YOUR APPLICANT TRACKING SYSTEM STINKS!

As a CIO looking for my next FTE position, I'm here to tell you that if you're a recruiter and you're not getting the candidates that you are looking for, it's because Your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) Stinks!

I've helped HR departments deploy ATS solutions in my companies for over 20 years. Seen a lot of them. Good and Bad. ICIMS, ADP, Workday, UltiPro, Lever the list goes on. And I'm here to tell you that it's not so much the solution as HOW it's deployed and configured, that is either driving great candidates to your recruitment funnel or frightening them away in droves.

As I've been looking for a company in need of a CIO, and applying for positions online, I've noticed two distinct schools of thought when it comes to applying for positions online. The first, and preferred is the "easy button" approach. A couple of clicks, a question or two and you're in the mix! Quick and Easy. Done! Remember... at this point I am a CANDIDATE, not an EMPLOYEE. Make me WANT to apply to your positions by making it easy and frictionless. 99% of what you want to know is either on my LinkedIn profile or my resume. The rest should be covered in an interview. That's it. Easy Peasy Mac and Cheesy.

The second approach is that one that is grinding my gears and makes me shake my head every time I run across it. It's what I call "the Gauntlet". There should be a pop up window that warns the applicant that this process is going to be painful, frustrating and time consuming. Three things that every job seeker enjoys (sarcasm intended).

Let's start with the obvious. If your ATS requires any applicant to re-type all of the information that is on your resume into specific fields instead of importing it from my uploaded resume. Your ATS STINKS! There's no reason... and I mean NONE for anyone to have to do this. My Alexa knows my resume better than your ATS. I know resume formats can be tricky, but this isn't rocket science. At a MINIMUM, if you can't take ten random resumes and ingest them with 99% accuracy into your ATS, THEN DUMP THEM! Between machine learning and natural language processing, there isn't an ATS on the planet with a good excuse for having someone re-type in their qualifications into specific fields.

Second, let's get all of those attestations out of the way on a single page. I realize you need to track certain demographics to meet state and federal requirements. But let's do it efficiently and effectively. Put all of those attestations on a single page. Make them all radio buttons and a single date (pre-populated, please) with a checkbox that captures acknowledgments. It doesn't need to be three to five page with required reading to capture this data. No one is reading that stuff anyway. Make it EASY.

Lastly, lets save the personal stuff for AFTER you decide you want to interview me. Want to know what my hobbies are? INTERVIEW ME. What's my sexual orientation? INTERVIEW ME. Want to know my mother's maiden name and my Social Security number FOR A JOB APPLICATION?! Well that just starts to sound like a Phishing scam and there's no way in hell I'm going to give out that information on a job application (besides which, do you REALLY want to be responsible for protecting my SSN? what happens when your ATS is breached and you're responsible for my SSN getting out on the dark web?!) INTERVIEW ME, HIRE ME and THEN I'LL GIVE YOU MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER.

Most of these things are configurable in the platforms you already have. You just didn't walk through the process and put yourself in a candidate's shoes when you set up your ATS. PLEASE! GO BACK AND DO IT! Ask yourselves, would YOU answer some of these questions or jump through these hoops just to throw your name into the otherwise "black hole" that is an ATS system on the off chance you'll get an interview out of it? Smart candidates know that this is a numbers game and we are not willing to risk our personal information for an interview.

And while we are at it, @Workday, @UltiPro, @ICIMS, and @all you other budding ATS Platforms out there... If you are going to insist that I create an account on each at each and every deployment of your platform on your clients sites, then AT LEAST federate my information across all of your platforms so that I don't have to keep re-entering data over and over again. I've answered the same twenty question so many times I have dreams about them! Do yourselves (and your customers) a favor by collecting candidate information once and saving it so that the next time they are on an ICIMS platform applying for a job, their redundant information is pre-populated. Why isn't anyone sharing that information across their entire platform?!

I'm going to offer something that I may regret, but I've always stood by the position that if you're not willing to do something about a problem, you shouldn't complain. I'll offer up a free thirty minute consultation to any HR professional who recognized THEIR bad ATS system in this article to help you streamline your applicant tracking process from a user perspective. As a CIO who has deployed each and every one of these in former companies, I can assure you that I know what I am talking about and I would be happy to help you level up your game when it comes to finding talent. Contact me via LinkedIn if you are interested.

For those of you who are thinking "tough beans.. if they want they job, they'll jump through the hoops"... well.... I wish you luck. Talent is hard enough to find and the really good talent doesn't have to jump through hoops to get the jobs they want. The hoops jump them.

#ThingsBobSays #Recruiting #JobSeekers #Jobhunt #CIO