ATS administrators: Don’t leave the default locations!

Almost all “applicant tracking” (hiring) software gives you options to search for job openings in specific places, usually (for the United States) by state. The smart ones let you select multiple states at once. Some don’t even let you select states, and I will embarrass later on.

Some companies are intelligent and remove the states from the list that they do not operate in so the list is cleaner and easier to use. Many leave all 50 states in the list. One, UTC, even leaves entries in the list that will never be used:

United Technologies careers page. Search option with locations in the United States shown. Highlighted by me are “Jarvis Island”, “Johnston Atoll”, “Kingman Reef”, “Midway Islands”, and “Navassa Island”.

 

Per WikipediA:

• Jarvis Island is uninhabited and entirely part of a nature reserve.
• Johnston Atoll was last used for anything at all in 2004 for destroying stocks of prohibited warfare.
• Kingman Reef “has no natural resources and supports no economic activity” per the CIA.
• The Midway Islands do have an airstrip, so that’s possible.
• Navassa is a disputatious little island in the Caribbean that appears to be abandoned.

In general all of these places are extremely unlikely to have any sort of employment for anyone, let alone UTC, unless they have SECRET GOVERNMENT BASES there. If that’s true… I’m loving the idea of a military secret being blown by a defense contractor’s HR department.

[Edit in 2020: They updated their software and site, only the 50 states are listed, but Guam is considered a separate “County/Region” along with Hong Kong SAR and other actual countrys.]