Why Applicant Tracking Stinks: Part I

Looking around it is not difficult to find recruiting professionals who consider ATS a four-letter word. In this series, I am going to take a walk around the industry and my experiences as a new entrant over the past two years to explore how we got here and how to get out of the rut.

The first thing that we need to do is to admit there is a problem in the first place. Perhaps the most stinging rebuke to the industry that I've seen lately was this paragraph in one of Lou Adler's articles on the ERExpo about one month ago:

Your technology investment is yielding a negative ROI. While not a public session, someone described to me a meeting they had with a number of recruiting managers evaluating their satisfaction with all of the available recruiting technology. First, every tool was listed by name, including every major applicant-tracking system, every major job board, and all of the major tools. The ranking was limited to either a positive, neutral, or negative. In the summary report, not one technology product or tool received a positive ranking, and most had negatives.(emphasis mine)

This is one of those rare cases when I breathe a sigh of relief that HRMDirect is not yet a "major applicant tracking system." It's also proof-positive that any major vendor who tells you they've got this business figured out is full of it.

But wait, there's more! Here's Microsoft's Heather Leigh (see Item #10 on The 17 Dumbest Things in Recruiting), Electronic Arts' Jeff Hunter, and Global Learning Resources' Kevin Wheeler ("For most recruiters the ATS is a sinkhole for both money and time.")

Another indicator of the failure of applicant tracking to deliver serious value is the relative absence of it in smaller companies. In enterprise software people often talk about "paving the goat paths" as a way of saying that you can blow invest a lot of money optimizing processes which are collectively inefficient. However, as companies become smaller the process overhead gradually shrinks until you have one recruiter and almost no external process. At this stage, productivity becomes entirely a matter of personal output, and the vast majority of the tools out there just don't deliver much value to the individual user. Process is at the root of all this and I will write more on the subject, but suffice it to say that I approach with certain skepticism the claims of vendors to make 10 or 20 people more efficient when they have a hard time delivering value to one.

Read Part II of the series.

By Colin Kingsbury, Chief Evangelist / Co-Founder HRMDirect Inc.
Read more about applicant tracking systems by HRMDirect

Comments

[Recruiting Animal]

Colin, sorry, I don't understand this part.

"as companies become smaller the process overhead gradually shrinks until you have one recruiter and almost no external process.

Does that mean they cut their recruiting departments and don't supplement the rump with external vendors?

"At this stage, productivity becomes entirely a matter of personal output...

"Process is at the root of all this"

[Recruitomatic]

Colin, is it not possible that the problem is more fundamental than with the the technology and/or vendor relationship?

Without a process map that fully documents the internal workings that will be automated how can any solution be "made to fit?" I think the problem with ATS and other recruitment technologies in general is that they are made to automate a process per se and not the organization's process exactly, each organization being somewhat unique culturally, environmentally, operationally and so on.

Also, you assume employers are contracting and this reduction in size somehow impacts the delivery of technology. What about those companies that are growing and need a platform that can sustain that growth?

Amitai.

[Colin Kingsbury]

OK, looking back I can see where my language was unclear. Note the date folks, it doesn't happen often :)

What I should have written was, "as you look at smaller and smaller companies, the amount of time employees devote to activities which do not create direct value decreases." At larger companies there are often many hands on the conveyor belt, meaning that any one person's work gets "averaged out" with everyone else's. Something which makes a top performer slightly less productive is often worthwhile if it can raise the performance of two below-par slackers. At the opposite extreme, you have the lone-wolf headhunter, who does nothing that doesn't lead her closer to making a placement.

In terms of process, I want to keep my power dry for a separate post on the subject. But, the basic version is that most companies' processes are both less valuable and less unique than they often appear to those in the middle of them. ERP and CRM implementations started getting a lot better when clients decided to start shaping their processes around the tools more than bending the tools to fit their processes. It took a good 5-10 years though of train-wreck projects before companies began to rethink their approach.

[Martin Snyder]

As almost always, I agree with Colin on many of his points, including the notion that if you can improve the working life of an individual recruiter, you stand a much better chance of doing that for 10 or 100 in another situation.

I disagree highly with Recruitomatic on this one because a too perfect process map or other top down process planning / automating actually often is counter-productive if you consider this kind of technology to be 'horizontal', which we certainly do.

Example: what process maps govern the use of Microsoft Word and Excel ? Not many, yet those tools support vast productivity across all kinds of jobs because end-users pick and choose which features they need at any time. Now it may work out that 80% of the users are using 20% of the features, but if thats what helps, then it's just fine.

To me, recruitment is recruitment, no matter where it's done and no matter the context. The core remains; people, roles, groups, and events that tie them together.

We see the market for our solutions as anyone doing recruiting, anywhere, anyhow; the trick is to create technology that can adapt to whatever situation it finds itself in (avoiding the very edges of the 'scattergraph', of course).

ATS promises too much and costs too much in general, and thats why it gets a bad rap.

[Recruitomatic]

Martin, I would be foolish to try and defend a weak position – based on my perceptions alone – when you are basing your argument on hands-on experience, one might say. And to the extent that recruiting is recruiting that is true, but cooking is cooking in exactly the same way. Surely without a process map, a recipe of sorts, you run the danger of ending up with nothing much more than soggy spaghetti. Profiling, sourcing, screening, assessment, selection, onboarding and what have you are all "recruiting" but vastly different for dump-truck drivers compared to, say, pharmaceutical sales reps. It’s recruiting, sure, but the process for recruiting each is very different, requiring a different deployment of [the same] technology and recruiter resources, no?

As far as Word and Excel is concerned, again, you are right. You don’t need a process map to get the most out of the functionality in the program but if you don’t have a beginning, a middle and the end – a process - your document, for example, is going to end up more like a Kurt Schwitters poem than an ATS RFP or resume even, meaningless. But I concede you and Colin would know more than me in this regard which is why I am happy to stand corrected ;0)

All that said, I do disagree with you on your last remark: "ATS promises too much and costs too much in general, and thats why it gets a bad rap." That is simply not true. You are confusing what ATS salespeople say with what the technology actually does.

Amitai

[Martin Snyder]

Thanks for the nice response R-o-M

I like your cooking metaphor, since we manufacture ranges, grills, pots and pans, and the like.

The cookbook has little to do with us; where you learned to cook, who you are cooking for, etc. is your business.

Now there are equipments that you could buy that take raw ingredients and turn them to foodstuffs.

When grilling up some truck drivers or marinating and roasting pharma reps, it depends on who is doing the cooking, and for how many.

Most kitchens just need the basics.

Salespeople say what customers want them to say- it's a two way street. Have you ever been in one of the fancy kitchen stores?

In any effort, it's the easiest thing in the world to let the gear be the focus-but the key is rarely the gear, its usually the driver, the player, the explorer, the musician, the artist,the mastermind, or the chef who makes it happen. Good gear is essential, but it's not the arbiter of what's happening.

Be wary of gearheads- they often devolve into chasers of differences without distinction meaningful to the outside world.