The solution problem
No problem, pt 10
A little while ago, yesterday to be precise, there was an outraged post on LinkedIn.
Nothing too surprising there, on the land of outrage, although this one did so in a pointed and hilarious way.
Ripping apart a job advert from a well-known charity, while showing a number of hypocrisies in its content.
Needless to say, it has zinged with a lot of engagement, likes and that.
But the post itself was factually incorrect.
I won’t give any detail on the post or the author, as it’s more what this highlights that’s of interest to me.
Indeed they responded politely to my comments explaining what I thought had happened with the advert, and have edited their post accordingly.
Nor am I particularly interested in why the post blew up so virally.
It’s more how shared experiences show how solutions can go badly wrong, how it may affect an employer brand, and what this says about candidate experience.
The complaint was three-fold;
1/ that salary wasn’t listed, in an advert talking about the importance of equity,
2/ that the links to further information, such as ‘what’s in it for you’ didn’t work,
3/ that it was closed three days from posting.
I did a small amount of research and found the original advert on their website, which
1/ showed the salary,
2/ had working links,
3/ was live.
There was also additional information with an overly exacting application process through their recruitment partner, which was missing from the LinkedIn advert.
They obviously don’t value including candidates who prefer not to write two double-sided documents to sell their specific suitability, and would much rather not have to do the work themselves.
Okay, so much so boring, so why am I writing about it?
While I too have made some assumptions about what happened, I do so with a little more technical insight into the recruitment process than the author, who is a proxy for the average candidate.
It appears to be a parsing error through their ATS, which lost key information.
Information which by not being there, pushed readers away, and created outrage.
Quite the issue for what amounts to an admin error.
But this error is widespread in recruitment, not just through ATS uploads (which is just as problematic when parsing CVs), but also through job board aggregators and scraping.
Scraping, if you aren’t aware, is when one website automatically takes content from one website and reshares it on theirs, or even a third.
In recruitment, this creates what appears to be new content, full of parsing errors.
My favourite catastrophic parsing error was the advert by a four-lettered Swedish furniture brand which listed a vacancy at their distribution centre in Bury St Edmunds.
I was so excited we had a distribution centre locally that I nearly spat my coffee out.
Sadly it was an incorrectly populated field on Monster, as they don’t have one locally.
After I’d inhaled my coffee again, I emailed their TA Manager who had no idea this had happened, even if it probably was one reason they had poor applications.
My favourite scraping disaster was one from a business that has a notable voice - a gambling brand.
A recruiter had outragedly slagged off one of their adverts on LinkedIn, which may come as no surprise. The advert was for a Head of Talent Acquisition, which appeared to be a contract.
With delighted mirth a bunch of other copywriting recruitment experts, stuck their oars in, pointing out the poor readability, duplications, and boring content.
One excellent observation was that the advert missed out on the voice of the brand - a missed opportunity.
Curious as ever, I had a look at the advert and saw that was from a job board aggregator, jobsrapido or something similar.
I looked at the original advert that had been scraped, and it was from another aggregator, spamajob or something similar.
Interestingly the formatting and readability were better and this time it was a permanent job with a salary.
I then looked at the original-original advert on the brand website, and again the advert was better, but this time the content was vastly improved.
And so, what had caused mirthful outrage, was much the same as with the Oxfam advert -
wonky automation.
In other words, something sold as a solution to job boards and in another guise to employers, creates such a problem as to affect brand awareness.
And as we all know one complaint is worth nine compliments in the world of brand (I may have parsed that memory incorrectly).
In all cases it seems that the employer wasn’t aware of how their system worked against them, irrespective of their intent. I’ve no doubt they think they offer a wonderful candidate experience too.
My favourite experience of being aggregated was when I googled my company name (Bircham Wyatt Recruitment) in a fit of corporate narcissism and found the 3rd ranked result was from another recruitment agency.
I clicked on their website and found that all my adverts were listed under their banner, making it appear they owned me.
In this case, it was an affiliate arrangement through a job board I subscribed to, which appeared to widen the exposure of my adverts.
Except if you go through the agency website, you have to register your details with THEM to apply.
I used my incredible clout to DM Mitch Sullivan, who wrote a post about it, creating outrage in the world of LinkedIn readers.
A day or so later I had an apology from the job board and the affiliate arrangement was no more. Thank you, Mitch.
As a micro business owner, the potential cost of this weird bit of scraping was negligible; however, I imagine the impact could be pretty bad for a bigger agency.
At a time when we are increasingly reliant on automated parsing in the guise of large language models pretending to be AI, one thing we mustn’t forget is the experience of our end users.
Who might be a candidate, or even me.
Unlike me, however, a candidate will just walk with their feet and you might never know. And if you do know it might be in the form of a mildly written LinkedIn post.
If you have invested in good automation it’s probably a good idea to see how your candidates will experience it.
What happens if you think you offer a good experience when your candidates experience the opposite?
Quite the problem, I expect.
Regards,
Greg
p.s. I can vet your candidate experience for you if you like. It seems I pick up on problems employers and recruiters miss. It’ll cost you, but your return will be more than your investment.
p.p.s. When I google my name, I’m ranked behind an American Sculptor. I’ll take that.
Oops, I named the charity. Oh, well.