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Recruitment and Technology

By Kathy Barton, February 27, 2008

Technology is both the booster and the bane of people-oriented processes. The combination of the major job boards and applicant tracking systems (ATS) has transformed recruiting, but has brought its own set of problems. It's a classic illustration of Michael Hammer's views on information technology. In an article published in 1990 in the Harvard Business Review, the MIT professor made the case that companies focus on fixing the wrong issues, using technology to automate existing work rather than using it to make non-value adding work obsolete. BPR, or business process engineering, postulates that unless you review your processes before implementing new technology, you run the risk of doing the wrong things faster. At the very least, you may add an additional administrative burden without concurrent productivity gains.

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The results of The Adler Group's Recruiting and Hiring survey of 2008 bears this out. We asked 775 respondents to rank their ATS in overall effectiveness and 611 people answered the question below. 17% of the respondents stated that their ATS was basically useless. 30% answered that the system works, but requires additional effort. Only 18% thought that their ATS increased recruiter productivity, and a mere 8% said it provided a strategic advantage.

So why do ATS systems lag behind other technology solutions, and even some other recruiting tools? These are much lower scores than you see for financial or manufacturing systems. One of the reasons is that the data used in financial and manufacturing systems is generally highly structured and easy to acquire, while the data needed to manage people is often unstructured and difficult to acquire and maintain. Another reason is that the ROI on financial and manufacturing systems is fairly easy to calculate. The hard dollar return on talent management systems has been harder to estimate, and therefore companies have been less willing to invest in these systems. Less investment means fewer companies building solutions, and less mature applications. Just compare any of the leading ATS vendors with Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, or Second Life. There is simply no comparison in terms of usability and capability.

Of course, on the one hand, it would be impossible to manage the number of resumes many companies receive for certain positions without an ATS system. On the other hand, most of the resumes are for people not really qualified for the position. So in effect, recruiters are wading through more resumes without coming up with more qualified candidates. More work, less productivity.

To really understand how Michael Hammer's theories apply to ATS systems, think about the underlying documents on which the technology is based: job descriptions and resumes. These are documents that have been around since the earliest days of recruiting. Instead of looking at how new technology might enable more effective ways of describing jobs, the ATS systems took what was currently in place and tried to make it easier and faster to create and distribute them. You can't really blame them--it's hard enough to introduce a new way of doing things without also trying to introduce new things to do.

If you read our newsletter regularly, however, you know that we recommend that if you are dedicated to hiring top talent, you should throw away your job description (or at least use them only internally) and use performance profiles instead. A performance profile focuses on what the candidate needs to do to be successful in the job, not the skills and experience that he or she has. Every job has six to eight critical tasks that need to be accomplished in order to meet company and department objectives. Understanding what those tasks are, and hiring people who both can do those things, and want to do those things, is the secret to creating a high-performing culture. Unfortunately, ATS systems aren't based on performance profiles. They are based on job descriptions, which are actually not job descriptions at all, but candidate descriptions. Five years experience, MBA, financial industry experience, has managed a team, can work under pressure . . . . This describes a candidate, not a job, which isn't going to help you in creating a performance-based culture.

Worse, ATS systems make it really, really easy to take these uninspired job (candidate) descriptions and post them out to the job boards. Now, think about it. If you were applying to a job, would you be more attracted to one of your job descriptions, or to a compelling ad that explained what you would actually do in the job, and how you could grow and build a career with a company? If the answer is obviously the second, then why do so many companies do the first? Because it's easy! Because recruiters never have enough time, and by just pushing a button, the ATS lets you post the job description out to the job boards. Not only does writing a compelling ad take more time, it's a lot harder to post it using a classic ATS system. So here you have a technology that encourages you do to the less effective thing--but do it much faster than you could do it before.

The secret of using ATS systems is to leverage what they really do best (keeping databases of resumes, moving candidates through the hiring process, keeping metrics for compliance) and work around them to enable yourself to do those things that will help make your company an employer of choice: defining what the job really is, and using that information to create compelling ads that will attract the top talent you need.