Ask Slashdot: Why Are Online Job Applications So Badly Designed?

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 12, 2014 @04:20AM from the no-one-asked-jakob-nielsen dept.

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?

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Pete and Repeat by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-12 04:27 · Score: 5, Insightful

What annoys me the most is they ask you to upload your resume... and then ask you to fill out a million fields with the exact same information that's already on your resume.
1. Re:Pete and Repeat by ShanghaiBill · 2014-08-12 04:57 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I further hate it when they insist on "plain text" for the resume too..... At least accept PDF or XPS versions of any document that's formatted like a Resume.
  You seem to be confused. Your resume is being read by a Perl script, not a human. If your resume does not include certain keywords, a human will never see it.