Yet Another Thing Your Applicant Tracking System Can't Do

Photo credit and license: Pierre-Olivier Carles; CC BY 2.0

Like it or not, e-mail marketing - also known as "bulk e-mailing", but more commonly referred to as "spam" - is a fact of life. Most of the time it's annoying, sometimes - creepy, occasionally - hilarious... The bulk-mailed message I received a few days ago from a major nationwide IT recruiting-and-staffing agency that shall remain unnamed falls under the category of... well... kind of thought-provoking. At least that's the effect it had on me. The minimally redacted (to protect the identity of the company and its client) text of the e-mail is below.

**Evening Shift Testing Opportunity! 5 positions!​!**

ATS-Friendly Resume Builder Project Dropped

I have just spent almost three months experimenting with various implementations of over a dozen most popular applicant tracking systems (commonly referred to as ATS's) trying to figure out what a job seeker can do in order to improve the accuracy of how his/her resume is parsed by and imported into an ATS.

Had the experiment been successful, I would be able to alleviate the two major problems pretty much any ATS out there seems to have:

• for employers -- reduce the likelihood of resumes of well-qualified applicants getting "blackholed" because of bad resume parsers (and most of them are pretty bad);
• for job seekers -- minimize the time wasted filling in countless text boxes with the information from their resumes over and over again.

Dun Mares and Black Stallions: Another Look at Applicant Tracking Systems

Allow me to start from afar. Take a look at the screenshot of a Google ad that kept popping up in my Gmail inbox. It appears that, having been sifting through thousands of my emails for eight or nine years now, the world's #1 search engine and online advertiser "thinks" I am a flirty plus-size female who likes knitwear, has anger issues, and may be a little slow in the head:

I guess I don't need to worry about my privacy.

On the other hand... a Taoist tale many of us are familiar with thanks to J. D. Salinger comes to mind (in case you don't remember, see below):

Duke Mu of Chin said to Po Lo: "You are now advanced in years. Is there any member of your family whom I could employ to look for horses in your stead?" Po Lo replied: "A good horse can be picked out by its general build and appearance. But the superlative horse - one that raises no dust and leaves no tracks - is something evanescent and fleeting, elusive as thin air. The talents of my sons lie on a lower plane altogether; they can tell a good horse when they see one, but they cannot tell a superlative horse. I have a friend, however, one Chiu-fang Kao, a hawker of fuel and vegetables, who in things appertaining to horses is nowise my inferior. Pray see him." Duke Mu did so, and subsequently dispatched him on the quest for a steed. Three months later, he returned with the news that he had found one. "It is now in Shach'iu" he added. "What kind of a horse is it?" asked the Duke. "Oh, it is a dun-colored mare," was the reply. However, someone being sent to fetch it, the animal turned out to be a coal-black stallion! Much displeased, the Duke sent for Po Lo. "That friend of yours," he said, "whom I commissioned to look for a horse, has made a fine mess of it. Why, he cannot even distinguish a beast's color or sex! What on earth can he know about horses?" Po Lo heaved a sigh of satisfaction. "Has he really got as far as that?" he cried. "Ah, then he is worth ten thousand of me put together. There is no comparison between us. What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. He sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not be looked at. So clever a judge of horses is Kao, that he has it in him to judge something better than horses." When the horse arrived, it turned out indeed to be a superlative animal.
-- J. D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

Joking aside, what I am trying to say - yet again - is that computers, although impressively fast, are still disappointingly dumb, and that they perform very poorly when it comes to processing human language, which is inherently ambiguous. To make things even harder for computers, humans often make it even more ambiguous.

In fact, in June 2011, having introduced Schema.org (initiated by Google), the world's four leading search engines pretty much admitted that they do not have production-ready technology capable of "understanding" what a web page really means and tried to off-load part of the job onto webmasters (humans) by encouraging them to add semantic markup to their web pages. I have written about it before, so I am not going to go into detail here again.

So much for the introduction.

When Marketing Budgets Hugely Exceed Those of QA: Thoughts Triggered by Yet Another Bug-Ridden Applicant Tracking System

If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products 

as they do on advertising, they wouldn't have to advertise them.

Will Rogers

Around 2008, I became interested in Applicant Tracking Systems or, rather, what I thought back then an ATS should do and how it should do it. I even toyed with the idea of developing my own, but the interest must have been not strong enough for this idea to go beyond a modest in-house working prototype used to train students. I am still interested in this type of software applications, which now manifests itself mostly in what I call a recurring irresistible itch to find bugs in them (Once a Software Tester, Always a Software Tester). So, here is one for your... amusement.



Let's say you are an employer using an ATS from a reputable SaaS (software as a service) provider.

A job seeker visits your web site, goes to its career section and from there is taken to your ATS.

Note: Technically, it isn't really your ATS since you just "rent" a "slice" on a multi-tenant ATS provided by a SaaS vendor. The applicant may or may not be aware of the fact that he/she is using third-party software, which depends, among other things, on how tightly the ATS is integrated into your web site and how familiar with this type of systems he/she is.

The candidate registers, begins the job application submission process and, a few minutes later, sees something like this:

Screenshot 1 (click to enlarge)

In case you didn't get it, let me show you another one. The screenshot below is from the site of another company, but the ATS SaaS provider and the bug are the same (pay attention to where the red arrows are pointing):

Screenshot 2 (click to enlarge)