Upon applying to many jobs over the last few years, I have noticed something: Corporate America and the bureaucratic nightmare that is the U.S. Government have seemingly become one-in-the-same with the amount of paperwork they obligate the masses to fill out. I recently sent my resume, along with a customized and carefully-tailored cover letter to express my interest in a position that I wanted.
"We're good, right? You'll thoroughly review my credentials and be in contact, correct?? No??? You need me to fill out more paperwork?!?"
Many companies have degenerated their application process into a redundant migraine for the job-seeker by using a "human resources," or "talent management" software from a Gestapo-esque company from California called "Taleo." This dehumanizing piece of garbage requires the prospective employee to fill out fields which include personal data such as: applicant's name, address, e-mail address, phone number, home town/county/state/country or territory--one such asinine option, according to the Official Taleo Sucks Blog, is the Heard/McDonald Islands (an uninhabited group of barren, volcanic islands located in the southern Indian Ocean, just a mere thousand-mile stone's throw north of Antarctica), educational background (including high school or university attended, year graduated, GPA, Major/Minor, clubs, etc.), employment history (incl. last five jobs held, dates employed--often down to the exact day!--duties carried out, and so-on-and-so-forth), just to name a few.
"But didn't you receive all that information already? What's with the need to repeat the information I previously divulged to you after uploading my resume??"
As I said, many of these companies, especially larger corporations are using this time-wasting travesty as a way of "screening" candidates (while the esteemed members of their HR departments are too busy Tweeting, Facebooking, G-chatting or YouTubing to be bothered to review job apps--this, of course, after spending valuable company time talking to plants or perusing screens of a different kind: Fantasy Football or pornography at the office).
Also, in addition to your resume, cover letter, AND Taleo process, if you luck out somehow and land an interview, some companies have a little gift waiting for you--a small token of their appreciation in their lobby before the interview: MORE PAPERWORK! Name, address, phone number, date of birth, SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, last three jobs/supervisors/dates employed/duties held/reasons for leaving/references, etc. Okay, they haven't even hired me yet and they're asking me for my SSN on a hard-copy piece of paper?? They now have your life and personal data by the cajones; and who knows, a disgruntled worker who could be fired in two weeks can steal that information from their former company on their way out and start an identity-theft ring, involving your name with every swipe of the credit card!
And the last thing you can do is point out that you've already submitted this information multiple times at this point--you don't want their first impression of you to be that of a complainer. So, in total, you could submit your personal data and intricate details of your employment history a total of FIVE TIMES between the resume, cover letter, Taleo application, pre-interview app, and the actual interview.
I digress, back to Unholy Taleo. Taleo claims to have your information saved so you could bypass that long process, editing it if need-be, to avoid completing the entire application again. However, in my long, storied career of looking for a career, that is an absolute lie. I've had to fill out an entire application each time I've had to subject myself to this mind-numbing tediousness. It's obvious the people that designed this painstaking software have never had to use it to apply for a job--they must have one hell of a sales team, using strong-armed mafia tactics to push this on all the companies that they've sold it to thus far. To my utmost surprise, Taleo is highly unpopular among job-seekers being used as lab rats with this redundancy, who knew?!? According to Amplicate.com, Taleo Hate scored 92%, compared to people who feel the opposite.
Ready for a particularly gruesome fact? On the Company Profile section of Taleo's website, they brag about such things as revenue and their performance in Nasdaq; but they also have a statistic that points out their lack of success in getting candidates hired. They list that, by using their software, there have been a total of 7,000,000 hires in a pool of 200,000,000 candidates. That's a success rate of 3.5% for the job-seeker, and in our terrible economy, the latest unemployment rate in the United States was estimated at 9.6% in August, 2010. Way to go, Taleo! According to their site, "On a peak day, Taleo processes more than 39 million transactions. That's far more than Burger King orders and far less than Facebook page views." So you compare compounding people's unemployment misery to fast-food and social networking, while there are ever-increasing layoffs and house foreclosures nationwide. Is Satan your CEO?
MY SOLUTION: Relocate Taleo's corporate headquarters to Heard Island and McDonald Islands with a television crew for a new reality TV show with a twist. Call it Survivor: HIMI, and require the CEO, upper management, sales & marketing teams, and Taleo's designers to use this software to attempt to be "hired off the island," and see how they fare with it.
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