This week in HR, we look at Recruiting. What a time we are in! Like many employers, Home Depot is contending with labor shortages as it tries to fill open positions. The home improvement retailer recently announced it would transition to a new "accelerated hiring process," making job offers to applicants in as little as one day after applying.

But when interested job seekers click the "Apply" button on the company's website, they are presented with the login page for an applicant tracking system (ATS). Like many other employers, Home Depot requires applicants to first set up an account and password with the ATS before they can proceed with the application—likely leading many to just move on. 

Barriers in the online job application process have always been a problem, and while research shows that candidate abandonment is still staggeringly high, a recent audit of the Fortune 500 returned some interesting data points: Job application flow has improved, but there are still too many steps involved in getting applicants to the finish line.

According to one respected recruitment data providers, the candidate drop-off rate for people who click 'Apply' but never complete an application is almost unbelievably 92 percent.

Published by isolved, our recruitment technology provider, "Candidate application volume has always been important and has always had its own unique set of challenges. The events of the past two years have intensified the importance and the challenges. Candidates are consumers, and they want quick, easy, and informative processes. Without that, they will move on. A strong talent attraction strategy and a great employer brand, combined with an engaging and authentic careers site and an easy application process, is critical."

A local recruiting expert recently told me that the flow of the application process is so important because of the speed of hire that is necessary in today's hiring environment. Companies must streamline their processes. The faster you can get a candidate into the funnel, the faster you can hire them. Tony Robins has been quoted many times, “Fire quickly, and hire slowly.” That was all well and fine pre-pandemic, but it seems wildly passe now.

A 90 percent drop-off rate (if that’s true, and I think it is) will drive your cost per application up…think about the fact that Indeed charges you for clicks, not successful application follow-through. It's going to drive your cost-per-hire up, increase your time-to-fill, and hurt your quality of hire. Every talent acquisition metric can be improved by improving your apply flow conversion rate. And the best way to do that is to make the apply flow experience better for candidates.

Lots of Clicks

The average time to complete an application is 4 minutes and 52 seconds, with the large, legacy ATSs returning the longest application completion times and the newer, more-flexible systems delivering faster results. Think isolved and efficiencies… People don’t want to invest in companies – especially those that don’t bother to answer their application with a declination or “thank you.”

Remove unnecessary complexity in your application process – don’t add a bunch of knock-out questions just for the sake of weeding out qualified candidates. There won’t be a ton of applicants anyway, relative to pre-pandemic levels. For every posting, we receive around 30% the volume we did a year ago and even less of a percent of those received pre-2020. We have to make every ad view count, more than ever now, as we vie against remote employers willing to pay anything for people in our market.

An average application process can be disrespectful of the applicant’s time. They are asked to create user accounts and passwords, they are being asked to answer the same question more than once, or they are being asked to enter data that is already contained in the resume that is also being uploaded.

isolved finds that 51 clicks are required across industries and different platforms to get through an average application. And the barriers keep coming…now some job seekers are required to authenticate their identity via e-mail before they can log back in to complete their application, presumably for security purposes. And we know for a fact there are bots and scammers trying every angle to infiltrate businesses’ servers, but there must be a balance of needs.

Progressive employers are shifting to a much simpler lead generation approach for the initial apply process and even ditching the resume requirement. Use a short form asking for name, phone number, e-mail and maybe a LinkedIn profile—that's it. Just get the basics. You don't need a resume, you don't need someone's SSN, you don't need their whole history yet. Recruiters can work from those leads to ask for more information if they want to move on with the applicant.

Many have advocated for the elimination of upfront registration and account creation altogether – which you can do with isolved. Think like a marketer, not a hiring manager, and you’ll take your process from clumsy technique to art.

People have dozens of logins for dozens of ATSs. That's part of the reason why people feel job hunting is so frustrating.

Sharing Branding

Almost half (48 percent) of the Fortune 500 feature ATS logos and branding within the application process, potentially creating confusion for the candidate as to where their information is going. We focus on imbuing your isolved portal with your branding, not Crescent’s or isolved’s.

If the transfer is done well, it's not that big of a deal, Russell said, but when "clicking 'Apply' opens up a new tab on your browser and the ATS site looks very different, that's not appealing.

Experts agree that the application experience should be consistent and that employers should ask their ATS partners to remove their vendor branding and update the look and feel of the ATS pages to mirror the employer's careers site.

Companies invest heavily in their brand, and it should be authentically demonstrated throughout the entire talent experience, even going beyond the application, to all candidate outreach. It shouldn't feel like you're moving to a totally different website.

Continuous Improvement

Experts recommend that talent acquisition practitioners experience their own organization's application process. See how long it takes you and, when you’re done, ask yourself how you felt about the experience. Then simplify the process, simplify account creation, and remove redundant and unneeded questions.

Everyone involved in hiring, including recruiters and a focus group of representative hiring managers, should evaluate the application process, noting areas to improve and opportunities to engage more with applicants.

If at all possible, track the applicant drop-off rate and other conversion metrics first, so measurements can be compared once changes are made. Crescent and empactHR can help you work through this strategic overhaul of your recruitment process and we can help you understand how to measure your recruiting success through real metrics.