ATS Sourcing Data: Can You Trust It?

• Author: Amitai Givertz
• Posted: February 19, 2007
• Category: Tools and Resources
• Tags: No Tags
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Jake Firth, CTO and co-founder of AllRetailJobs.com, recently published an industry white paper suggesting that candidates incorrectly identified the source of hire when clicking on applicant tracking systems (ATS) — almost all of the time! When you consider that critical decisions like recruitment advertising planning and budgeting are driven by source of hire metrics, such misleading data could have a potentially devastating affect, no?

Suppressing the cynic inside, speculating why this research is being provided by a job board, one has to ask: “Okay, so who’s going to fix the problem?” The job boards, an ATS vendor, perhaps? It seems that nothing much has happened since GO Jobs – a job distribution service – suggested a Source of Hire Protocol, and wasn’t the HR-XML Consortium supposed to be doing something spiffy? It’s all very confusing.

Anyway, you can read Jake’s white paper — ATS Sourcing Data – 83% Inaccurate  — and draw your own conclusions. It’s an easy read, if hard to digest.

You might find this related reading helpful too:

• Surveys Don’t Work: John Sumser’s summary of Jake’s paper on Electronic Recruiting News
• Source of Employment: A Riddle for Recruiters, by Peter Weddle on CareerJournal.com
• Keeping Tabs on Productivity of Recruiting Tools, by Eilene Zimmerman writing on Workforce.com
• Where Do Candidates Come From?, by Jason Whitman on Recruitment Technology: Beyond the ATS
• Getting Source Tracking Right, by Colin Kingsbury on the HRMDirect Blog
• GO Jobs Enables Source of Hire Recruitment Tracking With New Open Standard, found at OnRec
• Metrics for Executives, by Randall Birkwood found on ERE

If you are an employer — with or without an ATS — I would be interested to hear if you have ever had problems with the collection/accuracy of your source of hire data, what you might have done about it and if that worked for you.