You know that Apple commercial from the 80’s where the lady (who was strangely buff and hot at the same time) runs up an aisle in a tank top and chunks a sledgehammer at a massive TV screen? Yeah, this is kinda gonna be like that …
I propose that the current ATS model is broken. I propose that a central repository of data made up from collected resumes is a poor way to comb through and assess talent. I propose that once many of you reading this stop sticking your William Tincup voodoo dolls with pins, you’ll see my point. Allow me to elaborate.
I’ve seen it happen: the hiring manager hires a loud-mouthed, over zealous, way-too-excited, pompous jackass to work in an environment with a bunch of by laid back cats who just want to get their shit done in peace. Not only does the new guy give the other employees in the office frequent anxiety attacks, but productivity has plummeted since he came fluttering through the door. The others can’t even write a simple freaking e-mail without the guy butting in. He gets on the phone and they feel their ears start to bleed from his megaphoned volume voice.
So, the people who put up with the new guy ask the hiring manager, “What gives?” The hiring manager most likely responds: “What are you talking about?!?! Our ATS found this guy and his skills matched perfectly with the job requirements you gave us!”
And there, my pedigreed chums, is where it’s wrong. A vast of the people using an ATS in their candidate searches are only tracking the hard skills of the candidates: skills in Microsoft Word, Excel, Java, HTML, Adobe, Account Management, Dreamweaver, etc., which is great…expect it’s only half the equation. A smaller percentage are “advanced” ATS users, meaning they push personality assessments to candidates who’s resumes have been flagged by the ATS. Then, if you’re really a badass and care a lot, you might go look up the handful of candidates that didn’t bomb the Myers-Briggs on Facebook. So many flaws …
Flaw #1
The initial pool of resumes is limited to the outbound activity of the recruiter. No judgment here. A recruiter can’t be everywhere at once. The pool of candidates is finite and took a lot of the recruiter’s time to compile – which only further supports my advocacy for blowing up the database. There might be a fantastic candidate out there, just perfect for the job but because you don’t know her, you didn’t consider her. On top of that, how much more time would you have if you weren’t constantly pushing people to submit their resumes to your ATS?
Flaw #2
Resumes suck. Seriously, you know they suck, I know they suck, hell, even the candidate knows they suck. No one likes to read them, and sure as hell no one likes to write one. And don’t even get me started on writing a good one. So why are we still promoting an antiquated information delivery system, most of which is made up anyway? Hell, I once put in my resume that I could play the banjo … I was on a real Conway Twitty kick. People lie. I lied five times before I got out of bed. You can bet your ass your candidates are lying on their resume. Again, no judgment. It’s gotten to the point that if you don’t embellish (that’s a nicer word, let’s go with that) on your resume, you’re D.O.A.
Flaw #3
It’s inefficient. You know how many times a typical person takes an employee assessment test in their life time? Well I don’t either but I know it’s more than once, and that’s too many. Or better yet, how many cover letters, or different resumes does a person have to write, edit and submit? Or how many different formats there are to resumes? Or how many different file formats are accepted? It’s insane. 90% of what a recruiter looks for in a candidate exists in the public domain via social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, hell even Twitter.
Flaw #4
ATS’s and recruiters alike focus on the placement of a candidate and very little on the retention of said placement. Both need to think more (and build technology around) taking into account what a successful employee looks like at a particular client’s business. This doesn’t have to be rocket science. A simple survey or questionnaire could handle most of this. The questions just need to be asked.
Imagine now, recruiters lived in world where a technology could scour the internet for the same keyword searches, personality test results, and employee history on multiple social media sites. A world where interested candidates need only submit a screen name to a company to be reviewed. A world where the equation “hard skills + soft skills + culture = fitability (recruiter home run)” still applies and is executed on all at once, to every candidate possible, not just the ones in the database. A world where ATS’s and recruiters are able to place candidates successfully at jobs for longer periods.
I see skies of blue, red roses too …
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July 29th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Dude, there are so many flaws in your logic that it’s hard to know where to get started. But here are my top three:
#1 You say resumes suck because people lie. You think that someone’s facebook profile is going to be a better way to assess their ability to do a job? Or that their Tweets are going to be a more complete overview of their work history? Get real. The point of a resume is to
#2 You think that bad hires are the result of resumes. (The “pompous jackass” who had all the right skills.) Everyone says “the resume gets you the interview” not, the resume gets the job. If you think that the resume is all their is to screening candidates before making an offer, you’re nuts. The breakdown in the process you describe isn’t that they looked at the resume instead of the facebook page.
#3 What’s up with assessments? I’ve had tons of jobs, and never once taken an assessment. But the idea that some assessment I took years ago should be published on the web for employers to use today is a really creepy idea. You make me think of Gatica, where your DNA is your destiny. Ideally, an assessment would be to test a specific person for a specific job at a specific company. Jobs are different from company to company. And people change. (At least, my skills are better now than they were 5 years ago.) That said, I’d be happy to have my job interview just be my SAT scores, because I really rocked that test.
Oh, and here’s a bonus complaint. “90% of what recruiters look at is already in the public domain via Facebook and Twitter?” You have an incredibly low regard for recruiting. For a good recruiter, there’s more to assessing a candidate than checking out who their friends with or what they had for lunch.
July 29th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
That’s an interesting recruiting utopia you describe, without many suggestions on how to get there, which really isn’t a critism, just a point for discussion. As to the list of flaws to the ATS status quo you provide, while I generally agree with the list, addressing these flaws is likely a far more intractable problem that most might imagine. Some examples:
As to Flaw #2, yes resumes suck, but so do a lot of LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. Their suckage potential is equal to that of resumes, as is the untruthfulness potential. Ultimately, they leave us with the same predicament, namely, scraping keyowrds and phrases off of unstructured text. And, let’s face it, forcing everyone into the JobFox approach isn’t going to work either.
As to Flaw #3, while I agree that assessment tests are a pain in the arse, for a great many positions, there may be no other way to efficiently reduce a candidate pool to a reasonable size. Sorry job seekers. A problem here is that recruiting organisations are notoriously awful about screening skilled candidates, that task ultimately falls to line-of-business organisations that need a smaller candidate pool to make the process consume a less onerous amount of time.
Overall William, I think these are great issues you raised that are hard to solve. Interestingly, if you do solve those issues, what does that say to ATS solution providers? “Now that candidates are ubiqitously searchable on the web, your solution’s value is reduced to merely managing the job requisition process. We can do that with Sharepoint, open source, or a few tweaks to our core HR system. Sorry about your troubles.”
July 29th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
I worked in the recruiting field briefly- I was astounded to learn the inner workings of the industry. The system is archaic and ridiculously slow/resistant to change. To the few of you who “Get it”- Thank You, please slap some sense in to your industry….
My list of annoying recruiting practices:
1) Required Registration to submit resume
2) Manually entering all your resume info into separate fields on employer website
3) Asking highly personal questions early in the recruiting life-cycle, eg: salary requirements for a job you barely know anything about
4) Scam Job Openings
5) Spam from Recruiters
6) No feedback from recruiters
7) Missing self-imposed deadlines- “We’ll call you Tuesday to inform you of your status”
8) Standard Interview Questions
9) Relying on tests, assessments to make hiring decisions
July 29th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
About the only thing that made sense in this article was this – “A world where the equation “hard skills + soft skills + culture = fitability”. Everything else just seemed like a poor written rant.
The problem though with this equation is that you’re taking a basic formula which includes two variables (soft skills and culture) which can never completely be assessed by an ATS – let alone a recruiter.
An ATS is only supposed to suppliment the recruiting process – not solve it. Recruiting is still and always will be a world where two people (at minimum) are evaulating their wants and needs to determine if there is a fit. Mix in an outside recruiter, multiple interviews and your process has just been taxed with a thousand other opinions or reasons for the process to break down.
Stick with what an ATS is – a basic sorting machine. The rest is up to the recruiter and hiring manager.
July 29th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
There are some valid points in this article. In flaw 3 you say that most of the info can be found on social media sites, this is so true! I also like how you call for recruiters to look at the qualitative sides of candidates and not just the quantitative check list of skills. Thanks for expressing your different (maybe passionate) view on things.
July 29th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
William,
I like your spunk. But if I were to criticize applicant tracking systems, I would focus on how poorly they serve the candidate and, therefore, do a disservice to the recruiter- not SonicRecruit, but those other guys ;). That’s the real flaw of ATS. Too often it is a brick wall between good candidates and hiring managers because the best candidates won’t spend a half an hour fighting with your bad online application.
I am not sure this post is an indictment of the ATS as much as it is a criticism of the recruiting process/culture they automate.
And that process/culture’s flaws are well known. I gotta be honest, the content is about as earth shaking as saying “mean people suck.”
And whether a recruiter sources from their database or through SN sites, they still have to vett the candidate in a smart and capable way, and if they can’t do that I (which you seem to say), who cares where the candidate comes from.
So should applicant tracking system vendors go out an automate a process, and support a Utopian recruiting culture that doesn’t exist? We are actually trying to change things incrementally and give our clients options to do things differently.
I honestly don’t think you accomplished your goal of blowing the lid off of applicant tracking with this post. But it was in line with your edgy brand, so I get it. You just gotta bring more next time, otherwise you run the risk of being edgy for edgy’s sake.
Ian Alexander
Cytiva Software
http://www.sonicrecruit.com
July 29th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
My only question regards William’s self-awareness; his self-defined role is provocateur, and while he succeeds with this piece, how much of it does he really believe?
Does he really think that people say “our ATS found this guy” ?
Does he really think ATS deployments are only focused on “placement of a candidate” ?
Does he really think that copying “what a successful employee looks like at a particular client’s business” is a viable means to build a strong organization ?
Does he really think that “keywords, personality test results, and employee history” can be comprehensively (legally and practically)structured into employment decisions by “scouring the Internet” ?
I guess what comes of this article that “ATS” is a very broad word, sort of like “Pyrotechnics”- one man’s firecracker is another man’s A-bomb. Recruiting is a basic economic function and there are many, many ways to go about it. Likewise there are myriad ways to handle recruitment data.
Because many ATS vendors overpromise on the value of certain features (artificial intelligence and systems integration), and understate the costs of critical elements (like professional services and dedicated data analytics), the industry has a reputation for big-talk and small-results.
In those senses, we are going about things the wrong way, but the fact is that even crappy ATS systems often give good ROI, and trying to do any volume of recruiting without one is a fool’s errand.
July 30th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
ATS systems do stink. They stink for candidates who see them as a black hole with no chance of feedback except with an electronic one liner. They stink for recruiters because they don’t even get you the keyword matches described. They’re terribly clunky for sourcing. Most new cutting edge recruiting technologies can’t be used by large firms because bureaucratic firms need everything to link into their black hole ATS. If you talk to large firms that are honest, large chunks of the recruiters do their own thing. They’re supposed to live in the clunky ATS but they do their own thing. Unfortunately this also means they don’t do a great job of tracking successful sources. Getting good resumes is step one though – as someone described above, you will actually have to have a conversation with the candidate eventually, feel them out the best you can and take the leap. Psychological horse shit tests are just as fallible as anything else – so enforcing these rainbow tests are crap. I only had to take one in my life. The hiring mgr. really liked me and told me before the test to “answer the questions the way I thought they SHOULD be answered” wink. The matched resume is a hard first step but the second step will take human interaction. Sorry, I know it sucks getting off facebook and having to talk to real people – yucky.
July 31st, 2009 at 9:06 am
While your ATS article is funny and does have some valid points, the problems you raise are not all the fault of the ATS systems. It seems that your article is both a reflection of recruiting strategies in addition to what you see as flaws ATS technology.
ATS systems don’t replace good judgment or the need to consider both cultural fit as well as hard skills. I agree with your observations in Flaw #4. Candidates need both basic skills to do the job as well as a style and personality to complement the corporate culture.
It is true; there are more sources than ever before when searching for candidates . Social media has opened a new world of both active and passive candidates. Good ATS systems can leverage social media in addition to the traditional on-line job applications. This decreases the time it takes to surface a good candidate pool, and provide recruiters and managers with more time to interview and assess those candidates.
But first you need an understanding of what hard and soft skills constitutes success in an organization. A solid strategy and proper use of these tools will improve the quality of those hires.
August 1st, 2009 at 7:26 am
Applicant Tracking Systems in and of themselves do not suck. It’s the way they have been used that is so terribly flawed. “Recruiters” — and I use the term loosely — have become ATS zombies.
When they are told to go fetch, they look for keywords and bring their catches to the hiring manager (who, by the way, is not “allowed” to recruit, lest the recruiters have nothing to do).
The majority of corporate recruiters really have no clue about the skillset and competencies required for the positions they are trying to fill. Recruiting should be the job of the hiring manager, and it is easily facilitated through the social networking portals. The ATS — the official record keeper — can be the domain of HR, but only as a repository and audit trail for compliance.
I’ve been ‘ranting’ on this subject for some time now. http://undergroundjobnetwork.com/?p=487. Let HR “track” applicants via an ATS, but please get them out of the recruiting business.
August 27th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Interesting article. Keyword searches, personality test results, and employee histories (i.e. resumes) plus the job descriptions that guide these tools are fundamentally flawed. These are artifacts of the recruitment world that is starved for anything more robust and useful. ATS systems are merely a symptom of these flaws; a facility to automate the broken process.
The key is to understand exactly what a person can do and what a job requires that is specific enough to show clear distinctions in people while not being so granular that it is too burdensome to use. Skills provide the key in that regard. I would not make a distinction between hard and soft skills, but rather skills in total that make up one’s leadership, management and technical/functional domains. The interesting insight is that once you define these skills for the organization and for positions, you get a clear sense of what the needs of the company and role as well as the culture (based on management and leadership skills that are held in higher regard).
Furthermore, once we know of a person’s skills, that can be used to measurably access training needs, succession plans, career pathing, and performance reviews in a way that is more transparent and more fair to employees. In turn, this makes companies more aware and sensitive to the real needs in the organization. By rolling up the skills of each person, the information can be consolidated at various levels in the organization to provide an amazingly detailed picture of the DNA of a company.
Your nirvana may not be so far off as you think. Using skills as the basis of accurately building job requirements and precisely measuring talent, we can go a long way in turning ATS off and moving to a more sound and reasoned approach to everything HR.