Raghav has continued with a wide survey and has raised some interesting points, and although my conclusions are not quite in line with his in all cases, he offered up a few key ideas.

First the little stuff: In the USA right now, its wishful thinking to ask ‘Why not provide candidates that make it to the final stages in hiring with feedback on why they fell short?’ It’s just too legally risky to say much of anything about anyone. There is no good reason for a business to add risk for no real reward by offering more information than the laws of state and courtesy require.

As for the way they do it in the UK, ‘Britain already has a law that requires job applicants to be provided full access to selection-related information if it involves an automated process (Employment Practices Data Protection Code, 2002). Since applicant tracking systems were created in response to EEO laws, do we need to wait for a law before they get around to providing such functionality?’ that would take a lifetime to adjudicate here. One person’s automation is another person’s manual labor. How might a defendant explain the results that their ‘expert’ text searching systems arrived at? It would be virtually unexplainable in a legal sense.

And hey, I’m usually leading the way for making things better for candidates. A good ATS makes it possible for organizations to provide some basic standard of response to many job seekers at a reasonable cost. But helping them to ‘Ferret out what information they need to know about a company? Again, I don?t think so. Not every candidate is really even a candidate, and showing too much over the web or in any uncontrolled way gives a window into your operations for competitors and others who may mean you no good. Good candidates are well able to gather information from any number of cues on the employment branding trail; too much information violates the golden rule.

As far as Raghavs thoughts on employment advertising between Job Boards and Newspapers-

Its not hard to parse the meaning of a selected quote: ‘On the Internet, you kiss fewer, but only those frogs who really know what they want will find themselves on the end of their princess’s puckered lips.’ The Economist (March 25, ‘A Monster Success’) That speaks to Monster being effective, not the other way around, and a real and growing division between staffing for easy fit jobs and for more creative jobs like sales, executive management, artists and content people, etc.

Job boards are one of the major innovations of the age in their way, so I would be hesitant to say their time has passed, when it may yet bloom more fully. Newspapers, on the other hand, are pretty well able to sell as much classified job advertising as conditions will allow; it?s a mature if not declining market and the actual labor to post ads and record sources manually into an ATS is neither materially expensive nor difficult to obtain.

Two important points that I do agree with Raghav on are these:

‘A better approach might be to provide better support for building relationships with candidates. Most vendors claim to do so already, the usual approach being that candidates can store a profile and search criteria for jobs they are interested in’

Yes, networking can only be done by people, at least at this time, and not in the UK! ATS software that supports recruiting the way its done in third party staffing provides the tools that all salespeople require; calendaring, activity management and search, fast lookups, email tools, strong relationship modeling, etc. etc. As they say, you can do applicant tracking with recruiting software, but you cant recruit with applicant tracking software.

Finally, ‘Outlasting Cycles’, or being ready for markets that are both candidate rich and job rich is a critical long term success factor. It kind of forces you to do a good job all the time.

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