Our final highlight from the second episode of the William Tincup Experience featuring Alex Murphy touches on recruiter and candidate experience.
Candidate experience
Candidates vote with their mouths about what they will and will not accept.
19 out of 20 people will bail on the application process if they have to take the ATS apply path (Appcast).
Have you considered what it means for your application process to be broken? This idea does not center around functionality - like if you were viewing it from an IT perspective. All the buttons worked, all the data routed, so nothing was actually broken. That is technically a working application, except it’s not. The objective is not to JUST get people through the process, it’s to get as many qualified people to apply and into your system of record.
Nobody wants to hire a professional job seeker and nobody wants to BE a professional job seeker.
To understand how to improve your candidate experience, go apply for a job - no - go apply for 50. And then imagine that it is 11pm and you are about to apply for job number 51 and you are routed to a login screen. A professional job seeker knows what the next steps are, but someone who is not a professional has no idea how to even get to the apply process. The tolerance level for candidates is not high enough to sit through this process. This results in unhappy candidates and even more unhappy recruiters. The candidate expectation today has not changed much from what it used to be. They are convinced the ATS is screening them out, that a bot is in charge, etc.
Recruiter experience
When recruiters become aware of the application drop off rate, they take the process into their own hands. They head to job sites like LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, and Indeed and manually post their open roles - and because sites reward this immersive user experience, those jobs have more visibility, they attract more candidates, the Easy Apply process can be utilized, and now the system tracking the applications is no longer the ATS, it is the recruiters inbox.
However, In order for an application to be considered “real” or “full” it still needs to end up in the ATS, so the recruiter now ends up copying and pasting the information from their inbox into their system of record - which means more manual data entry, less time recruiting. All of which is a result of a broken application process like mentioned above.
Check out the full conversation here: https://youtu.be/timyD55kR2Q