Can an ATS Really Know a Candidate?

I was thinking about an article by the famous recruiter, Lou Adler who made two critical points about hiring qualified people.

• People who get promoted more rapidly or assigned to the toughest projects tend to have less experience than those who don’t. Yet when we hire someone from the outside we want more experience.

I have found a number of loftily written, multi-year job descriptions that are jobs in which I could excel. Yet I know that I will not get a call because I don't necessarily have the dreamt-for experience. Jobs that I would be perfectly qualified would not be of interest to me. I don't want to do what I did before. I'm looking for new challenges to learn and grow.

• Most managers would hire a top achiever who is a little light on skills and experience and modify the job accordingly, but their hiring systems prevent them from ever seeing these people.

And the second point requires deeper exploration. Judging from my front end experience of applicant tracking systems powered by Taleo and Brassring, I can tell you, it ain't about the applicant. They are brutally clunky with terrible visual experiences, unreadable guidelines and they crash or hang regularly. Really, the name says it all: "tracking" - it helps people follow a person through the lifecycle of the hiring process. It doesn't purport to "discover" talent. As a result, the loop holes abound.

David Perry and many others recommend doing an end-run around ATSs by approaching the hiring managers directly. Bersin & Associates, conducted an interesting test - Secrets for beating ATSs - and found that 75% of candidates are killed before they even reach human eyes. They created a perfect resume for an ideal candidate for a clinical scientist position. They matched the resume to the job description and submitted to the company's Taleo ATS. The end result: The resume only scored a 43% relevance ranking to the job.

Large companies need these systems to deal with the sheer volume of interested folks, and stay in the government's good books. But at what cost? Employers are working so hard to improve their recruiting "brand" to attract the very best candidates, yet it seems that one part of the process is sabotaging the efforts of other parts.

When a recruiter clicks on the name of a candidate whom the applicant tracking system has ranked as a good match for a job, she doesn't see the resume the candidate submitted, she sees what is pulled from the candidate's resume into a database. This link has a telling screenshot of what the ATS provides the recruiter when a match is made. It looks like a dog's breakfast - or more like what comes out the other end. I have worked with text analytics programs and know how difficult it is for a computer to understand the nuance of language. Many who purport to be able to do it still require humans to "train" the system for their jobs, industry, and context.

It is very important to note that you cannot get a job if you don't apply for a job. The irony is not lost on me.