Registration should be easy. It should be a no-brainer. The concept of registration at a web site has been around for slightly less time that the age of the Web. It is "old hat". Granted, some web pages need more information than others, based on the services that they provide. And some web sites need more security than others. But everyone does it.
The first problem with COMSYS' site is the "explanation" web page. This page informs the registrant of the steps needed to register, and includes instructions such as "first click on this link, and then fill out this information, and then click on this other link to fill out more information". The need for such an explanation page indicates a failure of web design.
If you need to explain to people the steps need to register on your web site, you have a very poorly designed web site.
COMSYS' problems extend beyond the need for an explanation page.
The basic profile section, which lists a phone number and *two* e-mail addresses, has some major UI gaffes. I'll ignore the ability for a variable number of items for e-mail and phone numbers, like the GMail contacts UI. Variable fields are fairly new, and only the cutting-edge companies have them.
But COMSYS' site has major flubs. A phone number is edited, by the site, to contain only digits. Their edits remove parentheses and dashes -- those symbols that make the phone number readable to humans. And for the e-mail address fields, if you enter only one, the web site copies the e-mail address to the second field.
One field is listed as "Industry Experience". It's a text field, and you don't know quite what to put in it, until you realize that it is only two characters wide. (The text box is much wider than two characters.) Apparently it is for "years of experience".
The skills pages allow you to select various skills and self-rate your level for each (a nice feature). You can even mark skills as "primary". But only after selecting a bunch of skills as primary, and then clicking on 'submit', do you learn that you can select at most three as primary. The shock of a hidden rule for data entry overwhelms the amazement at a limit of three primary skills.
Major UI gaffes on your web site make you look like an amateur.
The task of connecting contractors with positions is a complex one. COMSYS chooses to collect information on the skills of each individual. The UI they have is not particularly onerous, but it's not friendly either. They have a series of pages that list sets of skills, and the registrant checks the skills that they have. The problem with this approach is the omitted skills ("Ruby on Rails" was listed, but not "Ruby").
Using a defined list of skills (or not allowing registrants to define their own skills) gives you an incomplete view of the person.
But these are nit-picks. I see bigger problems:
Problem one: COMSYS has built a web site to (apparently) let their back end (identifying candidates for positions) work efficiently. They have done this at the expense of the front end.
Problem two: COMSYS has built a web site that conveys the attitude "we are in charge and you are the product". Registrants must follow COMSYS' rules on the web site, listing only those skills that COMSYS deems important. Registrants have no ability to add unique skills to the list.
Problem three: Registrants cannot use the COMSYS site to extend their personal branding. People want to buy in to a job site, to define themselves and show off their talents. (I'm not saying that COMSYS should allow people to re-design the COMSYS web site and use custom graphics, but I am suggesting that people want to list their own skills and provide custom descriptions.)
The bottom line is that this web site offends, and COMSYS will probably lose talent because of it. After using this web site, I am pretty sure I understand the corporate philosophy of COMSYS, and I don't want to work there. Of course, they would place me not at COMSYS but at a client site, so the internal workings of COMSYS are not an issue.
Or are they? I suspect that COMSYS deals with corporations that think like themselves, just as individuals associate with like-minded people. If that is true (and I recognize that the reasoning starts with an interpretation of a web site and follows some tenuous logic) then I don't really want to work with COMSYS' friends, either.
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