Big is the enemy of good (part one)
In this post – the first in a two-parter! – I'm expanding on observations I made previously when I wrote about AI sucking the air out of the room, often to the detriment of other pressing priorities.
Some of my points may seem a little facetious, so it’s worth acknowledging upfront that I'm not trying to pretend any of what I'm talking about is easy. Just that perhaps it doesn't always have to be this hard.
Which sounds a bit like a Coldplay lyric. Sorry.
On the surface, it may seem like I'm a little excitable about the ins and outs of online recruitment processes.
But in truth, they offer a useful segue into more troublesome matters: fragmented services, out-of-control spend, and the holes organisations dig themselves into.
The sad dog
For a variety of reasons, I’ve recently found myself spending more time on LinkedIn. It's not an online destination I've ever particularly felt at home on, but it helps to fill an X-shaped hole in my life. Plus I’ve found the content there to be a tiny bit more windswept and interesting of late.
A byproduct of this is that I see a lot of job ads, and occasionally find myself clicking through to have a nosy.
The types of roles being recruited offer a useful window into organisations, and can give you insight into how they’re looking to achieve their respective missions. Does the job come with a team? Is it part of a team? What are the reporting lines? Where does it sit within the overall management chain? Is it permanent or fixed-term?
That in itself can provide useful reflection points on the roles and structure within my own organisation: What might be useful to replicate? How could we scale? Who might be worth talking to about their approach?
It's striking though, when you do a bit of compare and contrast, just how woefully broken elements of the process of applying for a job seems to be.
Here's a one-sided conversation I made up:
"You know how it’s difficult to navigate the jobs section of your website, and that it doesn’t really work on a mobile browser?"
"And that it describes your organisation at great length in impenetrable language but doesn’t focus on what an applicant might gain (other than sole responsibility for an impossibly long list of essential criteria)."
"And you know how you haven't published the salary range or go into any detail about the benefits, and that people are expected to struggle through a multistage application form made up of web pages that look like they were crafted in Dreamweaver in the late 90s?"
"And you know how you’re also struggling to recruit diverse skills and knowledge into your organisation?"
"Big reveal: those things might be related!"
What's above is – of course – exaggerated for hilarious comic effect, but the reality isn’t a million miles away.
In the too-many years that I’ve had responsibility for corporate websites in one form or another, the jobs/recruitment section (or portal, or whatever special name it's been given) has almost always hung off the edge like a sad old dog being dragged along by its owner.
It yearns for a treat, or to be thrown a ball, or to have its floppy fringe trimmed for the summer. But no! It must languish, unloved and unkempt, forced to walk in the shadows, forced to still work on Internet Explorer 6.
This post started life as a relatively short list of observations – a few thoughts on how to improve the basics of an online recruitment journey on a standard corporate website: job listings, the application process, relevant organisational information, as well as how to simplify life for those who are sorting, assessing, and ranking applications.
But the more I wrote, the more it struck me that the issues I was coming up against were indicative of something murkier, and that the troubles with online recruitment are just a snapshot of more pervasive problems.
Symptoms of a broken system
Why do so many jobs sections sit apart from the rest of their respective website motherships?
Aside from some tokenistic visual consistency (a logo placement, a colour scheme) there can be a huge disjoint in the user experience between the 'main website' and the 'jobs bit'.
As a casual browser you can be lapping up well-honed copy and simple calls to action, and one click later you've entered The Upside Down. It kinda looks the same but you feel a bit lost, there's a lot of weird debris floating about, and Running Up That Hill is playing in the background.
Below is a genuine example of a job application user journey on a public sector website I recently spent time on. I won't name names – it's one of many – but it was pretty astonishing to experience how convoluted the process was.
Let's call it The Quagmire.
Step 1: arrive on website, find ‘Jobs’ on navigation menu
Step 2: arrive at jobs homepage, and I have to select from a number of job family categories. I am unfamiliar with the organisational structure so the language isn't particularly intuitive, but I click the title that sounds most relevant.
Step 3: ‘Jobs’ has become ‘Current Vacancies’. At the top of the page is a large graphic with five logos, which seem to be related to some kind of accreditation schemes. I don’t know what these are or what they relate to, and there is no link and no alt text. On a mobile the graphic is completely illegible – it's a lot of screen real estate to devote to meaningless gumph. Under the graphic there is a heading saying ‘20 Careers’ and a list of roles alongside a number I assume to be the job ID. This might be useful from an internal perspective (?) but it makes the page difficult to scan. [note: we've moved from 'jobs', to 'vacancies', to 'careers' within two clicks]
Step 4: There is a decent job description, salary information, and description of duties. Buried at the bottom of the page is a link that says: “More information about the role and how to apply is available at: [link]". I click on this, although the phrasing is odd.
Step 5: I’m taken to another version of the same job description, however it’s on a slightly different version of the website (new URL, subtle layout variations) and the headings are in a different order from before, with various additional sections of text. It includes an option to attend a meeting to find out more about the role (helpful!) but this is buried in amongst lots of poorly-ordered supplementary information. I have to scroll up and down the page a couple of times to find the ‘apply’ option (it’s on a button at the very top of the page). I click it.
Step 6: I’m asked for my email address and then made to scroll through a privacy notice with 15 (FIFTEEN!) separate clauses and is about 7 metres long. At the bottom is a button saying ‘next’. I'm tempted to click it but find I have lost the will to live.
NB: I haven't even got to the application stage yet.
I don't use the word 'astonishing' lightly. It's almost a decade since the Gov.uk's Digital by Default Service Standard first came into force, and it's nearly 25 years since the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Steve Krug's seminal Don't Make Me Think were first published.
Put bluntly, this shit ain't new, so you’d be forgiven for thinking the basics would be sorted by now.
But in my experience the basics don't get sorted for the same reasons that so many digital services fail to live up to their potential – less to do with technology, an awful lot to do with organisational culture and protocols.
Not so simple fixes
If you break down The Quagmire example, an approach to alleviating at least some of the issues might be to throw a sensible Content Designer at the problem for a chunk of time.
A nice simple brief: talk to users, establish consistency, reprioritise information, get rid of duplication, and embed templates and guidelines.
But even this apparently straightfoward task could end up running into all sorts of mundane-yet-showstopping snags.
For instance, I'd hazard a guess that The Quagmire has at least two content management systems in use, possibly owned and run by different business functions with different rules, processes, levels of sign-off, and tolerance for change.
The responsibility to come up with job descriptions is often delegated to departments or teams, so the creation of clear, accessible copy becomes the responsibility of individual hiring managers. But without a gatekeeper, even the most robust guidelines fall by the wayside.
Resource-strapped HR teams (who let's not forget are responsible for organisational culture, looking after people's wellbeing, training and development, as well as whether your highly technical role profile can be understood by a human) don't tend to - in my own experience anyway - have the kind of editorial processes and skillsets that a modern digital operation with a high turnover of content requires.
And who has a sensible Content Designer to spare anyway?
Suddenly altering a few words on a web page becomes a Frodo-destroying-the-Ring level quest.
It's difficult to enter The Quagmire without getting your feet soaking wet.
Why is this important?
Why is any of this an issue, you may ask. Shouldn't the main business of the public sector be about delivering services to, and fulfilling the needs of, citizens? Isn't this all just a bit, well, internal?
Yes and no. There's definitely an argument that so-called front-line services should always take priority. It's difficult to justify taking money and resource away from urgent projects in cash-strapped times.
But I'd hedge my bets there isn't an organisation in the land that could claim to have all the requisite staff, with the necessary skills and aptitude, to fulfil its obligations.
Without those staff, delivering the critical stuff becomes next to impossible. And as a consequence pivotal programmes end up getting outsourced, teams become reliant on contractors, and costs and accountability get compromised, sometimes severely.
Attracting the right talent is therefore pretty high up the list in terms of importance.
Organisations need to inspire people to want to work for them, to make even highly-specialised or senior roles sound like they're halfway achievable, to give people a clear sense of what's expected of them without overexplaining the byzantine hierarchy (they'll pick this up pretty quickly in the role, believe me), and to foster an understanding that although there are lots of challenges, there are huge amounts to gain if you really want to make a difference.
Making every person whose interest is piqued read through 1,000 words of insipid jargon AND your soul-crushing data protection policy BEFORE you even explain the application process isn't necessarily the best starting point.
Preaching to the choir
Like I said at the top of this post, I don't for a second claim any of this is trivial to solve.
Most of what I've written about so far is focused on the front-end. Behind the scenes things can be even less stable. The implementation of secure, scalable services, while at the same time dealing with the burden of legacy technology, can be a huge undertaking.
But maybe huge is part of the problem. Maybe the fact that certain types of programme have to pitch vast game-changing goals to get funded can be calamitous. Maybe big is the enemy of good.
In the next instalment I'll be running with this theme a little more. Until then, keep hitting refresh on your inbox!
🧐 Thank you for reading (this far).