Leader machines

On 1st October Fortune magazine featured an article called 'Leader Machines'. 

'Your competition can copy every advantage you've got - except one.'

Yet again the mantra of 'People are our greatest asset' was being used but with good reason on this occasion.  And the article led into 'The Top Companies for Leaders'.  So I decided to see how great these great companies were at recruiting online!

So who were the companies:

• General Electric.
• Procter & Gamble.
• Nokia.
• Hindustan Unilever.
• Capital One Financial.
• General Mills.
• McKinsey.
• IBM.
• BBVA.
• Infosys Technologies.

I was of course expecting a great experience from all of them, being leaders in attracting and developing leaders.

GE, P&G, Capital and General Mills all had good sites; McKinsey however had a stunning site with great use of web 2.0 ideas.  Infosys had the worst site with jobs from 12 months ago that were closed anyway!  IBM and Nokia were somewhat basic and clunky considering their technological focus.  BBVA was in Spanish so I had no idea.

So, content and presentation excellent to poor.  But when you actually start the job search well, what a disappointment that was.  Brassring, Taleo and Peoplesoft were the primary culprits with Peoplesoft being so bad it virtually didn't work - although this is so far from core you get altitude sickness so they won't care.  But Brassring and Taleo.

It felt like in some cases going into the most expensive hotel in the world, having a porter for every bag, a butler for every room, your own chef and a private swimming pool.  And then going to a dingy little basement to checkout and have to pay by cash rather than use your own personal diamond card.

I am amazed at how little effort the ATS vendors seem to put into the front end of their product.  Surely, customer success based on the quality and volume of hires is their success.  So why oh why are the search and apply processes so bad?