This year marks the 50th anniversary of the classic Rankin-Bass holiday special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Despite its’ age, this stop-motion special still appeals to kids today and certainly evokes nostalgia amongst those who don’t believe in Santa any longer (sorry if I just ruined that for you).

There is a time and place for nostalgia and re-exploring our past, that’s for sure. But since this is a recruiting software blog, we’re going to have to say we’re not big fans of the retro world, particularly when it comes to outdated recruitment technologies.

Most of us probably remember the Island of Misfit Toys visited by Rudolph and his friends in the holiday classic. Unfortunately, much of the recruitment technology landscape is similar to that island, littered with misfit tools that stand in the way of efficiency, hiring success and improved candidate experience.

Today we are releasing a free eBook highlighting the results of our 2014 Talent Acquisition Survey (download now). In the survey, we asked more than 300 HR professionals how they felt about their ATS, the core system that typically lies at the heart of a company’s talent acquisition operation. Unsurprisingly, the feelings toward this crucial piece of technology were pretty frosty, with 64% of respondents expressing dissatisfaction or plans to replace the ATS in the coming year.

Check out some of the verbatim responses we received from HR professionals that took our survey.

How do you feel about your current ATS?

The legacy ATS’ that dominate the corporate recruiting world often get a bad rap, no doubt. But in many ways, it’s not fair. The fact of the matter is, the ATS was never intended to be used as a recruiting tool. It simply wasn’t designed for that purpose, particularly modern recruiting that leverages mobile and social and analytics. Sure, many have been retrofitted in attempts to include these capabilities, but at their core they simply aren’t built for recruiting. Your ATS is like a cowboy who rides an ostrich, or an elf that would rather be a dentist than make toys.

Being asked to do things that aren’t in its nature, and then having all this negativity and complaining heaped upon it probably has your ATS asking…

Because you weren’t built to be a recruiting tool, that’s why. You poor thing.

But of course, there are solutions available now to make the ATS better at things like mobile recruiting, and delivering understandable and useful analytics. These tools are essential ingredients to achieving your organization’s hiring benchmarks, attracting better quality candidates and improving the candidate experience.

If you let the ATS be the ATS it was intended to be, and complement it with the right solutions, your candidates will likely have better feelings about your application experience than they expressed in our survey. For instance, they probably won’t say they’d rather do all their gift shopping on Christmas Eve than struggle through a cumbersome and clunky application process, as they reported to us.

The misfit toys were eventually airlifted off the island by Santa. Who will rescue your misfit tools?

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