Cheezhead

There’s nothing more annoying to a jobseeker than to visit a job board, do a search, review the job and click the apply button, only to be redirected to a company’s cumbersome applicant tracking system on the corporate web site.

OK. Now, they’ve got to create an account - sometimes having to search for the job again on the corporate site - and go through what can be a painful and time-consuming process that can take thirty minutes! Multiply this by ten jobs and ten different applicant tracking systems, and now you’ve just spent 3 hours of your life applying to 10 jobs, when this process could be completely streamlined! No wonder job search is so painful.

On our site, we’ve found that almost 40 percent of jobseekers simply give up and go away. Where do they go? A loss of 40 percent of your potential applicant pool is pretty expensive, considering the amount of money employers pay to post jobs on job boards these days. At least 35 percent of job listings on job boards do nothing more than farm candidates by redirecting them to the client’s corporate web site, and this number seems to be growing daily.

Can’t we make life easier for these jobseekers? How about a standard API or object (or even XML) that EVERY applicant-tracking tool & corporate employment site would accept from job boards? That makes real sense. When the job board redirects the candidate to the corporate web site, the board also passes the jobseeker’s information along with the redirect. This standard “application object” accepts the information, and automatically inserts it into the applicant tracking system or into the company’s homegrown applicant collection database…instantaneously. Problem solved.

Perhaps a new business idea? Could a third party build this “application object,” and act as the middle man, charging a few cents to the job board or a few cents to the applicant tracking system to handle the transaction? How much revenue could you generate if you charged 2 cents on every online job application on the web that used this third party object? Could this middle man perhaps warehouse the jobseeker data for the job board and act sort of like Microsoft Wallet did or Google Checkout does now? Interesting.

Seems like a win-win to me. The job board is happy because they boost their candidate response for their client’s jobs (which will justify ROI so they keep buying the job board). The jobseeker is happy because they didn’t have to do tons of work inserting resumes on ten different corporate web sites, making their job search just a little bit more pleasant.

As more and more job boards simply become a tool to redirect candidates over to corporate web sites, the job board and applicant tracking systems should start looking at teaming up to benefit both of their customers – the jobseekers and the employers.