Ask 100 prospects and you will hear 100 complaints about your ATS. Or any ATS. What we see as a "necessary evil," your prospects see as more evidence that you care far more about your internal processes, in making things easier for you than in attracting great talent.

Is it true? Would you be willing to start from scratch to build systems that are geared towards your prospect? I'm not saying you should throw your ATS away, but you do need to look at things from the candidate's point of view.

What about what's on your career site? Does it go out of its way to give prospects information to answer all their questions, or do you hoard it so you'll have something to talk about during the interview?

I'm not just talking about the broad strokes of your benefits package or if you have a stated diversity policy, but information about what the job really is. If they relied on your job descriptions, once they get past boilerplate information about the company, the list of requirements to apply for the job, what's left that describes the job itself?

Does your career site sound like it was written by a robot lawyer, or by the people who really work there? Before someone applies, will the have any sense if you're a 9-to-5 kind of place or a 24/7 kind of place? Or if they will have a new computer, or someone's old four-year-old hand-me-down? 

Are you responding to people on your social media channels? Or do their comments linger without response? If you were asking questions on that site, you'd want an answer, right? Otherwise why have a social presence?

These are the kinds of questions you'd want answered before you took any job, so we can't pretend they are edge cases. This is clearly what your prospects want, so why aren't you delivering? 

More quibbles, complaints, challenges and arguments on recruitingcontent.com.