Some of our clients are complaining that it takes their candidates too long to apply using the forms required by the ATS so they end up losing their best candidates as those candidates won't put up with having to jump through meaningless hoops when an opportunity that is every bit as good exists with a more candidate friendly employer across the street.

Some of our clients are complaining that their ATS is so rigid that all applications must be forwarded by a human being to the appropriate recruiter and that can lead to delays of days. One federal government agency that I talked with told me that they wished that their delay was measured in days. They don't get their "fresh" leads for several weeks!

Some of our clients are complaining that their ATS fails to track the source of their leads or tracks it in such a way that the information isn't just useless, it is actually misleading. The most common example are the "where did you hear about us" drop down boxes, which fail to take into account that many and perhaps most candidates hear about an opportunity from multiple sources yet provide the candidate with no guidance as to which one of those sources they should select. The ATS also fail to take into account the fact that candidates only have an incentive to answer the question and have no incentive to answer the question correctly.

One HR manager told me that one of the first things that he did upon being hired into that role was to ask his recruiters for a report that would show their source of hires. Seems simple enough, right? They pulled a report from their ATS that showed that Monster was their number one source of hires. Seems reasonable enough, right? My contact then asked his recruiters to calculate the return on investment (ROI) for their hires. After he explained to them what that meant and how to calculate it, they came back to him and said that they couldn't do it for Monster. Their calculations were literally showing that they had an infinite return on investment from Monster. How could that be? Because they had never used Monster yet their ATS was showing it as their top source of hires. And how could that be? Because the ATS had a drop down that asked candidates to self-select where they heard about the opportunity and Monster was listed in that drop down. The candidates, who could have cared less about remembering where they actually heard about the opportunity, picked the source that they most recognized. Compounding this problem are employers who insist on including their own web site as a source (it is a destination, not a source) in the drop downs and the impossibility of asking candidates to accurately self-select when they respond to a job posting that runs across a network of hundreds or even thousands of job boards, as do all jobs which are posted to CollegeRecruiter.com. If the candidate finds the job on another site in our network, they have no way of knowing that it was posted to CollegeRecruiter.com nor should they care, yet some ATS ignore that reality by just listing CollegeRecruiter.com or whatever site to which the employer is posting its jobs (or, the case of Monster, sites to which the employer is not even posting its jobs).

Okay, enough of the complaints. What do we do about this mess? Rather than trying to re-invent the wheel, let's look at what those who market products and services on-line do in order to automatically track the source of their leads (equivalent to resumes) and sales (equivalent to hires). After all, you don't see Amazon, Dell, or even CollegeRecruiter.com asking its clients who purchase on-line to identify the name of the site who referred them so that we can properly track the effectiveness of our advertising, do you? One great solution is to borrow the lessons learned and perhaps even the technology created for affiliate programs.

One of the ways that CollegeRecruiter.com markets itself is through an affiliate program. We pay thousands of web sites for each candidate that they refer who registers with us. The affiliate solution provider (software company) we use is Commission Junction (CJ). They provide similiar services to many of the leading job boards, including Monster, Careerbuilder, HotJobs, Beyond, and more. CJ and its competitors provide the web site owner with a small bit of tracking code that the web site owner adds to the "thank you for buying" confirmation page. For employers, that would be the "thank you for submitting your resume" page. CJ and its competitors also provide unique web page addresses (URLs) to each site that runs our ads. When the tracking code on our site is combined with the unique URLs on the sites that direct their visitors to us, we are able to automatically track which of our registered users came from which of our affiliates and the entire process is fully automated. We can choose whether to allow any site to run the ads or just sites that we want to work with. We can choose for how many days to track the referrals. In this way, we can properly credit our affiliate for the lead they helped us to generate even if a candidate clicks from one of our affiliate sites on day one but doesn't register at CollegeRecruiter.com for another 45 days. So long after the candidate has any hope of remembering how she heard about us, we are able to accurately and automatically track the source of that lead. The trackable ads can even be run in traditional print media such as newspapers. Paying our affiliates is a snap. We pay money to CJ to cover the money that they pay on our behalf to our advertisers plus the 30 percent commission that CJ receives for providing the software, payment processing, fraud prevention, customer service, etc. Because we're in total control over what leads (resumes) we pay for and from who we buy them, we are guaranteed a positive ROI (there's that acronym again) on each and every registration.

So I ask you: do you still want to kill your ATS or do you want to put pressure on your ATS vendor to fix their software so that it incorporates the fully automated tracking features successfully used for a decade by Commission Junction and other affiliate program solution providers? I thought so.