This advent calendar presents 24 practical suggestions on how to learn from candidate behavior to improve your HR marketing, based on early results from Potentialpark's upcoming 2024 Talent Comm study.
This week's special is "Easy Apply". Every day this week will be about how to make application processes more competitive and lose fewer candidates.
Funny story: when we discovered in the Potentialpark research that it's not the career website where you lose the most candidates, but the Applicant Tracking System (ATS), we created a new study. It was around 2010. We called it: APOLLO - Applying Online & Loving It.
I'm still proud of that name. It gave everyone who heard it a good laugh. And that meant two things: the very idea that applying online could be lovable seemed entirely bizarre at the time. And secondly, we had a marketing success with the new study. With most of the hiring happening online, a new problem became obvious.
Since then, job searches and application forms have actually made huge progresses and become more candidate-friendly as a whole, bit by bit. We see job maps, LinkedIn CV parsing options, and many 7-step application forms have been boiled down to one-pagers.
But still today, making applying "acceptably easy" is one of the biggest pain points. One that employers and HR teams can agree on:
Data from the candidate survey
In the latest Potentialpark survey, conducted this fall, 49% of candidates in the US, 51% in Europe and 53% in Asia agreed said what frustrates them is that the application process is too long and complicated. That's around 10 percentage points more than last year. Expectations rise.
And this is a problem because applying is often a spontaneous and fragile decision, and the worse the process, the more drop out.
HR teams struggle as well
And HR teams? I remeber an event where we jokingly suggested to launch an SAP e-recruiting self-help group for HR professionals. Except that nobody was laughing this time, and instead all the processionals around us instantly asked "where can I sign up?"
I doubt the reaction would have been any different if we had said Workday or Taleo instead. Installing and improving ATS environments from a candidate experience point of view can be a traumatising experience on its own.
This sums it up. The online job search and application is a pain for both talent and employers.
Because while we find it obvious to invest heavily in social media campaigns and apply professional copywriting and photo shootings to the career website, we rely on IT providers for the application process.
That's like saying, let's build a beautiful cake shop with world-class pastries and a picturesque terrace and violine players, but then use dentist chairs for interior design and require customers to place orders by fax machine. You kind of just waste all your previous efforts.
Everyone talks about TikTok, AI and Virtual Reality. All good, but talking about the biggest potential for improvement, an HR Bill Clinton would tell an HR George Bush "it's the application system, stupid".
The good news is: you are not alone. Every employer is struggling with this. (And you konw, even those with an excellent best practice candidate experience solution are just one restructuring or IT system change away from being thrown back and having to start all over again.)
Adam Karpiak, twitter.com/Adam_Karpiak/status/1510992618657832960
Today's tip: the biggest frustration and where to start
Important to keep in mind: it's not only the application system that determines the candidate experience of applicants, it's actually a whole bunch of factors:
The job search (like job filters and search UX)
The job ads / job descriptions
The application form
The options to login, track and re-use applications
The transparency of the process before and during the application
Support and contact options
and generally what happens after candidates submit.
The last one is the tip of today's Calendar Door. Because if the research points at one thing employers should improve, it is:
Be faster. Reduce the time between application and interview, and between interview and decision. Sounds trivial. But so few companies do it.
Speed is the ultimate competitive factor. The safest way to lose applicants is to let them sit and wait for weeks. In a tight talent market, and with GenZ entering the workforce. it's sadly very expensive.
And if you manage to reach a faster turn-around time, mention this on your career website so candidates feel confident in this. The rule should be, where candidates are the scarcest resource, put candidates first in the application processes.
The probably most impressive implementation of that rule I heard of was at a German employer: they recognized the problem were slow hiring managers and set new internal standards. The recruiters turned the tables on them and said:
While we can't force you to book an interview in a timely manner, what we can do is reject applicants if you take too long. So when hiring managers took more than a few days to book an interview with a new applicant, they got one reminder, and if that didn't help, the recruiting team simply rejected the applicant with a nice thank-you email.
This achieved two things: it put the hiring manager's skin in the game so they really felt the urgency of the war for talent and stopped putting recruiting off, and secondly, they avoided negative reviews on Glassdoor.
Not sure everyone can go as far as that company. But if you see that as a gold standard, you realize you need tostart talking about the processes today to make them more competitive over time.
While you ponder about a new ATS or fancier job ads, think about the cafeteria example above: the nicest cake in the world in the loveliest location won't make any guest happy if the waiter doesn't show up for an hour. So fixing the recruitment process, especially the response times, is one of the basics that will help with everything else.
This week, we will have more data and tips every day on how to make applying online more competitive in this Advent Calendar.
BONUS: Would you like to receive the results of Potentialpark's new Talent Comm study when it comes out with data from the global candidate surveys? Sign up on the Potentialpark website to secure a free research expert talk (no strings attached) and tickets to Potentialpark's events to meet peer HR marketers.
Come back on Monday for the next Door of this Advent Calendar.
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