(2024-10-24) Procopio Applicant Tracking Systems Are Crushing Jobseekers' Dreams

Joe Procopio: Applicant Tracking Systems Are Crushing Job-Seekers’ Dreams. AI Automated Candidate Screening Is Turning Job Searches Into Dead Ends

I want to tell you one more quick, maybe-true story, about how half of an entire HR department got fired last month for using automated candidate screening, poorly.

You need to know that I am not an HR person and that I have very few HR skills. So I’m not going to solve all the HR problems in 1000 words

I’m going to connect the dots on how the rise and reliance on automated candidate screening — part and parcel of applicant tracking systems — is betraying both the talent getting screwed over by it and the company using it.

The Chili’s guy worked because it forced me — company leadership — to be not lazy.

Having to basically invent the skill set of the person I needed based only on the results I desired, made me realize how little work goes into actually defining the qualifications for the role itself. (job description)

We basically take it off the company HR shelf or copy one from the internet, right?

This, not a perennially overworked HR department, is where the problem begins.

More specifically, the problem begins when company leadership decides they need a skill they know very little about.

With time of the essence and no real overarching philosophy in place, everything except the actual necessary qualifications goes into a two-page job description that reads like a vague self-help manual written by a cult leader.

But wait. There’s no AI in it. At all.
What do we do?
Got it! We’ll stuff the rest of the job description with AI buzzwords. Doesn’t matter how. Just have someone in HR do it.

Then they program the ACS on the ATS and hit the “OK Find Me A Unicorn” (OKFMAU) button

You don’t have to be a data scientist to see how quickly this metastasizes into a full blown carnival of hoop-jumping recruiting processes, painfully mismatched hires, sound and fury signifying nothing, reductions in bloated workforces, and ends up with truly talented people on the sidelines not getting a sniff from companies that have thorny and growing problems getting anything done.

The Chili’s kid was proficient enough with data and passionate enough about sports to learn whatever he didn’t know provided I could get him across the finish line. And it’s not that no one has time to coach anymore so much as it is no one knows what they need out of the player in the first place.

Someone in HR will figure it out. And the ATS will find it. With keywords.