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When will Applicant Tracking Software Get the Message? follow this blog post

posted by on Oct. 13, 2009

"We were not able to identify your contact e-mail address. Your login e-mail address will be used as your contact e-mail address instead. Please be aware that this contact e-mail address will be used to contact you."

The message above was sent to a prospective candidate from an applicant tracking system -not ours. This system is managing a fortune 500 company's careers site. Yikes! It can hardly be debated that enterprise software is way too complicated and for the most part, pretty thoughtless when it comes to user experience. The message above is a perfect example. The expensive applications that businesses use to run their human resources are some of the least friendly, most difficult systems ever committed to code. If you work at a company that uses buinsess software or you've ever had to do something that should be simple, like apply to a job - or, heck, even look at a job on a corporate careers site - then you've probably encountered some really annoying user experiences.

 

How did we get here? Part of the problem may be that the people using enterprise software just don't demand anything better. They think all business software has to be complicated - it's all they've ever known. People have just been dealing with poorly-designed technology for so long that they internalize the flaws. Maybe it's that a lot of these systems, applicant tracking software particularly, are built for "power" users so thoughtful, consumer-like, usability concerns are sacrificed for massive amounts of options that ultimately "sell" the technology. In the end, buyers do compare features and typically the software with the most features wins. But, the question that constantly nags us is - Does the user win? We think not.

Clearly, the real topic here, the usability of enterprise software, is a huge can of worms and I'm only scratching the surface of an increasingly incendiary topic. I can tell you this though; the "error" message above actually encourages us. It's evident that a majority of our peers that develop recruiting software ignore design / usability. We don't. It's also clear that buyers of software are increasingly eager to find well designed software that improves usability and ultimately makes their lives easier. We like this trend, it plays to our strengths.

Finally, we want to make a public promise. We will NEVER send another human a message that doesn't make any sense. It's the least we can do.

 


 

applicant tracking software applicant tracking system recruiting software
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6 comments

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  • 1 point 27 days ago

    Steven,

    I totally agree. It's also amazing how many HR and recruiting professionals want to track applicant source metrics but can't either because their current system is a dinosaur or it's just too time prohibitive to do manually - or both.

    Our product designers went the route that you suggested below. We easily provide employers the ability to create a unique URL for any and all applicants sources. We then track this data automatically on our real-time analytics dashboard.  Our clients love it.  They can finally figure out where they are getting the most bang for their buck and adjust advertising dollars based on real data - instantly!

     

     

  • 1 point 28 days ago
    It is also reprehensible how horribly virtually all of the applicant tracking systems actually track the source of applicants. They could easily provide the recruiter with unique URL's (web page addresses) for every job board posting and other source yet they don't. They rely on fundamentally flawed and misleading drop down "how did yiu hear about us" and other archaic systems, which deprive their recruiter clients from having easy and cheap access to one of the most important metrics for their jobs: where are our hires coming from?
  • 1 point 38 days ago

    Stephanie - Thanks for the comment. As for tracking drop-off rates or what the B2C's call "failed conversions", we've conducted pretty extensive research be it a couple of years ago. In 2004 and 2005 (we ran an RPO, you can read our story here if you are interested http://www.newtonsoftware.com/background.html ), prior to building our own applicant tracking system, we white labled a well known ATS system that required applicants to create an account before submitting a resume. This system had all kinds of error messages native to the application.

    Fortunately, with the help of a web forensics tool and with assistance from a crafty IT resource, we tracked the traffic to the careers pages of our clients and then tracked the click-through rates for all of the jobs we were managing. What we noticed was actually pretty telling. Nearly 10% of traffic that came to the careers pages and clicked on a specific job left after the ATS asked the applicant to create an account. We can only start to guess at the drop-off rates when the applicants received some sort of error message.

    Another interesting metric that came from this study was that less than 1% of visitors to careers pages ever forwarded a job to anyone else. Meaning, the "forward this job to a friend" or "tell a friend about this job" - was very ineffective

    Based on this research, we chose to make the application process as simple as possible in Newton, our product. Most of our customers are SMB's that welcome the opportunity to review candidates. They want to see resumes. They want applicants to apply! They don't necessarily have a "processing" problem rather, they have an "attraction" problem. So, we chose to go with simple and chose to skip the complicated stuff- no bogus error messages - low margin for error.

     

  • 1 point 38 days ago

    I'm a recruiter. And yet there are ATS's out there that I can't make hide nor hair of. From the CANDIDATE'S perspective! If a highly technical person (I can promise you, I am. I can even update my iPhone software all by myself) I cannot imagine what it's like for someone with much less technical capacity, and patients for that matter. I ask..what's the drop off rate after people get a ridiculous message like that?!

  • 1 point 38 days ago

    Having worked and recommended with various ATS at the enterprise and ASP models, I've seen this also. 

    The biggest reason I believe the systems aren't scrubbed by the users as well as they should be lies in "user usage". 

    How many times have the actual HR folks receiving the applicants tried to enter their OWN system and see how easy it is to use and what messages are produced?

    Mike Tiffany 

    http://stl-it-recruiter.squarespace.com/

  • 0 points 27 days ago

    Automating business processes by hard-coding each (and maintaining the code as the processes evolve) has been very expensive and unpleasant for all concerned. 

    Its also going into history as more and more organizations use workflow engines integrated with their document management and collaboration systems (SharePoint is the most famous but there are other platforms).  

    Next Gen ATS (and other line of business apps) will also integrate deeply with those systems, and that will eliminate a great deal of the kluge factor as most people will then interact with common interfaces most of the time: Outlook, Excel, Word, PDF Readers, etc.   The remaining core features will be delivered via simplified portal, likely also a service provided by another enterprise app.  

    SAP is doing this with Duet as are many others, and its pretty much our current design focus too until proven otherwise.  Hardcoding workflows and document handling is for the birds.....