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Like Rodney Dangerfield, Charlie Brown never got much respect.
Charlie’s bad-luck streak continued this year when as a fully qualified — if fictional — “marketing manager,” he applied for jobs at all of the organizations on Fortune’s 2012 list of the Best 100 Companies to Work For.
The exercise was this year’s CareerXroads’ Mystery Job Seeking survey. The recruiting consultancy, headed by Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, used “Charlie Brown” to test the on-line application processes at these companies.
In the Mystery Job Seeking survey, CareerXroads creates a fictional job seeker and a résumé to apply for specific jobs. The résumé includes key words to ensure that it rises to the top of companies’ applicant tracking systems. The consultancy doesn’t hide its involvement. A disclaimer at the end of the resume provides context and contact information.
The resulting report points out that, while there has been some improvement noted over the course of 10 years of surveying, a great deal remains negative.
For instance, Charlie’s 2012 experience included:
- Poor feedback
- Nearly 70 percent of the companies provided no two-way communication
- More than half gave no expectations for the process or closure
- Not so much user-friendliness
- More than 30 percent made it difficult to navigate from their home to career page
- Charlie couldn’t get to the careers page of three companies(!)
- Charlie couldn’t apply by clicking on a job description 13 percent of the time
- Only 3 companies allowed Charlie to check his application status
- Lots of “busy work”
- Charlie had to retype professional information already included his uploaded resume
- Asking the same questions multiple times
- Requiring more than an hour of work to complete the process
There was good news.
Three companies (Zappos, Google and Intel) provided either follow-up information or detailed next steps. Novo Nordisk even asked for specific survey feedback on Charlie’s application experience.
However, in the end, there’s a lot more improvement work to be done by most companies. Crispen and Mehler noted that:
“Two decades since the first jobs were posted online, feedback and communication between candidates and employers should be automatic – building blocks of a strong employment brand. Yet many firms have not embraced the fundamentals. Fewer than half the survey participants described the employment branding as good or very good.”
They concluded:
“…the overall picture is not what it should be. The improvements noted over the past decade have been small and incremental, not sweeping. Too many companies continue to treat job seekers like yesterday’s stale bread. They are secretive with information, indifferent to candidates’ needs.
“This is instead of creating welcoming experiences whose benefits are two-fold: a higher likelihood of adding productive employees and enhanced employment brand.”
