Taleo's particular talent is in interfering with applications to other companies that use Taleo. Suppose you use Taleo to submit to Oracle. Great! But when you use Taleo to submit to Cisco, you need to use a different address because email addresses for oracle.taleo.net and cisco.taleo.net are in the same namespace. There are a couple of online systems that make me reconsider applying, and Taleo definitely leads the pack.

Wait...you can only apply to one of their customers?

As near as I can tell, you can apply to only one with the same email address. The best dodge is to use use a gmail.com address with a plus-address. If your usual gmail account is [email protected], you can try [email protected] and [email protected] and both of these will land in your [email protected] account, but I think there is still a problem when you reply to taleo.

You do need to reapply from a blank slate to each customer. Once I'm redirected to a Taleo site for applying, I immediately exit the job application and look elsewhere.

I've always wondered something: Does Taleo compare your resume across ALL of its sites? Like if you submit a resume for Company A, but you also sent one for Company B, and both use Taleo, does the software say "This applicant applied elsewhere and here's what they said that was different" ? I've never received a response from a Taleo system.

I have similar experience with Greenhouse's system.

I've used Greenhouse on the hiring end, and there's no 'extra' info about candidates. We only see what they submitted in their application.