iCIMS Hire Expectations™

While many readers are just starting to kick off their summer; here at iCIMS it’s upgrade season. Beginning a few months ago and continuing through the summer, all of our customers are getting seamlessly upgraded to iCIMS 10.

All of our 800 clients are learning that Version 10 officially supports Internet Explorer 7 and 8 for Windows users and Mozilla Firefox 3 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris users.  (Of course, applicants accessing career portals and employees accessing onboarding portals are able to use Internet Explorer 6, as well as an even wider variety of browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox 2, Safari2, Opera 8, Google Chrome 0.3, etc.).

However, they are wondering why iCIMS would like them to upgrade from IE 6…Some users (especially corporate users) can’t perform an easy upgrade; however there are plenty of reasons to start replacing this 9-year-old browser. Here are a few of them:

• Security.  Based mostly on security concerns, PC World rated Internet Explorer 6 the 8th Worst Tech Product of all-time. Now, keep in mind, Microsoft responds to virtually all of these reported holes with patches, but reportedly, new ones are reported at a pretty constant rate.
• Speed. Compared to newer versions of IE and other modern browsers, IE6 can be extraordinarily slow.  Try loading up a typical widget-full page running Java or Flash and see what happens. Modern browsers are optimized for this feature heavy experience and can easily load web pages faster.
• Lack of support for new features. Even on a job well done, IE6 can arbitrarily change style sheets, which determine where things are placed on the screen, making otherwise fluid web pages look ugly.
• It’s being left behind. Did you see the newest Lady Gaga cover jam? Maybe not if you use IE6. Besides YouTube, Google has also ended IE6 support for many of its services, such as Gmail. 
• Languages. While the internet has always been a global project (think: World Wide Web), the web is becoming ingrained across more and more of the planet. Just this year, ICANN, the organization responsible for assigning domains, approved the first Internet addresses to feature Arabic characters for Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE. Why am I bringing this up? Well, Internet Explorer has some pretty big problems displaying Unicode and international characters, which can chip away at a global roll-out.

Of course, posting all of these reasons aren’t to say that we don’t like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. In fact, much of the interactivity of today’s web is due to developments made to IE since it debuted in 1995. Because IE6 has many flaws, Microsoft has been encouraging users to upgrade or download its many patches. In fact, the newer release IE8 is a much better tool and is a significantly better offering.

Agree? Disagree? In the comments below, feel free to let us know what you think!