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Ask HN: Thoughts on Applicant Tracking Systems?

14 points by v1l ↗ HN
Nearly everyone hates their applicant tracking system. ATSes have become these clunky, workflow pieces of software, mostly because they cater to recruiting teams and the compliance/workflow needs of enterprises (every ATS wants/has moved upmarket). It's quite shocking how little true innovation there has been in how companies hire.

The problems are too many to count, but here are two that I find particularly self-defeating when hiring: i) job descriptions that are a copy/paste (and fail to engage any reasonably talented person who knows their worth) and ii) how companies review and respond to applicants. A good ATS should help bring an order of magnitude improvement to this.

Hiring managers today rarely spend the time doing the work of hiring and have outsourced much of it to the recruiter, including something as important as screening/filtering applicants. In-house talent folk/recruiters will put up with these systems because they have to. Early stage and mid-sized companies often don't need much of this complexity.

Hiring therefore has become a painful exercise for all involved, not in the least the candidate. How often have you not heard back on your application? How often has someone dropped the ball on you? How often do you feel you just applied to a black hole?

I'd love to hear your thoughts - especially if you're a hiring manager or in the in-house talent function at a 500-or-fewer person company. What do you suffer from in your current hiring process/ATS? What do you hate (enough to truly desire an alternative)?

11 comments

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codegeek
I care about this topic a lot. I think clunky ATSs are just the symptoms of the disease. The recruiting model as we know is mostly broken. Incentives are misaligned. Large companies have lot of red tape. No clear communication between the hirer and the hiree. Recruiters can be useful but they mostly aren't (the good ones are really useful btw).

So instead of building a nice/shiny ATS replacement, I would think about how to come up with a process change in this industry perhaps one bite at a time.

rileyt
Has this been solved better by any other industry? Tech seems particularly bad...
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
muzani
I honestly don't see much issue with them. I like companies where everyone isn't just a cog in the system. If the system filters me out when I'm qualified, then there's a culture fit problem.

There's a reason startups are able to compete against companies like Google, and it's because they pay a lot more attention to their recruiting pipeline as well as their product.

jlizzle30
I'm in the middle of building an AST with a technical recruiter (I'm an eng) and would appreciate folks feedback/advice.

- We are modeling the AST after software project management products (eg. Asana, JIRA) where 'tasks' are instead 'candidates'. Specifically, kanban style boards, assigning candidates to recruiters, keeping notes & documents in candidate profiles, asynchronous collaboration, etc.

- Looking to launch as a freemium product for small recruitment team (down market). Very easy to get started and only pay when you have X number of recruiters in your organization. Model is Asana or Slack.

- Import LinkedIn recruiter projects

Again, would love feedback/advice so please reach out.

rileyt
This sounds awesome!

Starting with smaller companies for free is a great idea. It instantly differentiates you from everything that exists today.

I'm working on a resume builder[1] and have spent a fair amount of time talking with hiring managers and recruiters. I can confirm that the vast majority of them are unhappy with their ATS — even recruiters.

How do you plan to accept applications? Many of our customers have asked us to build something that prefills the application pages with data from their resume, because they find the applications repetitive and annoying. I realize the applicants aren't you customer, but I'm curious of you have thought about it.

Also, do you plan to support automatic parsing of pdf/docx resumes?

[1] https://standardresume.co/

burntoutfire
> in-house talent function

Off-topic, but I hate these little pieces of newspeak that has managed to apparently insert themselves everywhere, such as calling personel "talent".

v1l
It is what it is...
catsarebetter
I think that the problem is that everyone sees the hiring market as a zero sum game where there can only be 1 winner. So everyone wants to make scalable, efficient, and generalized solutions for the whole market. I don't think that's the case. Junior engineers and Senior engineers have vastly different problems and preferences to their job search, 10x engineers don't even job search lol, and startups, depending on so many different factors and reasons, want different types of engineers. What exactly makes people think this is a "one fit all" solution? The job market is incredibly fragmented and has way too many edge cases for a single ATS or service. I think that everyone looks at the swe job market as a multi-billion dollar market and in reality it's more like a series of fragmented million dollar markets.
v1l
I couldn't agree with you more, which is why tools/solutions that try to cater to all and sundry actually end up losing ground over time.

I believe there's room for an ATS that serves a certain niche of the market and nails it.

catsarebetter
Then I guess go after remote workers, they're gonna grow like crazy