Web 2.0 to the Rescue

Here at Electronic Arts we run a standard ATS. It’s where we manage our job postings, candidate records, etc. Since I run the department that runs the ATS, you would think that it would be easy for me to make changes to the system, get information, run reports. But you would be wrong:

• I can’t get a decent XML feed out of our ATS. So I use SimplyHired instead.

• I can’t get decent analytics about who visits our site, so I use Google Analytics instead.

• I can’t get good reports on who referred who, so I use Jobster.

I get better traffic reports out of my Adwords account than I do out of my ATS. I get better referral reports out of Jobster than I do out of my ATS. It took me about an hour to get an XML feed of jobs from Jobster to my blog. About 15 minutes to get an aggregation of jobs we (unfortunately) post on job boards to feed my blog. And Google Analytics? 10 minutes tops (plus some time to embed the script into our jobs pages). Each of those projects would have taken a minimum of 2 weeks and cost thousands of dollars if I had to depend on my ATS to generate the data / reports.

Anybody with even a passing interest in the future of HR technology should find it compelling that Google, SimplyHired and Jobster can solve my problems faster, better and cheaper than my ATS and its support / maintenance ecosystem.