Jobs at McDonalds: The McUgly Career site

It was with much anticipation that I awaited delivery of the new McDonalds career site.  I did see it last week and was sorely disappointed but at least I'm not the only one who isn't impressed!  And the more you go through the site the blacker it gets!

Let's not blame the ATS vendor
I have to admit to having some sympathy with the ATS vendor Peopleclick as their other UK customers The Body Shop, Vodafone and T-mobile all have much better sites and make better use of the ATS experience.  However, McD's have not given it much credibility by even having a statement as follows:

Standards Compliance
This site is WCAG AA approved (with the exception of the application pages), complying to priority 2 of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. (oh no it doesn't)

(There is NO option to apply any other way should you not be able to use the application pages!)

And at the bottom of the accessibility statement we also have following:

Images and Flash
All images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. (if only they did)

So poor old ATS vendor gets kicked whilst the rest of the site makes statements that are basically not true!

SEO
Looks like this was overlooked entirely; I'm sure there's a good reason for this.

ACCESSIBILITY
I'm not going to go into too much detail but when a site makes claims for adhering to certain standards then fails the basic automated assessments it makes it all a bit of a mockery in my view.  If you are going to make efforts to make your site accessible then more effort should be made to follow best practice.

USER EXPERIENCE
As the site is in effect 2 sites (Careers and ATS) the accessibility functionality is different.  For example, if you switch to white background it reverts back to black when you start the application process. Yes, you can switch it again but not ideal.

OVERALL
The main UK site for McDonalds has a black background so clearly the career site is 'staying on brand' but the way your are able to 'navigate' on the flash splash page is not obvious at all.  Also, the way they have 'integrated' the information pages and the ATS pages is very clunky and quite difficult to read.

Personally, I am very surprised that this has been the best that could be done and is a real disappointment considering how much really good work has been done around McJob.  Not one I'd be proud of if I were working for the ad agency or ATS vendor!