And to Hell with the Applicant or How We Need to Improve the Application Process

By Gal Almog, CEO, Redmatch

In 2000, I attended a recruiting conference in New York. It was at the peak of the Internet bubble, and I was sitting in the audience trying to figure out how the Internet would affect the labor market. It was evident that something dramatic was happening and that recruitment would never be the same. The more I listened the clearer the picture became:

There is a chromic shortage of talent.

The Internet will be the place where candidates will look for jobs, and this is where recruiters need to be.

We must change the way we hire if we want to find quality talent.

One of the speakers went so far as to describe what was happening as: The war is over, and the job seeker has won.

It was scary and exciting at the same time. Then the bubble burst, and quickly thereafter came the recession.

Last year, I went to another conference. The message was clear:

There is no shortage of talent.

We are getting too many resumes from unqualified job seekers.

We need better applicant tracking to manage the recruitment process.

This time the speakers were not so sure about who is winning the war for talent. Nevertheless, the message was clear: We need better tools to screen applicants, and it does not matter how much time or effort we require them to spend. After all, they want the job, and we want to be more efficient.

What is going on? Will this yearís message be the same as the year 2000? Have we learned anything during the last five years?

Unfortunately, we learned very little. The only significant change I see is the emergence of a new market for software products called applicant tracking systems (ATS). What seems to interest todayís recruiters is how to track candidate response.

Calling a recruitment system an applicant tracking system is like calling a customer relationship management system (CRM) a contact management system. Anyone using a CRM system knows that contact management is only a small part CRM and sale process management.

(One moment of full disclosure: I am a CEO of a company selling applicant tracking systems. I am not writing about my companyís software but rather about the state of our industry, on what I hope is behalf of my colleagues the other ATS vendors, who feel stuck with a product name that does injustice to what they are really trying to provide to their clients.)

We are stuck with the name ATS because this is what our customers are used to looking for. The more descriptive name should be Talent Relationship Management (TRM). However, my company dropped this name because no one is doing a Google search using the keyword TRM. Rather, they all look for ATS.

And, yes, it is all about the applicant, not the tracking. I believe that everything starts with the applicant. The best ATS or TRM systems are useless if the applicants cannot find what they are looking for. The corporate career site is the companyís store front and should be given the same level of attention.

One of my clients is a regional bank. It gets hundreds of thousands of applications a year through its corporate career site. Many of the applicants are this bankís clients or would-be clients. If they come to this bankís site and spend their valuable time futilely trying to find a job, will they feel good about the bank?

The bank is spending millions of dollars on marketing, branding and promotion in an effort to reach millions of people and many more millions of dollars to retain its clients. Shouldnít it invest a fraction of that cost to make the experience of people who visit the bankís career site more pleasant and rewarding?

And if the candidate manages to find and apply to a job, will someone bother to tell him whether he is qualified or not?

How about telling applicants who have just visited a corporate career site about all the jobs that they qualify for, based on the information they provided when they applied for the first job?

How about asking the job seeker about his skills and about what he would like to do and then showing him jobs that he qualifies for.

How about keeping the candidate profiles in the corporate database and sending an e-mail message to job seekers when a new job that they qualify for has been posted?

How about sending the applicants a Happy Holidays e-mail message, even if we have no job to offer them? I can see an applicantís thoughts when he opens this e-card: ìWow, this must be a cool company to work for.î

We want applicants that are thrilled with their experience in applying for a job. We want candidates who will continue to explore employment opportunities with a company, long after they have applied for a job and spent 20 minutes of their valuable time answering qualifying questions about their skills using the ATS. We need to appreciate the job seekerís time by keeping information that he has already provided us for when he applies for additional jobs.

If we invest in the applicant experience, resume tracking will be the easiest part of hiring the best talent.

Gal Almog
CEO
Redmatch
www.redmatch.com