Ask HN: Why do companies use terrible job application portals like Workday?
They are so bad, forcing you to create an account for every company and making you fill endless boxes to duplicate info on your resume. They probably lose 10-20% of good candidates through this funnel because it is so tedious to use. How did it become the standard ATS? Why aren't alternatives like Greenhouse or Lever more popular outside of startups?
5 comments
Almost nothing in your IDE is "best in class": there are easier terminals, quicker searches, smarter diff tools, quicker editors, faster test runners, etc. What makes your IDE good is that all these mediocre parts are integrated, understand each other, can be used without learning yet another tool, and there's a big community sharing know-how about taming the Frankenstein's monster you chose. Still, many parts are clunky and will frustrate people who use it once every few years.
An ERP like Workday is the IDE for an enterprise (and a safe default like VSCode & co). Any single component is always worse than an entire startup laser-focused on that problem/process (e.g., ATS), but for most business processes, "satisfying" is much better than "optimizing". When a business grows, the range of problems they need to address increases rapidly, like the surface area of a balloon being inflated. "Good enough" is good enough until it becomes so painful as to become a top problem for the CEO or the HR Head, and "which ATS we use" never crosses that threshold. Yes, getting new talent is important, but ATS friction is not a big contributor - Google/Netflix could use anything, and their pipeline would not change in either direction, so the main levers are elsewhere.
An ERP like Workday is the IDE for an enterprise (and a safe default like VSCode & co). Any single component is always worse than an entire startup laser-focused on that problem/process (e.g., ATS), but for most business processes, "satisfying" is much better than "optimizing". When a business grows, the range of problems they need to address increases rapidly, like the surface area of a balloon being inflated. "Good enough" is good enough until it becomes so painful as to become a top problem for the CEO or the HR Head, and "which ATS we use" never crosses that threshold. Yes, getting new talent is important, but ATS friction is not a big contributor - Google/Netflix could use anything, and their pipeline would not change in either direction, so the main levers are elsewhere.
The real problem with technical recruiting that creates a bunch of nasty feedback loops in the system is recruiters and HR not understanding the technologies they work with and not having the engineering sense to talk with candidates for 5-10 minutes about their projects and see if they're full of shit or not. The only thing 98% of them can figure out how to ask is "How many years of experience do you have with ____ technology?"
Workday is cheaper, right? I think that's the ultimate answer.
Money, compliance, vendor lock-in, and/or obliviousness by the decision makers.
I also wonder if "losing 20% of good candidates" isn't balanced out by "only receive applications by people that would actually be interested in working here"
I have never worked on this side of hiring but I would imagine if a site was so frictionless it let android engineers (for instance) do one-click apply to every company hiring android engineers that the hiring managers would have too many resumes to sort through of people who would never actually accept.
I have never worked on this side of hiring but I would imagine if a site was so frictionless it let android engineers (for instance) do one-click apply to every company hiring android engineers that the hiring managers would have too many resumes to sort through of people who would never actually accept.
People willing to deal with tedium is probably a positive sign for a workplace with a lot of tedious stuff.
Prob a few reasons
1. Cuts down on low-effort applications
2. Gives full functionality for a large company
Same reasons Google and other have their own torturous processes
First you have to find out who is really desperate to work for a company
And a lot of big companies are GREAT places to work for certain types of people
Most people, prob
And you might not even have to do an application unless and until you go to convert to full time
So you have to fill out the app, but you're already hired so it's worth it
1. Cuts down on low-effort applications
2. Gives full functionality for a large company
Same reasons Google and other have their own torturous processes
First you have to find out who is really desperate to work for a company
And a lot of big companies are GREAT places to work for certain types of people
Most people, prob
And you might not even have to do an application unless and until you go to convert to full time
So you have to fill out the app, but you're already hired so it's worth it