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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.”