This Friday my wife is graduating from Christian Brothers University with her MBA. It has been a long road over these past few years, but she emerged victorious. The next chapter in her life is to move her current consulting career back to corporate America and it is interesting to see that process again...and when I say interesting I mean SAD and PATHETIC. It amazes me just how unusable these online job applications are. First she is asked to create an account on CompanyXYZ's site as if it is some online community that she will be frequenting often and sharing recipes with friends. Second she is asked for her personal meta information, Name, Address, etc. and in some cases her SSN (which no one should ever give unless they are given a job offer and the company needs a background check) and then she has to enter in all of her previous employment, education and then FINALLY upload her resume. Some want the resume plain text, some require it in PDF or DOC. Nothing is ever consistant. All of this is redundant and unnecessary. You want someone's contact information, it is in the resume. You want someone's previous work history, it is in the resume. You want someone's qualifications and awards, IT IS IN THE RESUME. Why does an applicant HAVE to give you this information again?!
I won't go into all money and time that is wasted when companies purchase these monalithic systems, but I will emphasize that the employment applying process should be about the user. You may have a great company, but your online application system sucks and probably turns away more qualified applicants than you realize.
HR needs to take a lesson from Posterous. If someone comes to your site to apply for a job then all they should have to do is email jobs@companyabc.com with the subject as the job title/number. Your back end system should then parse through their resume and extract relevant information to put into your system for further review and processing. The first argument I always hear against using email is "Not everyone's resume is a format that is standard that we can parse". While this is true my responses are a) partner up with Monster.com or Linkedin.com to where all the user has to do is pass in their username for those services and consume a service from the providers who will have their information in a standard format b) hire decent developers who actually know how to program and write the appropriate algorithms to search for headings like "name", "contact", "experience", etc. If handful of guys at Posterous can parse email, like this one, from every known mail client in the world and post it to a blog I am sure that a resume should be possible as well.