I'm Louise Fletcher. As President of 
Over on Career Hub, Norine Dagliano has an interesting post about the downside of online application systems:
I just spent over an hour helping a highly skilled and experienced RN complete an online application and upload her ASCII résumé
and cover letter to apply for a job in the cath lab of a large suburban hospital. How did we ever get to the point where having an email address, being able to complete an online application, and knowing how to upload an ASCII résumé were prerequisites to providing expert clinical care to patients undergoing diagnostic and interventional heart catherizations?
I feel her pain. I spent many years in HR and - towards the end of my corporate career - my department got smaller and smaller while my workload grew. With an average of 40 vacancies at any one time, and no recruiting staff, I had no choice but to automate the application process.
The system I chose actually allowed candidates to upload Word versions of their resume, and so probably didn't eliminate as many people as the one Norine describes. But I was always firmly convinced that the automation hurt the quality of new hires, because a system can't make the kind of decisions a person makes.
For example, the system I implemented allowed me to set up screening questions which would either ensure that you were rejected or moved to stage two of the process, depending on your answers.
So if a requirement for an accounting job was a CPA designation, I could ask that as a screening question ("are you a CPA?") and set the system to reject you if the answer was no.
But what if you had let your CPA lapse but were perfectly qualified in every other way? Or what if you were not a CPA, but did hold the exact same position at our main competitor? A human would (hopefully) have made that distinction and passed the resume to stage two. But the computer just follows the pre-set rules.
This is why I firmly believe that job seekers have to bypass these systems wherever possible - or at least supplement online applications with more proactive job search strategies. Your future is too important to leave up to a computer!
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