The goal of a corporate career website is to attract qualified candidates as well as encourage them to submit their resume to a job of interest. Unfortunately today’s corporate career websites and their applicant tracking systems lack website usability elements that make it difficult to achieve this goal.

Back in 2005 Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter wrote a series of corporate career website best practice articles. These articles are outdated but still very much valid.

Don’t Force Candidates to Jump through Hoops

As Steven pointed out, there are many usability issues working against today’s corporate employment websites but in my opinion, one of the more detrimental usability issues is

forcing a potential candidate to register or set-up an account before they are given the opportunity to submit their resume.

It takes a lot of time and money to drive quality traffic to a website, a forced registration process simply deters job applicants. The next generation of Career Website’s should be more “customer centric. In a society that is about instant gratification, the fewer clicks to your desired goal the less job applicants you’ll lose along the way.

Questions I have

1. Has anyone seen a study on the percentage of applicants that drop off of a career website because of a force registration process?
2. Is the forced registration part of the ATS, the corporate website or both?