Still using icims.com for recruiting? Think again!

If your company has open vacancies and uses some system for pre-screening candidates (e.g. by giving them questions), I have a "small" task for you. Go to your system, answer the questions as if you were a candidate, validate the answers as you would expect from a candidate (e.g. actually perform the actions that the answer describes), and then save the results. Look at the whole process. Make a conclusion for yourself whether your system is usable for the stated purpose. Communicate it to your management, if needed.

If you are using icims.com for hiring technical candidates, the answer is most probably "not suitable at all".

The most annoying bug that icims.com has is that it does not allow the candidate to enter certain characters in certain positions. The exact error message is:

Q3 2 Contains invalid characters. You cannot use the characters: ' " \ / or ` in an enclosing instance of <>, <<, >> or ><.

 This triggers at least on the following types of input:

• XML or HTML
• Command redirections, e.g.: echo "foo bar" >> baz.txt
• Sequences of menu items to click, e.g.: "File > New > Folder", if a bad character happens to be before that

So, you cannot ask questions about HTML, shell scripting, or even general questions about using GUI-based applications.

This error message probably means that they are concerned about XSS attacks. However, filtering out invalid characters is a very sloppy way of protection against such attacks. And it imposes completely unreasonable restrictions on the user input.

In fact, any kind of input (including XML, bash scripts or text about clicking the menu) should be suitable, and can be made to display safely and properly in any browser, just by escaping the special characters when generating the HTML page. Many template engines exist that do this escaping for you automatically. Today, there is simply no reason not to use them.

If a candidate sees such error, he/she becomes demotivated. It is a stupid barrier before getting the correct answer to you. It also indicates that you don't care about your customers (by choosing business partners that allow such sloppy practices). Worse, some of your candidates (who see icims.com for the first time) can think that it is your product, or your internal system, and that you (not icims.com) have web developers with insufficient skills. I.e. that your company is not good enough to work in, because you don't weed out underqualified workers.

You don't want to lose candidates. So you don't want to use icims.com. Really.