This might seem a bit of a change in direction. I’ve always championed mobile integration in to recruitment process, and apply by mobile has been a big part of the conversation. At risk of being controversial (as if I would), I have been rethinking my position on this. First off, this doesn’t mean I’m changing my mind about the importance of mobile, the numbers show that mobile is social, and is fast becoming web. Mobile should be the first consideration in buying or building technology, building mobile to web rather than the other way round.
Over the last 3 months I have been spending a lot of time going through the data for the Candidate Experience Awards, UK Edition, known as the CandE’s. When you look at the hard data from a wide range of companies, the learning points are quite clear. To give you some idea of the headlines that are going to be included in the white paper:
> The average job gets 80 applications for each post filled.
> 70% of candidates are unqualified for the job they apply for
> Only 20% of applicants see a job description before applying, and this includes the minimum requirements.
When you look at these numbers, it does make you question if this is desperation or a lack of research on the part of the applicants. Whilst the process might well be painful, as is well documented, killer questions are being left to the end of the process, (if at all), rather than being stated before starting the application process. It seem that all the emphasis has been on talent attraction rather tan recruiting, as recruiters have rushed to become marketeers. With these numbers, any level of candidate experience for already overloaded recruiters becomes a problem.
This brings me on to mobile apply, or any type of apply for that matter. The smart companies in the survey have started separating out candidates and applicants, with different processes to provide the best experience for each. My definitions are:
> Candidates
Anyone connected with the company in a network. This could be a talent network, a LinkedIn follower, a Facebook fan or similar. A candidate should be able to declare their interest with one click, giving access to their data, enabling notification of relevant content and opportunities matched to their profiles. A candidate stays a candidate as long as they choose to be connected. This replaces concepts like silver medalists, or the win/lose application process.
> Applicant
Anyone actively in the application process for a job or jobs. A minimum requirement of this should be that the applicant is aware of the minimum requirements and has seen a form of the job spec, not the job ad, but the job spec. Rejected applicants become candidates for future messaging, sourcing, matching and consideration. My thinking on mobile is that this should be for the candidate process only, though the process of moving from candidate to applicant can be mobile enabled via the talent network, with mobile landing pages and related data sent to those candidates who match the minimum requirements based on the candidate data submitted.
My thinking now is for a mobile candidate process, and that a mobile apply process on its own might just make the situation worse. The #CandE UK WhitePaper will be available for download soon. Any company interested in getting their own process benchmarked against other EMEA employers can register their interest free to take part in the 2013 survey. There is no maximum number of companies who can be awarded the kite mark recognition, or achieve distinction, and all companies get a complete report. If you are serious about candidate experience, take part!
Bill
PLEASE NOTE: The opinions expressed in this post are mine, and not an official #CandE communication.
Find out about the CandEUK 2013 Awards HERE
Right after rethinking mobile apply, wonder whether the 70% who made no investment in the application they submitted really need a better experience. I doubt it
The recruiter does John. Lose the 70% so they can concentrate on the 30%, We should talk more about recruiter experience and quality control.
Well said and spot on Bill, it’s purely the 30% that need focus, the rest are to a large degree a waste of time
Interesting data Bill!
Thinking out loud after reading your article (so this may not work)…
What if apply was two phased?
Part one the candidate answers key closed questions based on the job description, in fact ditch most of the job description and just show half a dozen multi choice questions in its place! So part one is name, email, current job title, current company and (mobile friendly) multi choice question.
Phase two an email inviting the candidate to send resume or Li profile (mobile friendly).
So in one go we reinvent the awful job description. All we need is tech to read today’s terrible job description and turn it into questions?
I’m a bit more radical than that, get rid of the application process completely and enable the candidate process (submit profiles). to become a candidate,and only invite those qualified to become an applicant at the appropriate time. When we change the candidate/applicant thinking, we change everything.
I’ve been operating on sort of the opposite definition (applicant is anyone who applies, candidate is any applicant who’s deemed worthy of serious consideration for the position), but I agree with the thinking. More prescreening (even via mobile) makes for more qualified applicants.
You said it Dave and this really not that difficult to turn around and change. To have an initial screen with say the 5 most important criteria (as stipulated by hiring manager, and re-configured by talent acquisition) should cut down the 70% significantly. If at the same time we could do away with the by now really dusty and so cliche job description and replace it with something fresh and innovative as per Lou Adler: http://bit.ly/X7YnkB
then we can get far an beyond where things are right now. Using a quote from Einstein ‘if I had an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about it, how to solve it, and 5 minutes in solving it’ It really is that simple.
Jacob,
Forget what job descriptions are now, and think what job descriptions can be. When you think of job descriptions as that, presented in different formats like video, pictures, blogs etc, you can see what is possible. Lou Addler is talking nonsense again I’m afraid. You don’t have to kill everything that doesn’t work, just change it to something better. Kill poor job descriptions, but show them in some more interactive formats before asking people to apply. applicants should really know what they are applying for.
@Bill, now there is a thought, let’s rethink the entire process rather than patch up and continue, Right out of Mr Adlers thinking.
@Bill I beg to differ on Adler as I think he is right to a very large degree. As for using different formats rather than traditional CV, sorry but with for most categories of roles with a high volume of applicants (even in 30% category) I can faster and more efficiently scan and assess CV’s that way rather than looking at any ‘creative format’ In a recent discussion amongst my peers that was also the overall consensus.
Oops think I went off on the wrong tangent there re CV’s – apologies. indeed creative and different exposure of JDs the way forward and circling back to Adler using his recipe for format will enable to make it much more interesting.
jacob,
when the line manager draws up the job description, you get the starting point for selection. this is a selection tool, not a marketing tool. You can convert the JD in to content for attraction, but make the minimum requirement clear.remember Im talking about applicants not candidates. You can determine who to send your content to from your candidates based on their data. The JDs now be poorly written, but they are not poor instruments. I think adler misses this point in a big way.
Hi Bill, pleased to see the focus of this latest blog. As you know, I have been banging the recruiter experience drum for some time, and as someone at the coal face having to deal with the 70%ers, I agree wholeheartedly. People make the decision to apply for roles for multiple reasons, but the one killer question I would include if we can be assured of an honest answer, is “Have you actually read the jd?” Agreeing twice in one post with Bill doesn’t sit well(!), but I must also agree that Lou Adler’s post is wrong. I believe an applicant deserves a basic acknowledgement that their application has been received and whether it is being considered or not. A candidate can be “dispositioned” to different stages where different levels of contact are appropriate – be it post interview feedback and such like. What I hear from recruiters is that we are not short of applicants, we are short of the right applicants, and the general “noise” means that it makes it even harder to sort the wheat from the chaff.
sorry to get you on board Ken. The #candeS showed that recruiters get everything dumped on them from selection to feedback, along with an average 20 recs at any one time. Guess why the process slips
Great conversation you’ve started here Bill.
A couple thoughts:
Engaging and allowing prospects to apply w/o much research into what they may be getting into is not providing a candidate experience that focuses on a context to help them make the best decisions.
In that case, both the company and the individual have failed.
However to dismiss that pool as a waste and outside the company’s capability to fix given the tools available today is a mistake. Potentially its a valuable ‘rework’ opportunity.
Recruiting is and should be moving beyond mindless sales cliches. Prospects, in the end, do need to see ‘hurdles’ if they haven’t prepared themselves..and that would be a positive candidate experience that focuses on fully informing a potential partner rather than influencing a mindless customer.
My definitions differ somewhat but since there are no agreed standards, we’ll work them around til we get to it.
I see the following terms in the supply chain:
Lead- Person whose data is insufficient to determine if we want to engage i.e. a list of all the people who attended a relevant conference. Leads are not aware of your company’s interest in them.
Prospect- Any person who is being engaged by the recruiter/company but has not yet applied i.e. in CRM with touchpoints. Prospects are aware of the company. They may have an interest in working there…or not at this time but they have not formally expressed interest in working there now.
Candidate- EVERYONE, passive or not, qualified or not who has formally expressed an interest in a position. This crucial distinction is important in my mind because the Candidate has very specific expectations at the moment they commit…and few companies make an effort to understand what they are (with data rather than opinion) and then help to set or re-set those expectations…the core of the candidate experience.
Applicant- A candidate (above) being considered who is also qualified (uniquely an American definition)
Finalist (silver medalist). An applicant pool screened down to the firms minimum practical limit to select.
Selected New Hire. Still a candidate (at the least) until the last day in the previous company…and maybe until they are performing up to speed in the new company. (How you treat them here could be a critical win or loss for everything that went before).
Personally, I believe the onboarding of an employee should be of real interest to any recruiter regardless of whether they are responsible for it or not. I used to piss off a lot of hiring managers when I critiqued their practices several months into one of my hires.
Thanks Gerry,
you started this whole ball rolling. it was interesting to hear from the distinction winners that they class a candidate as a candidate until the end of probation, when they move to HR.. I’m a big fan of this approach and thinking. I get your classifications. maybe we need an applicant experience and a candidate experience award, as most of a companies focus seems to be on technology and applicants in a pass/fail transaction.
Bill
For legal purposes (in the USA), an “Applicant” is a person who has created an “expression of interest” in a particular position. In other words, its the seeker, not the employer, who triggers the status.
No problem with that martin. you send the matched opportunity, they say “interested” and become an applicant. Works fine for Find.ly, jobs2web etc. Bill
As the one that started the Adler topic I feel obliged to make a comment on it. I don’t understand why what Adler says is being shot down the way it is, and for the sake of clarification let me just say that for this is about: how to change the process of getting more relevant and better candidates in through the door. For me that can be done in several ways, like what Dave said, a up front/early in process qualification questionnaire. However as we know that the old and dusty JD does not necessarily (rarely) yield response from the best candidates, this is about how to make it all the more enticing, getting to the core and actually explaining what it is that we want a candidate to do in a role, rather than list a range of criteria that rarely has any relevance on abilities. If we are to look at the whole subject from a new and fresh perspective then surely the JD is one that cannot be left untouched, – and that is my point with raising the points that Adler advocate.
As for Gerry’s comments, I agree with you, that there might (I repeat the word) might be value and opportunities in the 70% BUT we all know that of the 70% be it directly or indirectly only more like 30-40% will be of real value as a future network, as a lever to access and reach out to candidates of potential interest. That means (and this can be done, is purely question of devising the methodology for it and then scale it) how to either identify those 30-40% and/or how to be able to send messages out to all applicants that will acknowledge their interest and take them or those that they may know to next level as a community. Unfortunately I think this is a pretty complex subject to get your head around (not by that saying that we shouldn’t) only that many angles, many answers, many perspectives.
Jacob,
for me it really lies in the candidate/applicant approach.Why invite people to apply for jobs they cant get without first accesing and matching their data. Ths is easy to do now, and moves away from a pass/fail transaction to a life long relationship. tracking potentially interested people does not require them to submit data or to apply, and it is made easy now with all the data available. Candidate first/informed applicant second. this is a shift in thinking. connect by mobile, apply later, and only show jobs to people who match the minimum requirement. Why tease them with anything else?
This is a great discussion area. Good post Bill, and I am glad your research backs the common `recruiter experience` gripe that Ken alludes to
As per the discussion on the social agency hangout we had – the problem is the stem of the way we advertise, when we target wide, receive applications wide, and reject wide.
Focus on communicating consistently with the 100s of relevant candidates, rather than mis-communicating with the 1000s who will apply with ill-sense and then complain when you don’t reply.
The astonishing lack of focus on talent-pipe-lining and cluster-targeting in recruitment methodology staggers me. Major brands can do it off the back of their status and the size of their recruitment teams. Agencies can do it off the back of their specialisms.
So, my advice is, build community pipelines, find brand & career advocates with influence within that community – share roles and careers within that community for referral and re-distribution within their relevant networks.
The Candidate Experience is something that is less a recruiter issue, and it’s not a mobile issue – but more a process issue. Choose bad processes, and you get bad candidate experience.
Well said and true in every sense Steve
Amen to that
Some interesting and valid views on the candidate / recruiter experience but I really want to comment on the mobile apply part of this.
I think you are making some assumptions about what mobile apply actually is in your post Bill. We’re still at the very beginning of the mobilization of recruitment but I’m already noticing companies that are implementing mobile apply are doing it in a number of different ways. Furthermore I’ve seen tech from some as yet still below the radar companies that does some very interesting things in this area.
Mobile could potentially offer whole new ways of improving the methods and processes which companies use to attract talent. It seems a shame at this early stage to set it up as a problem to solve rather than an opportunity to think differently about what we already do and make it better.
The recruitment industry has a tradition of bashing the square peg of “we’ve always done it like this” into the round hole of technology innovation. Mobile is such a disruptive force that approach just won’t work this time. We need to be thinking smarter about the opportunity rather than revisiting the same old tired debates
Thanks for posting Bill you’ve certainly got us talking
Thanks for adding your view Matt. I have also seen some brilliant new mobile technology that offers exciting possibilities in just about every area of talent attraction, branding and the recruitment process as a whole. I agree that the required rebuild and rethink around mobile is a great opportunity to rethink how things are done in the whole recruitment process. This is part of my thinking around doing away with the apply process, and not just on mobile, and looking towards connect and content for candidates. With the data we can extract and score, there is no need for the old style of search or apply. The numbers are showing that it is too easy to make an application for a job that an applicant is unqualified for, and too much thinking is based on pass/fail, rather than a talent network approach. I’m all for rethinking everything to solve some of the problems we have now. I’m not convinced making it easy to apply, rather than connect is going to make the situation any better though. Bill
With 99% of employers though we’re not talking about making it easy to apply via mobile we’re talking about making it possible in the first place!
A point well made. I prefer making it easy to connect, engage without the need for a big apply button.
Perhaps they can be refined, but I do agree with Gerry’s definitions, and the uses to which classifications of candidates in all stages of the process can be put.
Lead
Prospect
Candidate
Applicant
Finalist
Selected New Hire.
Bill’s initial contention was that the use of mobile applications inferred that the depth of content delivered by someone registering their interest, was more likely to be poor, and that the ease of application did not test the individual’s determination. This therefore made for a huge number of casual applicants, who aren’t THAT keen, and aren’t THAT suitable. (Remembering always, that eager candidates aren’t always suitable either)
So we want to attract the best, and dissuade the rest – it was ever thus!
I reckon the only way we have of changing candidate’s behaviour, is by establishing new norms, which become accepted as standard by employers, agencies, and by jobseekers. Technology has meant that the ground is always moving beneath the feet of all players in this game; meaning, as Steve Ward said, employers default to attracting wide, and candidates to applying wide. Nobody wants to miss an opportunity, and very few trust that the process will efficiently bring together good matches. That good candidates don’t get overlooked, and good jobs are visible to all.
When I was a kid, my dad told me that if I was very good at something, I wouldn’t have to look for work; instead work would come looking for me. Well, unfortunately technology in the hands of very well-intentioned people, has meant that we have proportionately fewer needles in a far bigger haystacks.
I would start by using Gerry’s titles and let individuals know how we classify them at any given point. Technology enables us to at least do that.
“Dear Mr XXXX. You are a candidate for this position, and will become an Applicant if you are considered to be suitable. We will notify you by 1st April if you have progressed to this stage.”
Thanks Stephen,
As always, Gerry comes up with some great points. What the survey results showed us is that there is just not enough information for candidates to make informed decisions, and the concentration on marketing has seen companies judging success by volume rather than quality. the standard process is ad to apply or update to ad to apply, with little content in between. I’ve also seen little evidence of companies being open over their culture, considering anything that might put off an application as being a bad thing. this is of course wrong. There is a lot more to this data than bad applicants who rush to apply. I’m not sure we need search for jobs on career sites, or apply, given the data and matching technology we have available. Be interesting to see how this pans out.
Bill
I think this is a great conversation that needs to be had. The problem as I see it is that we are trying to take the “Desktop” process and mentality of Apply and fit it into Mobile. Mobile is a completely different medium that people use differently. There is a different behavior that requires a completely new approach. This includes the way in which people consume the job description and employer content to help them decide if they should apply in the first place.
If we simply take the desktop content and apply process and make it fit the screen size, we are not doing anyone any favors. Applying on the desktop is already disjointed and cumbersome, imagine how much worse on a small screen.
There are no glaring solutions as of yet, but the reality is – this is very much in the hands of the Employer and their willingness to change. Going mobile is forcing us to rethink the need to have a full application with 27 pages of questions all in the first touch. Here is a small example. All job applications collect a physical address. We used to need this on the first touch so we could send a post card to acknowledge their application – but today we don’t need this unless we are ready to run a background check. Easily something that can be pushed down to a point much later in the process.
It makes me think of the regulations regarding Accessibility. Today in the US, if you make any improvements to your building (i.e. renovate the lobby) you must also make the entire building accessible with ramps, hand rails, etc. These regulations are in place to ensure that people in wheel chairs can reasonably gain access to public places. But in the end, who uses the ramps the most? People with strollers, shopping carts, roller board suitcases. The accessibility improvements are good for everyone – and so will the improvements to the apply process to accommodate the mobile job seeker.
Thanks Ed. my question is wether people need to apply at all when all their data is available elsewhere. Why not just connect and have jobs and content that fits come to you.
THIS is the key. “Why not just connect and have jobs and content that fits come to you.”
Less adverts. More relationships. Better trust. Better candidate experience. Better advocacy. Better business.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading each and every comment, and I personally appreciate the mutual respect everyone is exhibiting in spite of differing opinions. At more of a ground level, I am interested in learning and exploring more about specific app vendors or companies who are utilizing mobile the “best” right now so I can stay abreast of who is leading on this platform at the moment. I realize there may not be one clear leader, but certainly a few who have (a) nailed the mobile apply, (2) integrated video JD to sell the role, (c) vendors who have build integrations into ATS, and (d) using geo targeting to communicate with candidates (or applicants) within a specific location.
Also happy to take the discussion off line if this is off topic or if the thread is too lengthy.
adam, will do a follow up post to answer this Adam, but lets connect and have a conversation.
Gerry makes excellent points and recommendations and from where I see it, filling in the bits and pieces in between is not hard work, all it requires is an hour or so thinking it through and then doing it. 99% of companies are truly useless at providing a guide and an advice of what is going on and when and the entire process, – that can be fixed very easily (‘where there is a will there is a way’) As for your suggestion Steve and with what you advocate for Bill, let the jobs come to you. You are kinda going down the route that the Coupon/daily deal providers like Groupon are applying, set the basic criteria, sign up and off you go. One would think that if the likes of Groupon can do this, why not the world of talent acquisition/recruitment? Why despite obviously being done in respect to discounted deals this not done when coming to jobs is a mystery. It appear to me that the technologies in their raw form out there, yet not applied in respect to jobs, taking that step ought not to be that insurmountable.
Jacob – it has existed in principle for years, through job boards’ categorization and `relevant` alerts, etc – but the inaccuracies of automation mean that it becomes flawed, because the wide filter options do nothing more than potentially spray wider.
The loyalty factor needs to come from direct interaction rather than automation. Our persistent quest for automation in this industry diminishes quality in the recruitment process.
Direct human contact and one-to-one communication with targeted and relevant people isn’t the worst idea in the world in recruitment. The persistent drive to change this frustrates me.
So on that note Steve, might one conclude: Get the basics, and get them to be right (aka engage, communicate, and s p e a k to candidates) yet sprinkle a dusting of new and radical thinking (mobile, pre-qualification, build systems for candidates coming to us) that will enable and enhance basics?
Sounds simple and in fact I think it is and could be, however we seem to want to make things more complex than they need to be and to what purpose?
Met an extraordinary successful recruiter (agency) at TruLondon and he is successful on basis of doing recruitment as per Anno 1990, yet with assistance of today’s tools and channels! He has 80% of business from 20% of clients, he measures his agents as per how much they speak with candidates and he places 2/3 of candidates through referrals. Have we lost sight of what really works and matters in our pursuit of next shiny new tech solution?