The Covid-19 crisis has certainly changed the way we work today but its also changing how we post our jobs online. With more and more jobs going remote (and some of them bound to stay remote) a vexing problem still remains for talent acquisition execs when it comes to listing a fully remote position on their ATS.
Applicant tracking systems have never been good at accepting or properly categorizing remote job postings. And the pandemic has only put a bigger spotlight on the issue.
Here’s what one recruiter shared on social media recently about the problem;
“If I post a job with location as "remote", it does not get picked by LinkedIn. Anybody else have similar experience? Workaround offered by Lever is to post the job on my company career page with one location and mention "remote" in the title. I would like to avoid doing that. It skews up my reporting.”
She mentions Lever as her software of choice but to be fair this is a problem faced by many ATS platforms. Instead of providing ‘workarounds’ to clients, its time vendors actually solve the problem ASAP in this new era of remote work.
Searching for remote only type of job has always been a hassle for candidates. But some sites are starting to address the issue. In early 2019, Google for Jobs introduced a remote jobs category that each job board or ATS should use to properly identify it.
Specifically Google says the job posting must be for a fully remote position and have the jobLocationType field set to ‘TELECOMMUTE’. Jobs that allow partial work-from-home or have other negotiable arrangements are not considered fully remote.
LinkedIn has also added its own remote support for jobs in the location box, You can search by keyword+remote instead of a city. Before they fixed this if you typed in the word remote in the location, you might get ‘Remote, OR’ an actual town called Remote!
Putting the word remote in the job title is standard practice these days. But I’d also suggest ATS job forms should add a secondary location field for the following entries: On Site, Telecommute or On Site/Remote.
We really need some sort of industry standard around remote listings. Job seekers need to be able to easily filter these jobs not tied to a specific location. Adding a specific field to help identify it as onsite or remote seems like its well overdue. As is making the word remote a search location in addition to city/state names.