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.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Oops. Taleo was suddenly more useful than normal, at least in the wrong way

A fellow job searcher wrote in to say....

"I've been unemployed since Oct 2008 so I've had to use Taleo to submit my resume for many different positions. So this morning I start my job search from my daily Indeed.com email alerts. I see a position I may qualify for so I click on the link and start the process of submitting my application through Taleo, but it won't let me. What's up with that? My first thought is the company must have pulled the position, lots of that going nowadays fer sure, so I'll search for other openings within that particular company.

I start searching for the openings and realize I've found a bit of a bug in the Taleo system.............

What's the bug you ask?

I'm logged in under someone else's profile!!!

Damned right skippy, I'm looking at Mr. so & so personal profile, resume and have the ability to retract submissions for the position!!!

Now this is a bit peculiar. I wonder how many people have viewed my personal and private information? Since we're obviously competing for the same positions have they retracted my resume submissions in a hope of narrowing the candidate pool?

Wanna see screen shots?"

Why I love screenshots! I like to mangle them and insert them awkwardly into the blog here.



Eh, it's not very interesting really. The screenshots aren't easy to share because they contain personal information about the guy whose profile showed up randomly when the job-seeker clicked on the job.

He adds that...

"Kadim;

I called Taleo, was put on hold and transferred around a couple of times with the front line drones who didn't care about my concerns. The last person I spoke with basically blamed me for the issue, said it must have been something wrong with my computer."

Well that was less than helpful considering the fact that this is a security issue regarding the Taleo software. Being able to log in to a random profile on accident is, umm, a no-no.

Having said that, if someone with Taleo contact me, I'll forward the images on so that you could take care of this issue properly. I'll even update the page to show you care. :-)

UPDATE--they cared. An email was received and the information forwarded on. Thank you.