The consensus at the IAEWS conference was that the job boards could and should come up with one standard tracking system. Those job boards that want their clients to know how many leads and which leads are coming from their job board would likely sign on and modify their systems. The technology is pretty straightforward and cheap. If most of the major job boards sign onto the system, then the ATS vendors will be far more likely to adopt that system and for the first time our clients will actually be able to understand where their candidates are coming from.

Within weeks of the IAEWS agreeing to move forward with creating the standard, two of the largest ATS vendors were acquired. First, Brassring was purchased by Kenexa and yesterday Automatic Data Processing Inc. (ADP) purchased VirtualEdge. As stated by Jason Goldberg of Jobster, suddenly there are only a handful of ATS systems that matter. If the IAEWS can come up with a standard and if those handful of ATS vendors adopt it, then there will be considerable pressure on all of the job boards and ATS vendors to follow suit. Those which don't will not be serving the best interests of their clients and will likely see their business wither and eventually perish.

As one of the owners of CollegeRecruiter.com, this issue is near and dear to my heart. Few client conversations are more frustrating than those in which the client tells you that they believe that you provided fair value but that they are unable to expand the relationship because they can't provide solid evidence to their upper management so they're going to continue to send business to higher profile job boards or other media simply because upper management is more familiar with the brand names of those other boards or media. Of course, upper management can't track the effectiveness of those sources either but that's neither here nor there.

I vividly remember a client conversation from a few years ago that is directly on point. I received a call from a human resources manager who had just started with his company a couple of weeks before and was interested in using CollegeRecruiter.com to help him hire college students for internships and recent graduates entry level jobs. Before calling us, he had asked his recruiters to identify their sources of hires so that he could focus his efforts on the media that had produced the best results. The source that generated by far the largest number of leads was Monster.com. The human resource manager thought that made sense so he then asked his people to pull the contracts for each of the top sources so that they could calculate their return on investment or cost per hire. They found that they were not using Monster and had never used Monster, yet their applicant tracking system was identifying Monster as the largest source of their hires because the ATS was asking candidates to self-identify where they had heard about the opportunity to which they were applying. Fortunately, the human resource manager understood the difference between evidence (what the ATS was reporting) and truth (no leads from Monster because they had never used Monster).

There will be some winners and losers as the ATS systems implement real tracking systems and I believe that is good. I am sure that we provide extraordinary value to some of our clients and not as good a value to others. We will likely pick up some business and perhaps lose some as a result of the better tracking. But whether we end up better off overall isn't the point. The point is that our clients need and deserve to know where their leads are coming from and how much those leads are costing them. If they don't, we will continue to have an uneducated client base and as an owner of this business, I strongly prefer to work with clients who understand what they're buying and why they're buying it. They end up happier and then so do we.