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Comment by ssharp | Hacker News Reader

There is a Fortune 200 headquartered in my area that, by far, has the worst application process and software I've ever seen. Aside from REQUIRING you to type in information like your high school's address and your high school GPA, they also have pre-screening booby-traps which you may need to lie to get past (e.g. my wife was applying for an HR job there and they asked if she had a bachelor's degree in HR, which she didn't, she has a JD and has worked in HR for years and she was filtered out of the applicant pool because of that). One of the last pieces of the process is answering a few long-form answers on why you'd be a good fit. They have four or five questions but the gotcha is if you lose focus on the textfield and have to click it again, it erases your answer.

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I'm pretty sure they have a "real" hiring channel that bypasses this; there's no way they could function if everyone had to go through that without error.

Great story. It's a sure sign that a strong bureaucracy has set in when one sees this. It's common in government organizations, but becoming more common in non-government (especially large) organizations.

becoming more common in non-government (especially large) organizations.

Been like that for awhile. You're just getting to know more of the vast ocean of all the bureaucratic mindset that is out there.

I think it's a strategy by "those in power" to tightly control who gets hired. They make the application process so bad that people with options opt out of applying.

It's common on Craigslist amongst the spamming services [sic] like Resumator, Sourcery, etc. Furthermore, experience has taught me that any time I see a job ad on LinkedIn that says, "Apply on Company Website," I assume there will be a tedious form to fill out (not to mention account creation).

tech companies have done a really good job at stream lining the process. Most of them you just click on the job and click apply with an upload resume button and optional upload cover letter button.

I'm sorry if LinkedIn doesn't provide the analytics these companies desire, but LinkedIn already provides that functionality itself.

Those sorts of processes are great for requiring information with people might not be inclined to give if they had a real person they were conversing with, particularly past salary questions that only accept an integer value.

Let me guess-- they use Taleo?

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