Some Recruiting Software Really Needs to Grow Up

First impressions count both ways. Too many companies who should know better are using embarrassingly outdated recruiting software. The following features that I encountered multiple times in my last search made each company using the outdated software look both unprofessional and out of touch. In all such cases today, these features are shoddy and do not reflect well on the company using the software.

Only Accepting Plain Text Resumes. Such software is designed to enable easy key word searches across multiple resumes using 1990s storage and processing resources. Another justification for once requiring text resumes was concern about software viruses. Some software still in use today will proudly announce something along the lines of “we don’t care about the format, just the content.” But the claim quickly proves to be a lie in almost every case. Scores of HR executives and hiring managers sheepishly asked me for a formatted copy of my resume within days of me reading and dutifully complying with the “we don’t care” statement. Other recruiting software will seemingly accept a formatted resume but will then convert it into a garbled mess of unformatted text that the applicant must either clean up or replace with a text resume. Data storage is no longer expensive, parsing software is a commodity, and today’s businesses all have enterprise-grade, network-wide anti-virus software to filter all malicious content potentially embedded in files (not just resumes) coming from outside the company.

Requiring Reference Contact Data up Front. This is like wanting to meet someone’s grandparents before agreeing to a first date. References are for late in the recruiting process, not the beginning. I would never abuse my closest professional colleagues by disclosing their contact information so frivolously. Instead, I would wait until I was certain I wanted the position in question and my candidacy had reached the stage when a reference check would be appropriate. Recruiting software that still requires contact data up front dates back to a time when updating the application in stages was a difficult data processing feature, so this older software attempts to collect all the data it could possibly need in a single session.

Sending Inept Rejection Notifications. As candidacy progresses, the social courtesy required when one party elects to back out changes. When I joined my current company, I did not send a “no longer available” notice to every company that had received my resume. But I did send very polite, situation-relevant notes to everyone with whom I was still actively engaged. Some recruiting software still in use today sends automated notifications to late stage candidates that read like there had been no meaningful interaction. Other out-dated software still in use will send notices saying “we are unable to offer you a position at this time” once the position is filled or cancelled to absolutely everyone, including those who had merely sent a resume even several months earlier.

Are you involved in the recruiting and hiring process for your company? If you haven’t tested out what an applicant experiences with your recruiting software recently, it is probably worth investigating very soon. A person’s experience with your company’s recruiting system affects far more than merely the current recruiting process. Each person and his or her contacts are potential customers, business partners as well as future applicants.

Perhaps you have recently noticed other outdated features in recruiting software that reflect poorly on the company in question. If so, please share your findings with other readers by commenting below.

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