Or: how HR may win the internet
Something interesting seems to be happening: is applying for a job becoming easier than basically everything else on the internet? Let’s first look at what’s wrong with the user experience of the internet today.
Me trying to bite browser pop-ups to death in a hotel in Vilnius, Lithuania
You know the story of the frog in the water who begins to realize very late that the water has been heating up for a while? I feel like that frog right now. Is it just me, or is the internet in its latest stage of becoming an utter pain for users every step of the way? Like one of Dante’s inner rings of hell?
Googling, shopping, social scrolling… this used to be fun and informative. Like this hidden magic shopping street in Harry Potter. Full of unseen miracles, with more opportunities every day.
Instead, all I see in my browser today are popups, cookie statements, sign up here, enable notifications, download our app, totally useless articles on Google written purely for SEO, a tsunami of drop-shipping trash with suspiciously good reviews, and of course: ads ads ads, sliding in from left and right. On top of that: attention-polluting short videos that turn us into screen monkeys
Even social networks that used to be about friends and family are now pushing addictive short videos, paid influencers, shady political news and dopamine-optimized comedy accounts. And AI has so far not shown up to help us, the consumer, as much as accelerate the enshittification with authorless content and an endless stream of bots, inspiring the interesting conspiracy theory called "dead internet".
Says me, an optimist.
Whatever you say about applying - it used to be worse
So why, in contrast, is searching for jobs and applying becoming better and better? It used to be a peak-bureaucratic exercise. Now it’s almost like finding a job online is easier than buying a pair of sneakers. I think there’s a much more interesting explanation than the simple fact that the talent market demands it. The development must have something to do with the nature of HR that gives me some hope.
So if you are older than Google, you remember applying “the old way”, say, with SAP e-recruitment or Taleo. It was like: please register, fill out our 5-page form, adjust your documents to the company-specific upload requirements (CV, cover letter, degrees and certificates, only PDF, all separate not larger than 5MB each, or all in one, but NOT zip…) and then after 45 minutes the form crashes down, leaving you in tears. Followed by 10 more forms from 10 other employers.
That was then. Today, applying online has become better. So, HR may not so bad at marketing after all, right?
Unless of course the employer installs unnecessary questions, like asking a bookkeeper for his driving license or an engineer for his salary expectation. Yes, you as an employer can still make applying harder than necessary. But that’s on you. Not on the tech. And if you don’t figure this out, your competitors do for sure.
Applying to several jobs required lots os snaps
Time to betray some secrets: At Potentialpark, we “play applicant” once a year (since 2010), select a few hundred employers worldwide and fill out their application forms for our research. Even five years ago, this exercise led the researchers to mental exhaustion near the brink of PTSD. (Lots of Swedish snaps was needed by the end.) Filling out form after form was simply too much inhumane UX to bear.
Potentialpark auditors at the end of the ATS research weeks (Nordiska museet)
Now – the same experience is actually not that bad anymore. The ATS providers seem to have recognized applicants (who the A in ATS stands for) as a stakeholder and upgraded their systems, together with the employers who willingly spend real money on a competitive CX. Much less snaps needed for the researchers.
And in our surveys, candidates tell us that frustration with jobs and application forms is not their pain point number one anymore. Things are not perfect, let’s not exaggerate, but applying is going in the right direction: becoming more candidate-friendly. Isn’t that great news?
How does applying online win the internet?
So how do we make sure it doesn’t get enshittified like the rest of the internet? How do we savor this?
I have a theory. It has to do with the HR superpower that separates it from all other marketing-driven corporate functions: its focus on the individual. Searching THE ONE, not THE MANY. In recruitment, you don’t aim at maximizing your market share, but finding one best match per job.
This mindset may drive recruitment marketing away from mass-marketing trickery and more towards value and a certain level of authenticity.
Other than consumers and customers, applicants are screened and treated individually, so it would be ridiculous to eliminate the individual out of the equation.
There’s a reason we don’t see that kind of conversion hacking that annoys the hell out of people just for a .1% higher conversion in job ads. Like imagine a Black Friday pop-up with campaign codes to win a signup bonus if you enter the daily newsletter by midnight. Or dozens of AI-generated employer branding blog posts churned out just to max the SEO of the jobs.
Some empathy and respect for the individual is always needed for recruitment to work, or you won’t optimize for finding the right people. I hope this theory is right because it would show us a clear path of hope.
Job search and applying may be entering the goldilocks stage where the UX is becoming more mature, but not too mature. Run by HR people with marketing and data analytics skills, not by soulless micro-optimizers who squeeze max conversion out of a button.
Let’s make applying more humane, not just more efficient.
So long as we keep the individual human being in mind and build jobs, content, application forms and all the rest around that ultimate focus on their experience, I think we have a chance to actually win the internet. Wouldn't that be fun?