How Applicant-Friendly Is Your Hiring Process?
Our next step in this ongoing endeavor to convert more of your company’s career site visitors to applicants – look at the hiring process through the eyes of your applicants. How intuitive is it? How good (or bad) is the experience?
There’s a fine line to be walked here. You want to make the recruiting process inviting and make it simple enough for people to apply. It can’t be a 30-45 minute exercise that requires them to provide excruciating detail about every job they’ve held, school they’ve attended, etc. On the other hand, you may encounter different problems if you don’t find a way to make the process organized and consistent. Simply allowing applicants to email their resume puts you in a position where all of the work falls on your shoulders as the potential employer.
In this blog, I’ll mention a couple of things our applicant tracking software clients use regularly to achieve a healthy balance.
Transition applicants from job listing directly to employment application
The best way to do this is to allow site visitors to start an application on the same page as the job description. This way, new applicants to your site can create their initial profile on-the-fly. While it might not seem like a big deal – as opposed to clicking a button that says “Apply Now” — it is interesting to see the increased number of applicants when this approach is used. This is no different than our inbound marketing consulting group advising us on how moving a box on our website will improve conversion. Amazingly, that simple step has significant results. The same holds true with this application launch feature at the end of a job overview. It’s a very simple yet powerful way to convert more visitors to applicants.
Shorten the employment application, itself
As best you can, look at that document with a fresh set of eyes to determine how much of what’s on there is truly useful and needed. For instance…
- How much information do you really need regarding prior employers?
- Do you need an actual physical address, or just the city & state?
- Do you truly need the supervisor’s phone number, or is an email enough?
This same process can be applied to the standard questions that are asked of your applicants. Perhaps it’s not really relevant to know what days of the week they prefer to work, or whether they’re willing to work overtime – especially if you only work standard business days and hire exempt staff! The point here is simple – eliminate what’s not needed to make the process as reasonable for your applicants as it can be.
Considering these seemingly small changes can help yield big results in terms of your flow of applicants. Stay tuned for my next installment where we look at a very unique way to actually break this application process into two separate steps.
In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about ExactHire please visit our resources section or contact us.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
