How Focusing on the Candidate Experience Helps You Hire Faster and Better

BY Matthew Koehler | July 16, 2024

Today’s job seekers are sending out dozens of applications just to get to an interview, let alone an offer. Candidates don't want to waste unnecessary time where they don’t have to. “Speed is a cornerstone of hiring. And companies that have a streamlined and efficient application process can convert more job seekers into applicants,” said Naomi Bower, senior director of design at Lever, an Employ Solution.

Most of those job seekers, around 78%, believe the application process should take 30 minutes or less, but still, that’s too long, says Bower, who led a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s June virtual conference. “Nearly one in 10 job seekers believe the application process should take less than five minutes,” she said. Bower spoke about what companies can do to focus on the candidate experience and speed up the process.

More than a third, around 39%, of job seekers will abandon applying for a job if the application takes too long, Bower says. This  means that companies are missing out on recruiting potential talent. “Imagine you worked for a B2C company, and your sales team noticed that nearly 40% of customers were abandoning their carts in your E-commerce workflow. Wouldn’t your entire company drop what they're doing to rally around fixing that problem?”

There are some simple fixes to streamlining the application process, says Bower. Making candidates type out information that’s already on their resume or taking steps that aren’t necessary are the most common frustrations for applicants. Other actions that will cause them to abandon the application process include having to join a talent network or creating a profile.

Naomi Bower, the senior director of design at Lever, an Employ Solution, led the session (company photo)

“If you’re on a hiring team, or a talent acquisition team, you can shift your perspective to one that also considers the time it takes a candidate to apply,” Bower said. “Just like you’d rally your team around reducing the time to hire, reducing the time to apply helps both your TA team and your candidates. So it’s a win win.”

To more quickly get from start to finish in the application process, Bower says companies need to focus on design. “When we think about design in terms of how something works, we can see how the principles of good design are critically important to something like shaping the experience of applying for a job online. At the end of the day, design is about crafting something with intention.”

To accomplish this, teams should focus on making the process simple, useful, and giving users control. To build out a UX that reduces friction and workflows, companies have to eliminate unnecessary and repetitive steps. Bower says you want to give candidates a good return on investment “by ensuring that [you’re] only asking them to complete the steps that add value for them.” This can be as simple as looking at an application process and taking out non-critical steps for candidates.

However, there are times when adding friction to the application process can benefit both the company and the candidate in the long term. For example, if a role requires a specific license or certification, then having an extra step whereby they certify or upload that license or certification, saves every one time by weeding out candidates who aren’t certified to fill a role.

There are several easy steps recruiting teams can make today with minimal effort to vastly improve candidates conversion rates. “The first one is to skip the registration requirement. Registration on a career site often comes with complex username and password requirements that create a barrier to moving forward.”

The next step is enabling quick-apply options, like social, cloud, and mobile applications. “Allowing candidates to leverage their social profiles, like LinkedIn and Facebook, to apply for jobs is a recruiting best practice. Having the option for applicants to automatically populate relevant information from their social media profile is effective in converting career site visitors and applicants.”

The same can be said for using Dropbox or Google Drive to populate relevant fields with cloud-based documents. “And employee data reveals that only about half of organizations offer candidates the option to apply with a cloud-based resume, which is a major deterrent for tech savvy candidates.”

“If your application process isn’t optimized for mobile, you’re absolutely losing out on candidates. Indeed is considered the world’s largest job site and offers a game changing opportunity for companies to convert candidates into applicants by leveraging organic candidate traffic, specifically at a point of application conversion.”

Bower points to some strategies to improve the candidate experience and positively impact candidate conversion. First, audit your own candidate's journey – put yourself in their shoes. Is it a process that you'd feel great about completing if you are a job seeker? Next, measure what matters to your organization and then optimize from the end of the candidate journey to the beginning. “And what I mean by this is to start with the end goal in mind of having job seekers complete the process and go from a site visitor to an applicant.”

At the end of the day, though, it’s about the process, and the best way to understand that process, and how it can be improved, is to experience it yourself. “Something that you can do right now as a hiring team, is just review your application process. Go on to your career site, step through that process yourself. And just take a really critical lens to what the steps are,” Bower said.

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Lever, an Employ Solution, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.

Matthew Koehler is a freelance journalist and licensed real estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in Greater Greater Washington, The Washington Post, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.

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