ATS systems are PRIVATE databases — they are NOT job boards like Monster or Dice. They are designed to collect very specific information that the company requires — they are NOT designed so that candidates can have the same application experience across many different companies – – quite the contrary.

With any real company valuing talent you will have to enter your information from scratch and answer custom questions that allow the company to evaluate you in detail according to their UNIQUE and PRIVATE requirements. If you aren’t willing to deal with this then you aren’t serious enough about the companies you are applying to.

Get real dude

The situation is similar with large enterprise customers. Although they sign long term contracts there are plenty of exit clauses and according to recent filings Taleo have a better than 90% contract renewal rate across all their platforms…

Where is the dissatisfaction?

If you think you can top Taleo then, dude, create your app and market it!

Regarding payment, that is such a loaded statement.

after all they are making over 100 million per year and companies wouldn’t be spending that much money on their product if they weren’t consistently happy with the results

There are plenty of people who have purchased software in the Enterprise who hate it, but they have no choice. For whatever reason, there is no refund policy, and they are forced to use the software. I’ve seen plenty of cases where there is so much red tape that those who are forced to use it can yell all they want to management, but nothing changes because ‘the decision was already made’, even if the decision was the wrong one. The Enterprise dollar doesn’t work like the consumer dollar since purchasing decisions are not always made by those in the know.

Take the medical industry. When I was working on software for them, we tailored our software to be appealing to the CTO’s and Hospital Managers for HIMM’s. When you charge $20,000k more than your competitors for basically the same software, you need to justify that price beyond the selling on quality angle… at least to get the sale anyway. One way we did that was make it more visually appealing. They were the ones who wrote the million dollar checks to purchase the software, so we catered to that. It was a flawed model, though, because the nurses were the ones actually USING the product. In effect, their purchasing decisions were made for the wrong reasons. I fully believe that’s not an isolated case, either.

I totally agree with your last statement; if a candidate is not willing to take the time, and answer some questions electronically, then that shows they might not be willing to do a lot of other things when the job ‘doesn’t go their way’. I wouldn’t want people like that working for me either.

…however, I’m a software developer. If I’m applying for a job to develop software, and the company in question has a horrible web application resume submission process, then yes, maybe it is best I not work for them if that’s what they consider acceptable user experience. Of course, being benevolent, I’d like the opportunity to make that my first priority to fix while on the job.