The appeal of applicant tracking systems (ATS) for employers is obvious: they promise to bring order to the often disordered process of managing job applicants. An ATS can theoretically drive all job applicants into a single pipeline, massage their unruly information into neatly ordered database fields set up exactly as the employer desires, and allow HR to actually manage the interactions with applicants.

Sometimes the ATS works well – and sometimes (like all software) it doesn’t. When it works, the HR and recruitment team are very happy and often are able to do more with less. (Although poor ATS implementations can cause problems for job seekers, as I noted here).

Job boards, however, face several challenges when dealing with employers using an ATS:

1. Technical integration: when a job seeker views a job on the job site and then decides to apply, there has to be a ‘hand off’ from the job site to the ATS. Usually this is simply a redirect to a specific ATS URL – but not always. A poor hand off can result in ‘dropped’ job seeker applications – and an unhappy employer.
2. Source recognition: Ask any job board operator and you’ll quickly find this is the number one complaint against ATS vendors: they can be ineffective at recognizing the source of an application. Thus, your job board may show that 50 people applied for a particular job…but the ATS only recognizes 5 applications from your board. What happened to the other 45? Some drop out because of the actual ATS questions and structure; others don’t mark their ‘source’ correctly. Some ATS vendors automatically recognize the source – this is good. But many rely instead on the job seeker – who is in a hurry, anxious to get through the application, and not awfully worried about accuracy of the source picked from a drop-down list.

There are, unfortunately, no easy solutions.  However, as a job board operator, you can prevent problems by ensuring that your job board software is flexible and built with the expectation of ATS integration, and by working closely with the employer and ATS vendor during the set up and testing phase. Don’t assume that the reporting is accurate – verify it independently. Remember – ATS is not going away, and your board’s ability to work with an ATS will have a huge impact on your long term success.

If HMOs were developed to drive normally well-adjusted sick people over the edge, then I would posit that the typical ATS was designed to make a job seeker sink into deep and utter despair.

Yes, I understand why an ATS is a useful – in some cases, necessary – part of a company’s career site, particularly in these days of few jobs and many applicants.

But why be cruel? Why make an applicant create an account, and then a profile, and then upload a resume – all to apply to one single job? What ever happened to quick and easy? Too many ATSs feel like an internet version of Kafka’s ‘The Castle’ – just one more turn, one more level, and forever the promise of an ending that never quite comes.

My advice: think long and hard about how much information you need, and when. Must you have an exhaustive profile up front? How many screening questions are truly necessary? Even in these tough times, some positions are hard to fill. Don’t scare away your best prospects!