When HR Technology Fails

Posted on May 7, 2007
Filed Under Online Recruiting, Employment Websites, Applicant Tracking, Best Practices |

I always like to share articles that are well written and relevant. This is one from Peter Weddle, president of Weddles and executive director of the International Association of Employment Websites:

Over the past ten years, many employers have made significant investments in application tracking systems (ATS). They bought this technology in order to work smarter. ATS vendors told them that it would improve their operational efficiency and financial productivity. In other words, these systems would help them manage both the acquisition and distribution of resumes and the tracking and allocation of their online recruitment advertising spend. The first objective has probably been met. The second clearly has not. Employers cannot track applicants with their applicant tracking systems.

How can I make such a statement? Ask yourself these questions:

Do you want to spend your recruitment advertising dollars in the best possible way?

Do you track the source of your applicants so you know which job boards are delivering the best candidates?

Do you make investment decisions based on these data? In other words, do you spend more money on those sites that deliver the best candidates and less or no money on those sites that aren’t measuring up?

If you answered “Yes” to all three questions, give yourself a pat on the back. Last year, we recruiters invested over $1.75 billion in online recruitment advertising. That’s real money in anyone’s book, and I believe it is our fiduciary responsibility to spend it wisely. Making smart investments, however, requires accurate data, so ask yourself this additional question:

How much of your recruitment advertising budget did you invest last year in the job board called Other?

If you answered “None”–as I hope you did–your ATS has let you down. Why? Because more often than not, Other is the response selected by job seekers when your applicant tracking system asks them where they first saw your job posting. That’s the state-of-the-art in applicant tracking by applicant tracking systems. They ask job seekers to give you the answer. They use drop down windows with incomplete lists of job boards and the memory of job seekers to generate the data on which you’re relying to make your investment decisions.

It’s bad enough that they limit the sources candidates can select when indicating where they saw your ads, but it’s inexcusable that they have ignored the available tagging technology that would replace the job seeker’s memory with a truly automated solution. Why should their systems be better? Consider the results of a study done by AllRetailJobs.com. It surveyed over 63,000 job seekers to determine how many could accurately remember where they saw an employment ad posted online. A staggering 83% got it wrong … and that’s the data your ATS are handing you.

What’s behind such blatantly inadequate system designs? If you ask ATS vendors, they’ll blame it on their customers. They claim that they have a long list of upgrades requested by employers, and getting accurate candidate sourcing data has never made it anywhere near the top of the list. Said another way, they don’t believe you think making smart recruitment advertising investments is all that important.

What should you do? Let ‘em know they’re wrong. If enough employers call their ATS vendors and voice their dissatisfaction, we’ll see this problem fixed and fixed fast. How important is that? Very. You can’t win the War for the Best Talent unless you know the best job boards for the talent you’re recruiting.

With the need to diversify advertising budgets to reach larger audiences and add to applicant bases, the need to measure the effectiveness of all media outlets is even more important. The purpose of an ATS is to “track” applicants. That means from the source to the hire. I encourage all to ‘lean’ on your ATS provider to implement the changes necessary to properly track your applicant ’source.’