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Ask Slashdot: Why Are Online Job Applications So Badly Designed?
First time accepted submitter GreyViking (3606993) writes Over the past few years, I've witnessed a variety of my intelligent but largely non-technical nearest-and-dearest struggling to complete online job applications. The majority of these online forms are multiple screens long, and because they're invariably HTTPS, they'll time out after a finite time which isn't always made known to the user. Some sites actively disable back/forward buttons but many don't, and text that's sometime taken a lot of effort to compile, cut and paste can be lost. And did I mention text input boxes that are too small? Sometimes it seems that the biggest obstacle to getting a job can be being able to conquer the online application, and really, there has to be a better way: but what is it?
What I find distasteful, is the inherent duplicity involved with "My time is valuable" when uttered in this context.
For every minute you "avoid wasting", you force how many other people to waste how many of their minutes? How much MORE valuable is YOUR time, to THEIRS?
How do you justify this disparity?
More poignantly, how do you justify this, when parsing technology exists in such a fashion as to allow automatic population of your presented high-level form that YOU read, without forcibly requiring your applicants to MANUALLY populate redundant entries on your application forms?
The option that wastes the least amount of time total, is to implement it correctly, so that information is asked for once, and populates it in many places automatically, so that no matter where the reviewer chooses to look preferentially, they will find the exact same data.
But that clearly makes too much sense; Everyone is too lazy to do it the demonstrably correct way, and as long as any one side of the issue can claim an advantage to leverage in doing the least amount of work, the issue will always persist.
Efficiency extends beyond just "It makes MY job easier!" It extends to the whole system, and what most improves useful results. There is a terrible problem with managerial myopia in this respect; Managers dont like being told that their policies are demonstrably poor-- Even more, they find ways to fire people that can actually prove it.
What I am getting at here, is that the root of this whole problem, is the idea that "I am the manager, and thus my will is of the highest impact, no other considerations matter" is in force. I'm sorry your majesty, but you have no clothes on.