job manually in Manatal, we could either fill out a form or use one of three sample templates. Creating a new job with a built-in template was quick and easy. We chose the “Sales Manager” template that already had the job description, responsibilities and qualifications populated, although we were able to edit the information.

We then tried creating a job through a form. We entered the title and department as a starting point. From there, you can paste the job description and do so much more, such as add a location, status, tags and activities. Any job description you create can be turned into a template to save time when you hire for that same type of role again in the future.

Once your job description is ready to go, you can post to more than 2,500 free and premium job boards at once, such as Indeed, LinkedIn and Monster. You can also post your job openings to social media networks using a shareable link to expand your post’s reach even more.

Candidate Profiles

Another standout feature of Manatal’s platform is its ability to enrich candidate profiles by automatically parsing and importing data from external sites, such as a candidate’s LinkedIn profile. That way, you don’t need to copy and paste information from one browser window to another. Using Manatal’s Chrome extension, People-Match, pulls candidate data from more than 20 social media and public platforms into Manatal.

Import candidate data from their LinkedIn profile into their candidate profile in Manatal

We tried the Chrome extension on LinkedIn and were able to add the person as a contact or candidate for a specific job. When adding a candidate through the extension, you can click on the link to navigate back to the candidate profile in Manatal. We were only able to see one of two candidates in the main candidates section but could see both in the respective jobs they were attached to.

We also were only able to find our newly added contact via the search bar and were not sure where the list of contacts is housed within the system. After consulting Manatal’s online documentation resources, we learned that you have to enable the “Contact and Guest Menu” under the “Administration” tab.

Applicant Tracking System

Manatal helps you maintain oversight of your hiring pipeline by enabling you to create a customizable pipeline, drag and drop candidates as they progress and view them on a Kanban board or list.

Kanban view of the candidate pipeline

List view of the candidate pipeline

When you post a role, the system scans it to learn the core skills and requirements And then cross-references that data with candidates in your talent pool to identify the best-fit talent. The ATS bulk parses resumes and detects, extracts, classifies and scores candidates’ information automatically in batches for a particular role.

In the testing environment, we noticed a percentage next to each candidate to gauge their fit for a role but it would be better to have more context to this percentage and dig into the details of where the candidate fits well for the role and how they fall short.

Manatal’s ATS supports multiple languages, even right-to-left languages, such as Arabic or Hebrew, and those with special characters, such as Chinese and Thai, making Manatal a great option for companies that operate and hire in a variety of countries.

Candidate Relationship Management

Manatal allows you to communicate with candidates via email or SMS. To save time, utilize the email templates to bulk send to candidates. Manatal syncs with Outlook/Office365 or Gmail and keeps a history of interaction between recruiters and candidates.

It was easy to contact a candidate via email directly from within Manatal without having to navigate to the email inbox in a separate window.

You can send an email to candidates directly from within Manatal

At first, we couldn’t find the email template function but learned in Manatal’s online documentation that you can set up email templates by either navigating to “Settings” or by clicking on your profile icon in the upper righthand corner and clicking “Settings.”

There, we were pleased to see several built-in templates, saving us time from building our own from scratch. Out-of-box email templates include:

Application acknowledgment Candidate rejection General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) data consent Invitation to phone or in-person/virtual interview Application status update Referral outreach Interviewing Tools

Interviews with candidates sync between Manatal’s Activities calendar and your Outlook/Office 365 or Google calendar. With Manatal, you can also create your own interview scorecards to ensure each candidate is evaluated fairly.

The interview scorecard function is tucked away in the “Administration” tab where you first have to enable the interview scorecard feature. It was easy to create a new scorecard by adding a field name and type, such as open-ended text, a number, a rating, a checkbox and other formats.

Scheduling Tools

Manatal’s scheduling tools are geared towards internal planning and organization and doesn’t offer a self-scheduling tool for candidates who are invited to interview.

In Manatal, you can create activities, tasks and events to your activity calendar in Manatal that syncs with your Outlook/Office 365/ Teams or Google Calendar or email inbox. You’ll receive automatic reminders of upcoming activities and they’re displayed on your main dashboard, so you’ll never lose track of what you need to do and when.

It’s very easy to create an activity and there are various ways you can do so, such as by navigating to activities in the main navigation bar or a candidate’s profile or by clicking on the big plus sign at the top right.

Create activities in Manatal for phone calls, interviews and more

When hiring collaboratively, you’ll want to use Manatal’s Activities feature to assign tasks to others and monitor your team’s task completion. Active tasks related to a specific job candidate appear in their profile, not just the person the task is assigned to which helps promote visibility and accountability.

Onboarding

Manatal is rather limited in its onboarding features, as it doesn’t enable workflows or checklists. However, you can integrate with Adobe Sign to facilitate e-signatures on critical onboarding documents that are securely stored and accessible in the candidate profile.

Once an employee is moved to the “Hired” phase, Manatal adds that candidate to the “Employees” section automatically. You can also integrate Manatal with your HR software to manage employee information.

Reporting and Analytics

Manatal has built-in reports recruiting key performance indicators (KPIs), such as cost of hire, time to hire, time to productivity and more than 20 other useful and visualizable metrics. Configurable dashboards mean you only see the recruiting data that matters most to you.

Manatal offers recruiting and staffing agency customers leaderboard-style analytics to gamify and incentivize recruiters. Leaderboards show placements made, closing rates and more. Agency-specific reports include sales reports and forecasting to get insight into their sales funnel and identify top performers. Manatal also offers agencies return on investment (ROI)-calculation reports for agencies to link revenue to jobs, clients and teams.

When navigating to the reports section of Manatal’s main menu, you can select “Candidates,” “Jobs,” “Performance” or “Leaderboard.” In each category, there are anywhere from two to dozens of reports from which to choose.

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