Agreed! Every time I'm hiring, I insist that my job posting has a "email your CV directly to the hiring manager" link, and it astounds me how much push-back I get.

It boggles the mind that a company can devote half a dozen designers to optimizing the experience for potential customers, but for potential employees it's "Well, HR says you have to fill out this form, and I guess what they say goes."

Former recruiter here. It is hard to help a hiring manager who insists on getting emails directly to their inbox, as it cuts the recruiter out of ths loop. As soon as you aren't on top of your email, it breaks. Think sync vs async.

Sharing an email account ([email protected]) scales is nicely for a few jobs with light candidate flow. It can start to break down when trying to organize things in a meaningful way for all parties, but mildy disciplined use of a Gmail account is pretty solid when compared to much heavier solutions, like Taleo.

Due to the large number of administrative tasks (posting ads, scheduling interviews, etc.), the walled garden platforms that refuse to give you (and each other) decent API access, and the number of relationships to stay on top of, there's really no substitute for good someone who stays on top of it all.

As a hiring manager, if you insist on managing the process end to end, you're the recruiter, too :)

As someone who applied for a job that I didn't find out about until the last minute, when the application engine locked up and didn't submit my application I was quite pissed off. Unfortunately, it didn't notify me that it hadn't completed the application. A friend of mine was working at the company and asked me a couple of days later why I didn't apply, after he agreed to be a reference for me and really upsell me to the boss.

That would have been one hell of an addition to my resume, and it's far more likely that plain email would have worked. Of course, a recruiter wouldn't have got his cut...

An email can actually go directly to you AND the hiring manager. We have the technology.

In one email account, you can see replies. With two accounts, you get zero, one, or two replies, and no one knows who said what to who. And mailing lists get kind of spammy, but are certainly a manageable option.

I agree. Email is so much better.

You could always request applicants include a word in the subject to filter out spam and people that can't follow instructions.

I generally don't apply when I see a complex form. Instead I try emailing the company.

I don't bother (with filter questions). If weeding through some bad resumes is the price I pay to make sure the best candidates will apply, I'll pay that happily. Part of the job.

Related: It's amazing how many HR depts are not equipped to handle a submission of the form "My CV and projects are on janedoe.com/cv.html, let me know if you'd like to talk." In a sane world, that would be the default by now.

Holy tamole spot on re: "here's a link".

I get people calling me because they found my contact information on my website, then demanding that I send them a "Word copy of your resume". A) there's a PDF there already. B) There's more up to date information in the site itself and C) WTF - don't call me then demand I send you something in another format. You only want it in Word format so you can edit it up anyway. (mostly recruiters, I know, but still pisses me off).

They want the word version so they can strip your contact information and sell your resume.

I once interviewed myself for a position via a pretty large company's body shop subsidiary. Not really sure how they got my resume.

Did you get the job?

No, another candidate got it, he had a slightly better resume and went by the same name :P

I stopped providing Word CVs a few years ago, considering it a filter on reasonable recruiters. People seem to have accepted it. I almost never get asked for a Word version anymore. Though I do still get people who find me on LinkedIn (which has my complete CV) and then ask for a PDF, but I'm fine with that.

i think a lot of hr departments and upper management approach hiring with the mindset of "they want something from us, so they should do things our way"

Ha! HR Managers don't visit Hacker News. In fact, I don't think they visit any technology sites at all. They have got to be one of the most technologically inept cohort of workers out there. Just look at the tools they prefer: Taleo, Peoplesoft, etc.

Michael Scott was right; I'd shoot Toby twice, too.

Oh Taleo. It seems some companies make it suck less

I've given up applying to companies because of their process.

Some are privacy abusing from the get go. Or some ask you several different irrelevant questions. "No, I'm not a veteran" "No, I do not have protected status, yadda, yadda, yadda, etc, etc, etc". While laws may require you to ask some of those, there's no need to have one page for each question, or to ask them for candidates outside of the US

(A huge pet peeve of mine: US centric questionnaires)

You are peeved by US companies asking US-centric questions? It seems like a problem you give yourself

When applying for a job outside of the US

Ah, that wasn't clear to me. Thank you

Effing Taleo. I bail on any application using their horrible interface no matter how nice the job looks. Add Brassring to the hate too. On the plus side it's a clear signal that management of any company using them is tonedeaf on HR issues and probably other important areas too so just walk away and be glad you dodged that bullet.

If I didn't know better, I'd say some banks purposely make it impossible to apply through their websites. I challenge you all to try to a job at Goldman Sachs. You won't be able to get though it. Parts of the web app are simply broken.

It's part of the challenge of landing a job there. They are trying to figure how creative and motivated you are to apply there.

If WHO YOU KNOW counts as being creative, then yes, it is a creative challenge.

There's probably a Metasploit module specifically designed to exploit on to the website and return a job application.

When I was interviewing I just wouldn't even bother applying if the company had iCIMS or Taleo - I figured it was a bad sign of how poorly they were run internally.

Yeah, but if you really wanted to work for us you should be happy spending a few hours filling in these ridiculous buggy online forms.

Also timely responses would help companies hire so much. I've had a company get back to me two weeks after an interview and be completely baffled that I'd taken another offer in the meantime. It was like a foreign concept to them.

Taleo is truly horrible, prob the worst I've seen. When I'm considering a job opening and discover I have to jump through Taleo I cringe and come close to treating it as a red flag.

Fitbit switched to Greenhouse recently and it's working well.

I agree wholeheartedly, but does anyone have any advice or stories of how they've made this happen? Are there other vendors or solutions out there that focus on ease of switching over to their systems?

The other vendor is plain old email. Works great!

Heh I understand your pain. One product we sell is a quick apply that can work on top of Taleo and other ATSs http://www.rolepoint.com/apply.html

We've also built and API middleware to abstract Taleo complexity in a simple and elegant REST API http://rolepoint.io/