Thought you could trust online forms to identify the source of candidates? Think again! More and more people are speaking up about the weakness of these forms, used by most applicant tracking systems (ATS). According to a recent study, these fears are grounded. After thoroughly analyzing 62,908 forms filled out by candidates, the U.S. job board AllRetailJobs.com arrived at eloquent results: only 1 candidate out of 6 correctly identified the Web site on which they found the job posting
The performance of these forms is not fully optimized. Most have a simple, far from exhaustive drop-down list for candidates to choose from. The formulation of the question can also be confusing, as some forms simply ask for “Source,” without any further explanation.
In addition, candidates often answer this question as quickly as possible, without paying much attention to its accuracy. Why indeed should they take the time to correctly fill out this section, which is of no interest to them? The proof is that 50% of them select “No specific source” or “Other.” Many select the most popular sites out of habit, or search engines Google or Yahoo, not because that’s where they saw the job posted, but because they led to the job boards concerned.
This inaccuracy of more than 80% is all the more worrisome because many recruiters rely on these reports to evaluate the effectiveness of job boards. After spending large amounts of money on an ATS, it is legitimate to expect reliable results to guide online recruitment purchase decisions.
Resorting to a technological solution—tags—is unfortunately not a magic bullet. Tags can identify from which Web site the candidate comes via the URL. They can therefore help flesh out candidates’ answers, but have many weaknesses, including the inability to trace previously unindexed sites and to identify increasingly common vertical search engines.
Recruiters are woefully ill equipped when it comes to effective metrics, and seem doomed to pick job boards on faith. Reliable sourcing information is definitely an unmet meet that ATS solution providers should quickly get cracking on.
For more information:
AllRetailJobs.com report “ATS Sourcing Data – 83% Inaccurate”:
http://www.allretailjobs.com/html/ats-sourcing.pdf