Taleo: Tool of Darkeness

What is Taleo?

Executive Summary: If you are applying for a job, and you get to a site that says “Powered By Taleo” close the site and forget about applying for this company.

Longer Article: According to the site itself, Taleo is strategic talent management software.

Confused? So am I. I wonder why anyone would have anything to do with such an obfuscated mess. If they buy products that have ad copy that’s so annoying does this bode well for your job?

My take on Taleo is that it is software you have to use to apply to certain companies. Although I applaud software and companies and the like,however, I hate taleo. Why?

For one thing Taleo is buggy as hell.

Another reason is that it seems that the point of Taleo is to save work for HR personnel by taking your well crafted resume, that you were told was so important, and boiling it down to keywords that Taleo will search for. The more keywords, the better the chance that you will called.

One way to look at this is a game of poker. If you stack the Taleo deck with the right cards that is keywords, you will get a callback from the job. Great, right?

Not so fast. First of all, it’s difficult to figure out what the keywords are. I fear that everyone that has a computer and a yen for a job has gotten their heads around the trick of feeding the job description back on the application. So I wonder if this type of “Taleo Jamming” works. If it does, then great. I’d be interested in people’s opinions on this as I find Taleo and its ilk to be of keen interest.

I will not be using this advice, however as my recommendation is that one should boycott Taleo Powered Sites. This is not out of any kind of activism, but rather from the practical standpoint that Taleo does not act, as a job candidate, in your best interests

As an employee, you are a unique person with skills and personality. I feel that this will come through most clearly on a cover letter. However, Taleo isn’t about cover letters. You still have to run the gauntlet with the little input fields. If you don’t match the
keywords, do they read your cover letter? I don’t know. Again, I’m interested in feedback from inside the HR citadel.

What Taleo tells me about an employer is that they don’t value the employees time. They would like to offload as much of their work onto an applicant and buggy software rather than screen the applicants themselves. This makes for a very cookie cutter hiring process.

Worst of all, the work that it takes to input the data into all the little boxes is not time well spent because I HAVE TO RETYPE MY RESUME FOR EVERY JOB I APPLY TO. What a pain in the ass.

I’m OK for researching the perfect job for hours then spending more hours into the resume and perfect cover letter. If I want a job, I’ll stop at nothing to get it. But Taleo makes me feel that I can’t really do anything to make myself look better for the job.

Also, Taleo is buggy as I have showed above. I experience its bugginess when I have applied to many jobs that I was qualified for on Taleo, and I never got a call back. Many times Taleo crashed before I could a. Finally, in disgust, I gave up.

I suggest that if people value their time, and they want to work for an employer that respects them, they’ll boycott these crappy
organizations. The world will split into the pro-Taleo and anti-Taleoworkplaces. Let the best workplace win!