Applicant Tracking? Really?
Over the last few months a close acquaintance has been searching for a new job since being laid-off. The stories of how unsuccesful she has been at simply getting a recruiter to look at her credentials has been very disheartening for someone who fully embraced electronic recruiting systems years ago.
From the looks of things, the process of screening candidates is now more complicated and convoluted than before technology offered its solutions. In many cases, once my friend is able to leverage a personal relationship to get to a recruiter to find out what happened to the resume she submitted for an opening, she is finding out her electronic application and resume never made it into the recruiter’s hands. Worse, after the recruiter tells her she is a perfect candidate for the position, she receives a “rejection” email notifying her that she is not qualified for the position. “Don’t worry about it”, says the recruiter, “just another system glitch.” Scary? Absolutely! What kind of talent are you going to attract with this kind of process? In some cases, she has simply turned down offers to be interviewed because she is concerned that the recruiting experience is a pretty good indicator of what a job experience would be like at that employer. I’m sure my friend will evenentually find a good job but I hope some of the employers she has applied to find a better way to manage their application process.
Wow! That is really disturbing…and I can understand why you feel disillusioned by technology if this is what your friend is experiencing. In the HR dept. at the hospital I work for, we use applicant tracking from HealthcareSource and have had exceptional results with them both from our upper level management perspective, and in our acquired team. I tend to agree with your friend that a good indicator of what a job experience will be is the impression she is given as well. After all…employers need to make a good impression that lasts, so that top talent will STAY!
I have implemented two different applicant tracking systems at two different employers. We spent a great deal of time setting up the system and processes to find the qualified candidates in a stream of applicants. Our goal of course was to have the system determine who met the minimum qualifications and who did not. as an applicant now on the other side, I too experience the “not qualified” rejection for positions that are at a level which used to report to me…
I think the issue lies with the average recruiter, who is not capable of performing an appropriate search within the database. Recruiters are generally not very computer literate, and let’s face it, in most cases don’t really know what the manager wants. I have friends who are recruiters, but they along with their HR cousins the Generalists are not really the best people to handle a computer, much less a sophisticated tool like an applicant tracking system. As such, they simplify their use of the tool, in many cases using simple searches, or as an electronic repository.
Until the recruiters understand the tool they have, they will not use it effectively. It is like putting a race car in the hands of an 85 year-old driver, who only wants to use it to drive a mile down the road to the grocery store and back.
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