Well, I'll throw myself out here on a limb...
I'm actively seeking a job with the LDS Church right now. I have been since January 2007. I'm committed enough to it that I've pulled my info off of monster and am ignoring all other contacts for the moment. I'm only interested in working for the Church. I've applied for several jobs listed on the LDS jobs site. Of the many I've applied for, I was contacted back on 1 that lead to a phone interview (wasn't a good fit for that particular job), and received an email on another something to the effect that it wasn't available anymore. No response at all on any of the others (and there were several). In addition to that, most or all of those are still listed even though some are almost a year old (somehow I'm doubting they're still valid).
The one good contact I had was regarding a job that was never listed for the Family History department. They interviewed me over the phone then flew me out (March) and interviewed me. The interview went well and they really liked me as a candidate. However, months went by and they're still interviewing and still haven't made a decision (It was initially indicated they could have an answer for me in 2 weeks). During this process one of the other groups that had helped with the interviewing expressed an interest in me should the first group decide not to hire me, but to avoid competing was holding off until the first group had made a decision. Finally things reached a point where the new version of the Family Search site went live and I guess FH decided to do some major reorganizing and hiring was frozen. About this point the first group decided the second group should have a shot at me since they didn't know what was going to happen. The second group however, had moved on and had already filled their positions. As of a few weeks ago I was told that the dust was beginning to settle with the reorganizing and they were hoping to be able to make a decision soon. As of today, I'm still waiting.
My bishop, who knows I'm looking, handed me the little tech recruitment flier the church put out a few weeks ago more as an attempt at humor than anything else given that he knows how long I've been waiting. The situation is such that personally, I'm taking a lot of heat from parents about how I should forget working for the Church and go look for a real job. My spouse though, has been quite supportive.
The long and short of it is I believe there are a lot of qualified technical people out here who'd like to work for the Church, but we just can't figure out for the life of us how...
Currently, the
http://www.lds.org/jobs portal is the only real way in that I'm aware of. This needs a major overhaul. There needs to be a very clear cut login process available if you have a resume on file already (not update my profile, click, click, click, yes everything is the same, okay, now I see the markers showing the ones I already applied for...)
Jobs listed need to be maintained. If they're not available anymore, remove them.
Jobs applied for need follow up. If a candidate, contact me. If I'm not, let me know.
The application window needs to be reasonable. "Okay, we'll recruit for X weeks, interview for X weeks, and make a final decision to hire, close the position, or go back to recruiting because there are no suitable candidates by X date". This window should be communicated to the candidates and tightly followed to avoid misunderstandings, problems, and keep the whole recruitment process on tract (You did need to hire someone right? If you really needed this person, something is suffering as long as the position goes unfilled.)
I get the sense that there are probably a lot of jobs that don't get listed on the site. I could be wrong. If there are, then internally, you need to get your departments behind supporting and using the job site.
Your jobs site is fairly cold. It's very much a "Don't contact us, we'll contact you if we see something we're interested in." Sometimes this is necessary. Sometimes it's just the approach to hiring that a given company decides to take. If you're short on candidates, it may be the wrong approach. Personally, I'd appreciate it if your recruiters were more publicly visible and approachable. One of the things that caught my attention about LinkedIn was for the first time I could see recruiters, information about them, and had something of a way to contact them (didn't really like LinkedIn's approach though - a readily available e-mail address would have done it for me. I tried this approach today. We'll see where it gets me. I wouldn't mind seeing the Church developing something along these lines internally that's more specialized for it's needs.
Follow up. This has been a real sore point for me. If I'm talking to a recruiter and he tells me that they should have some sort of an answer in two weeks and to call him back then (I'd think he should be calling me instead of me calling him, but that's minor), that in two weeks when I call him and spend the next week calling daily, leaving voice mail, etc. and I can't even get a call back responding to my voice mail, there's a problem. I'm not harassing anyone here, I was told to call. I'm placing 1 call every 24 hours from the point I was told to call forward trying to get a response. If you tell me to call you, I expect you to take the call. If you're not there and I leave a message, given that you told me to call, you at least need the courtesy to return the call. If you don't have an answer, that's fine, but tell me you don't have it. I've found over the years that customers are FAR more tolerant of problems if they're informed. If they're in the dark, you can pretty much bet they're going to be hostile. This wasn't a one time problem, but a repeated problem. Thankfully I had the phone numbers of some of the people involved in the hiring process and would circumvent this problem by ignoring the recruiter and calling them direct. They were helpful and I appreciated them taking time to talk to me, but, being frank, HR needs to do it's job. During the interviews I heard a number of comments about HR and none of them were positive. This leads me to believe the problem I was experiencing probably wasn't limited to issues with a single individual. If your departments don't feel that HR is properly supporting them, then this is probably a major contributing factor to the problems I've listed above.
Had this been any other company, I would have dropped the job, given up attempting to contact, and taken a position elsewhere. However it's the Church, and I'm really bent on wanting to work for the Church right now.
I'll confess that one of the first thoughts that came to mind when I discovered the tech site here was that possibly this was a way to find real people inside the Church who were involved with the recruitment process and perhaps find a job. This didn't seem to hold true at first (though I have enjoyed discussing a variety of technical topics here) I'm happy to see that it appears to be changing. (I might also note that the Family History department still seems to have little representation here formally)
As for working remote - I have a lot of experience with this. As a network engineer it's pretty rare for me to actually be sitting in front of whatever it is I'm working on, even if it's in the same building. I would have considered working for the Church long before now had it not been for this issue. I had to get over the issue of relocating before I could convince myself to talk to the Church about a job.
Anyway, I'm still here, still trying, still hoping to find a tech job with the Church. With any luck, I didn't just shoot myself in the foot.