A reader wrote in about this problem that many Taleo clients may be experiencing if they upgraded to the new 7.5 version.
Apparently some clients who are getting their jobs scraped directly from Indeed and Simply Hired are experiencing problematic system changes because Taleo won’t play the job views for candidates that try to view the jobs directly from those major job aggregation sites.
The source said, “As they ramp up their direct scraping/sales efforts, they are actually dead ending candidates and creating trouble for the clients that they are trying to sell too, but using the clients job feeds to build traffic to themselves – which is ‘web constipation’ for candidates.”
Here’s an example. Try this search the reader provided: http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=lifetime+fitness&l=Indianapolis%2C+IN
The results show all Lifetime Fitness Jobs (Taleo-based), but if you click on the jobs, you reach a system error.
The reader recommended that Taleo clients go out to these sites to ensure that their jobs are working, and then ask to get them down if they are affected.
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December 16th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Hi,
I get the point of the article, but I followed your Indeed.com search link, clicked the first two jobs and the last job listed, and arrived at the Lifetime Fitness job description page(s) with no problem… the URL indicated it was a Taleo site. I also clicked “Apply Online” without error. Maybe it was a temporary glitch?
December 16th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Could be that the error was fixed. As of yesterday, when I published this article, I received error messages for all of the Lifetime Fitness jobs listed.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
This is a Taleo issue…not a Simply Hired or Indeed issue. ATSs are difficult to work with, and don’t care enough about tracking to work w/ many sites. All Simply Hired and Indeed do are take content from the web, and provide access to it from one place. If you are getting page errors that is on Taleo’s end…not the aggregators.
They don’t “dead end” anyone. How is that in their best interest? They try to work w/ all the ATSs to provide BETTER TRACKING…not poor tracking. Sending someone to a dead end page does them no good. So, the person writing the email obviously doesn’t understand how this works. Making it EASIER for people to find postings, and then sending them directly to where that job was found is a GOOD thing. They work as conduits…not a dead ends.
December 16th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
To SEM: the person who emailed me agrees with you and said that this is a Taleo issue, not a Simply Hired issue. You are correct: the page errors are on Taleo’s end.
December 17th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Taleo has a real issue when it comes to “playing nice”. I’m familiar with a vendor who leads the onboarding space and Taleo has now told their clients that they will no longer allow integration with this vendor. It begs the question, that with Taleo:
Who owns the information?
Who’s driving the ship?
December 17th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Hi there, this is Mary Grace Hennessy, Sr. Director of Product Management with Taleo. I was the lead product manager for the release you reference in your post and thought I might offer some helpful clarification.
With Taleo 7.5 (available in 2007), we added web 2.0 features to our career section design in order to allow for more interactive page designs. In doing so, we introduced JavaScript and some third parties required help to do scraping. In response to this, last December (2007) in our 7.5 SP3 release, we introduced a new “site map” feature to help third parties with scraping. This feature enables anyone who wants/needs to scrape jobs from Taleo’s customers’ career sites to do so once–without needing to make changes every time we upgrade the design of our customers’ career sites. All customers received these instructions with the SP3 release notes, and I believe all of the major job boards and job distributors are aware of feature. If not, they can contact us to request the instructions.
The link referenced in your post appears to work correctly now, and we have had no customer calls regarding this issue recently, despite having millions of candidates running through our systems. Taleo is always happy to support any third party our customers wish to interact with who needs to get job data, and we do appreciate when issues are brought to our attention.
Thanks for listening,
Mary Grace Hennessey