How Taleo, and other job application/listing sites, suck. A place of retreat for the job hunter. Got a tip? Send it to taleosucks@gmail.com.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Nice registration page and upload limits

Today I applied for a job with an employer who uses Kenexa/Webhire.

When I got the main application screen, I was greeted with this:



Hallelujah! Amazing! Beautiful! I could set up a profile or not setup a profile!

Even more impressive, it asked me just those questions shown on the screen. I could then copy and paste in my cover letter, copy and paste (or upload) my resume and I was done. It took me a couple of minutes to do something that a similar Taleo system would have taken me ten.

This system allowed me to apply for all jobs in my "cart" simultaneously with the same information. I'm not sure if that's entirely appropriate, because different jobs demand different cover pages and perhaps even resumes. But if you're using the same information for all of the jobs, it's pretty cool.

This is also a system that does resume translation--it takes only certain resume types in upload and then tries to render that for itself.

My resume is formatted quite differently and always fails this--I really prefer uploading it via .pdf because even Word seems to choke on it from time to time. That's my problem but at this point I'm tired of sending out boring resumes. (Actually, this system didn't do a half-way bad job of rendering it.)

It really would be better off leaving it in whatever file form it comes in, and just letting the person on the other end open it up in the appropriate program (like Acrobat or Word.)

It did have a 500kb upload limit. My first comment on here complained about Taleo's unjustifiable 100kb upload limit. I agree, it is a bit on the small side.

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Registration pages suck

This blog went through the reasons why registration pages suck, and what a good registration page looks like. It's tangentially related--sometimes all you want to do when applying for a job is send in a resume and be done with it.