Standout Jobs

I never got around to writing a proper review of ERE Expo, where I spoke and presented Standout Jobs and met a ton of great people. I enjoyed the event a great deal, and thought the presentation went well. Kudos to the entire ERE team for putting on a great show, and I look forward to the next one in the Fall.

Reading Charlie O’Donnell’s thoughts on ERE did give me pause to think and comment. He was equally impressed with the event, but commented:

One thing I was sort of surprised about… It seems like so much of the technology in this industry is built around an initial assumption of failure. It’s as if everyone assumes that you have to post a job opening and you’re bound to get a firehose of junk from that, and so there seem to be about 400 companies in the applicant tracking space–all focused on herding the resumes, marking them, managing responses, etc. Very few companies seemed to be focused on the idea of actually helping you get a more relevant candidate flow or at least being able to filter them.

I would guess that some Applicant Tracking System vendors would argue with that…but I don’t entirely disagree with Charlie’s assessment. The deluge of ATS products is a result of the fact that major job boards (which were the first “innovation” in the online job market space) will send you hundreds of unqualified applications. Job boards kept sending resumes (which to a degree was fulfilling their value proposition at the time) and created a new problem. So ATS vendors rushed to the rescue.

Of course, since ATS products came to solve the problem of too many resumes they tackled it with a very process-heavy hand. In some ways that makes sense; they attempted to bring order to the chaos. Having spent many years in the project management software world, I know exactly what that’s all about. But ATS vendors created (or exacerbated) another problem — Human Resources is too process-driven, dull and mechanical when really it should be (and in many cases is) about people interacting with people.

I’d like to think we’re one of the companies that is “helping you get a more relevant candidate flow or at least being able to filter them” because our focus is on helping companies establish and promote a strong employer brand, market themselves (and their jobs) and reach their target audience properly. We hope that companies can build on-going relationships with candidates more easily and give candidates what they want in terms of information & connectivity. And ultimately that effort (although I hardly think it’s much of an effort) will result in a more relevant and higher quality candidate flow, and/or give companies the ability to more quickly filter people.

And I see a lot of opportunity for Applicant Tracking Systems to reach beyond their process-driven world into truly useful and effective career web sites, where they recognize the importance of the candidate experience, and the relationship building that has to take place between employer and candidate before the resume gets parsed, sorted, ranked, archived, etc.