In the course of our talent acquisition work at Kinetix we invariably see both the good and bad habits of both companies and candidates in the process. One item that regularly bothers me on the company side is a behavior practiced by so many corporate and HR folks that we call it the “Heisman”…. that is to say that they feel so overwhelmed by all the applicants to their job postings…many of which may not be qualified for the specific position in question – that they do everything possible to keep candidates away from themselves at all costs. The result is a stiff-armmentality that is only engendered by the fact that most ATS systems are
generally not set up to allow a candidate to register interest in a company without applying to a specific job.

Doug Berg wrote a great post on this topic for Recruiting Trends (see full post here) that gives a great perspective on this – I have included an excerpt below:

“Many employers haven’t even considered the simple concept of offering prospective candidates the ability to enter their
email into a simple employment newsletter integrated into your career
site. By using email subscription services such as Constant Contact, you
can begin to harvest email addresses of candidates from your site.
Another great option would be to setup a LinkedIn Group, a Facebook fan
page, or a Twitter account for prospective employees. This would allow
prospective candidates to follow your jobs in the social channels, and
provide you with a way to capture their interest. Your recruiters can
post future positions into these channels, which auto-broadcast them to
this pool of prospects online, helping to capture the initial interest
of prospects, and recycle them when future positions arise, helping to
leverage these easy tools to fill future positions.

Of course, the ideal solution is to setup a talent community option on your company’s career site for prospective
candidates. This way they can join or “opt in” to show interest in your
company without having to go through a full apply process.”

Given that I believe the war for talent is still here (just dampened by the current economic situation) and will only get worse when the
economy picks up, I wonder how long they will get away with not only
hazing candidates with their process but pushing away perfectly valuable
talent because they are too overwhelmed to see past the current task.
Add to this craziness that these same companies often spend tens of
thousands of dollars annually on job boards….to “pull in candidates”…
this is a recipe in stupidity. Though it’s not push a button exersize, a
company can do any of the things Doug suggests, including add a landing
page in their career section that asks one to enter email and perhaps
some other simple items with or without resume – (link to Linkedin
perhaps?) to show that you want the company to keep in touch. If you
want the best and brightest, why wouldn’t you do this?