We are in the (seemingly perpetual) process of trying to re-design our University career site to make it more user-friendly, more engaging, and to make it better articulate and communicate why we think our school is a great place to work.
Very important goals, and I do think eventually I can convince the organization to move beyond Web 1.0 and embrace the modern world of technology and recruiting, (maybe).
Flickr -Jenny Downing
But one issue that keeps coming up is the notion of having separate application processes for Faculty jobs compared to Staff and Administration jobs. It actually is fairly common still in higher education to have applicants for Staff jobs follow an online application process via whatever ATS the school uses, and have faculty applicants simply e-mail CVs and other documents directly to search committee chairs, bypassing the ATS if not entirely, at least initially. As you would expect, anecdotal evidence from Faculty candidates clearly indicates they prefer this method of applying.
The 'logic' behind this is that since in general applicants for faculty positions dislike the online application process, many feel it is 'beneath' them, most ATS (including ours) don't do a great job handling all the different files required for many faculty applications, and lastly and perhaps most importantly, the search committees (which are almost completely made up of current faculty) hate the ATS for reviewing applicants and documents. Let's see, the candidates just want to e-mail their information and the hiring managers hate using the ATS and want to keep the candidates happy. So, should we 'let' applicants for these positions simply revert to this 'old-school' method of applying?
Personally, I am torn between designing a system and a process based on anecdotal evidence or perceptions of what our target candidates want, and a coherent and consistent design for our career site and application process that certainly benefits the 'back-office' as well and supports any possibility we have of building a 'talent community'. We can't capture centrally all the candidate information that is sitting in 50 different search committee chair's e-mail inboxes. We will not have a way to systematically reach out to this community if in fact, we make no attempts to aggregate and centralize this information residing in e-mail inboxes and paper files.
So here is the question : Should we have 'different' application processes for different constituencies? Or should we design a system and process to the best of our ability and require that all applicants to comply?