Online Applications

"Mr. Zero" at The Philosophy Smoker has a post about online job applications. I agree that overall they are superior to paper applications in terms of less cost and less hassle. However, applications which simply ask for an email with .pdf attachments of CV etc. are orders of magnitude easier than those which require applicants to enter data into an online application database. The latter are more time-consuming, typically require data which are less relevant for academic jobs than other jobs at the university, and sometimes have issues relating to uploading documents (such as being unclear about precisely which documents need to be uploaded and which documents should be uploaded where).