Applying to Job Postings Online - Poetry in motion -- or -- something else ???

The Graphic as part of the header for this article is in the style of Rube Goldberg (1883-1970). If you're not familiar with his work, he was an American Cartoonist who made fun of the American preoccupation with automation. He did this well before our current Digital Transformation focus. His name has become synonymous with any simple process made unnecessarily complicated. He had a very tongue-in-cheek way of showing how we seem to have a propensity for taking something simple and then purposefully making it something completely inefficient and thereby creating lots of new opportunities -- for failure.

So, ironically, that leads us today to discussing the state of Applying to Job Postings online. (the crowd cheers -- or more likely groans)

While I was exploring new Job Opportunities myself in this rather challenging Job Market (thank you Covid-19, not) I experienced first-hand a wide variety of online Job Application systems/processes being utilized by Employers. Even when multiple firms are using the same HRIS system or the same ATS system to manage the Application process, it appears everyone has configured these systems quite differently. One would suppose that was done to address the perceived "unique" hiring processes required by each individual Employer (or was it?).

(time for a deep breath and a quiet sigh just thinking about this)

Some of these systems seem to provide a relatively quick and easy process to upload your Resume, answer a few basic questions, and apply to the open position. Many times populating the database directly from your Resume. These Employers seem to want to make it easy for you to let them know about your background and to make it easy to provide them with access to your skills/experience. They would be the exceptions, for the most part, compared to the bulk of what I have experienced personally and that sentiment has also been echoed by the Candidates I've talked to when discussing their own job search efforts.

Most of the Application processes I've seen are -- fairly cumbersome, time consuming, sometimes just downright confusing, and they often require the Candidate to provide a level of detail that goes well beyond what a reasonable person might expect the concept of applying to a Job should really be.

Quite a few of these systems are also trying to utilize rather poorly (imho) constructed questionnaires, some short, some lengthy, which a Candidate might deduce is a rather weak attempt at automating the pre-screening process. That's the process which determines who a Recruiter is eventually going to actually talk to. The goal is good -- let's filter the dozens & dozens of resumes we receive per open position down to just the "top" Candidates to talk to, the implementation of that process however doesn't really appear to be set up in a way to truly accomplish that goal. (false hope, perhaps ?)

I do have to say, if you're really using those questionnaires to automate the filtering of the Candidates that apply to your postings, you are definitely missing good people, and are in essence throwing away the very access to strong Candidates you long for in the current Job Market.

The pandemic initially afforded Employers with access to good people, lots of them. These were Candidates who through no fault of their own were currently looking for a new position or Candidates who were/are now motivated to find a new work environment that is truly Employee friendly. So Employers were initially spoiled with that level of access, but that time quickly passed. How quickly we forget we've seen this time and time again in the Job Market, where open positions greatly exceed viable Candidates to fill them. So now we're back to having Employers decrying that we are in a Labor Shortage, yet we keep seeing all sorts of barriers to entry being setup by the very Employers who are now desperate to add new staff. So, one might suggest that your questionnaires are most likely limiting your access to all the good Candidates you could be considering today. These would be Candidates you now have no barrier to meeting, they're identifying themselves directly to you by applying, but you are missing them anyways by how you've structured these questionnaires. (sorry, not really sorry, not at all)

Those questionnaires are typically, for lack of a better way to describe them, somewhat embarrassing to read through. Some of the questions asked are just not well thought out (imho) and it is puzzling to me why they were included in the first place. If they are actually being utilized to somehow automate the pre-screening of Candidates, this would be a real-life outright example of -- a major fail... They may have felt good to create, the concept seemed sound, but the desired results are just not going to be there as they are implemented today.

Unfortunately, they all too often ask a question, or questions, that really require a rather complex response from the Candidate, but the questionnaire has been designed to only allow either a "yes" or "no" response, or the Candidate has to pick an answer from some very limited multiple choice options, without allowing a Candidate to also give you some input (free form text anyone ?) to qualify their answer, to give you the "why" behind the answer they provided. Often times the question asked is of such a general nature, you can't really answer it with anything that would be truly useful in helping a Recruiter or a Hiring Manager to evaluate the value proposition of what a Candidate's experience really has to offer. Some of the questions are just, non-sensical. Perhaps the intent was good, but the implementation was just not well thought out.

Seems that someone needs to remind our Talent Acquisition friends, the ones that are using these questionnaires, that people are pretty complex -- their experiences, their skills, and their viewpoints usually can't be distilled down to what most of these questionnaires seem to be grasping to record. Either a better questionnaire is truly needed, or maybe, just maybe we should actually be talking to Candidates instead of using these questionnaires.

There are questions that ask a Candidate - "Have you done xxxx ?" or "Do you have experience with xxxx?" related to a particular skill or experience that may, in real life, require you to honestly say - "Yes I have, but probably not exactly in the way you're asking about it, what I have done related to that is ...", but the questionnaire locks the Candidate into giving either a "yes" or a "no" response, basically boxing the Candidate in to giving an answer that may not be completely accurate, either way they answer. If you say "No" then it's implied you don't have ANY experience with the skill at hand, so you may not be contacted for an interview, but if you say "Yes" then you're expected to have mastered that skill completely, where in reality the Candidate's experience is somewhere in between. Darned if you do, darned if you don't... So the value of the response to how the Question is worded, is pretty low and is not actually very useful or very accurate.

For example, when applying for an internal Talent Acquisition role -- I've routinely seen questionnaires that ask -- do you have experience with behavioral interviewing techniques? My own answer would be - "Partially... I've primarily done skills-based self-evaluation structured interviews with Candidates, ie. how comfortable are you with Skill A, when was the last time you used it, what did you learn from using it, how did it add value to your Employer's situation ? It is only when a Client has requested it, that I have then added to the interview some Situational (behavioral) questions that are most important to that particular Client. While not a full blown behavioral style interview or a PI (predictive index) focused interview, the interviews I've done have often included elements of behavioral interviewing. Sometimes using the STAR model, sometimes not. So, I do know what it is, I do know what the end goal is -- the Behavioral method of interviewing utilizes the assumption that future behaviors can be predicted (to a degree) by past behaviors, in similar circumstances".

So to answer the original question - do you have experience with behavioral interviewing techniques ? - I can not honestly say just "Yes" or just "No", if I'm to provide an Employer with an accurate and useful answer. The questionnaire in this case is too narrowly focused on a topic that may require a slightly more complex answer to address the intent of it. In case you couldn't tell, I have to say, I'm not a big fan of these pre-screening questionnaires as part of the Application process. The only time a pre-screening questionnaire has been useful in my career has been when a human being is the one asking the questions and allowing the Candidate to then qualify their answers. So either make the questions more flexible to respond to, like allowing someone to qualify their response in a free form text box next to the yes/no answer, or forego using them all together. If nothing else, allow free form text for qualifying purposes for every question. However, if you do that, you can't just set up some simple script or rule that if the response given is not the one you wanted you automatically disqualify the Candidate without anyone ever actually reviewing the qualifying response.

Moving on, I've also seen many of these systems asking for Professional References with your initial Application... Sorry, but my personal network of contacts, especially those who would be willing to vouch for my work ethic, abilities, and aptitude are never going to be provided to a Web Posting, ever...

Unless I'm actually a finalist for a position with your company, which implies we have met, interviewed, and discussed your company along with my background in some personal sort of way, and I am actually interested in joining your team, I am just not going to give you those contacts sight unseen. They are completely irrelevant to your evaluating my match to your open position at the earliest stages of an interview cycle, especially at the point of my initial application to your company. You don't need them when someone just applies, you don't need them to interview a Candidate yourself in an unbiased manner, and you don't need them if a Candidate has truly impressed your Hiring Manager and/or hiring team and as a result of that, they now want to hire this person, you just don't...

You see, I'm a firm believer that Professional References have an over-rated perceived value that is far from the reality of what they really represent. I've written an entire Article (Reference Checks Article) on this topic if you really want to open up that particular can of worms. Bottom line, you don't need Professional References from a Candidate when they are first applying to an open position, since realistically you won't be calling any of them just to decide if you should talk to the Candidate in the first place. Typically, as in 99.9% of the time, professional references are only contacted at the time of making an offer and in today's litigious world where most Employers, perhaps even your own, will only confirm dates of Employment, their usefulness is pretty low. (you have to get over yourself on this one, trust me)

I don't think I'm alone in this and I would hazard a guess that if you ask most Candidates about providing References (who are my former peers, supervisors, or business contacts) when I first apply to a position and -- doing so before I have ever talked with a Recruiter at the Employer, doing so before I have ever visited the Employer's location, and doing so before I have met anyone else at the Employer -- is just a bit premature.

In social circles it might be likened to a faux-paux, which if you're unfamiliar with that term is -- a slip or blunder in etiquette, manners, or conduct; an embarrassing social blunder or indiscretion (I found that definition online and it does seem to fit quite nicely here).

When applying to a position, it is fair to ask a Candidate to supply a Resume, their contact details, perhaps even a Cover Letter (assuming you do actually read Cover Letters), and to answer some basic logistical questions about the Candidate's ability to take a position if one were offered.

Considering that a Job Posting is actually an invitation by an Employer to introduce your work background to them for a position they are stating they do need to have filled, making that process overly detailed and cumbersome is not really all that inviting per se, and is not really in an Employers' best interest. Good Candidates will just not endure this very long and will simply move on and look for work with someone else who has a friendlier approach to hiring. For a Candidate, it comes down to evaluating -- are you easy to work with, or do you make Candidates run an obstacle course just to try to get noticed? The Employers that are the easiest to work with, they tend to get the most Candidates to consider for an open position.

So, even if Employers do feel they have an overwhelming abundance of Candidates to choose from -- chances are pretty good that they're still missing a lot of good Candidates (perhaps the best Candidates) due to their own systems and processes that are erroneously filtering good people out of consideration early on in the interview cycle. So you just might want to review and adjust your online application processes a tad bit, to make them just a little more flexible and user-friendly.

Your competition for good staff is certainly going to do this and they really hope that you don't. (let's pause and think about that last statement for a minute, please)

If history is our Teacher, it's during periods when Employers have a high degree of access to Candidates is when you should be gobbling up resumes and talking to as many Candidates as you can, as fast as you can, and building up your database of Candidates which you can access later on when the market shifts back to what we see today, too many positions open and not enough qualified Candidates applying.

Yet, conventional logic never seems to remember this or take this idea to heart, and lots of good Candidates get ignored when they were readily available. It may seem counter-intuitive to talk with lots of Candidates when they're available but you're not hiring, just so you can be ready for when no one is applying and you then need to add staff quickly.

The analogy of - gathering up those Acorns now before Winter comes and they're no longer easily found - comes to mind here.

Firms that do take advantage of this will have an easier time Recruiting regardless of current market conditions, those who said they were just too busy or too overloaded to think about it, they will continue to ride the feast or famine roller coaster related to access to potential staff in the days ahead.

I'll offer the following observations related to hiring, from a Candidate's point of view, you can certainly deny them if you wish, but they do come from my personal experiences recently and my many years of Agency Staffing where I've talked with literally thousands of Candidates and heard their frustrations first hand. That said, I do understand if you want to stay in denial about your own Application processes being modern and easy to use, it's the old - you can lead a horse to water analogy playing itself out. (a horse neighing and snorting sound right about now would seem appropriate)

Things I would recommend you consider --

• Access to Good Candidates is typically hard to come by and as the Job Market continues to improve it won't get any easier. Since we are now in a Job Market condition where there are more open positions than available Candidates to fill them, it would be best to fix your Application processes today to take better advantage of the Candidates you can still attract to your job postings.
• Good Candidates are typically good People, and they are usually better at doing their chosen vocation than writing an exciting Resume to explain to you how they did it. So we need to rethink and modify how we're reviewing and filtering Candidates as they apply to avoid missing many strong potential Employees. There is an art to evaluating a resume and knowing when a Candidate is probably much stronger than the Resume is showing. It takes experience to know how to crack the code here, and flimsy questionnaires during the application process is definitely not the solution.
• Good People usually expect that a Good Employer hires other Good People, and they need to see that first hand by having a Good Candidate Experience when applying to your firm. That means an easier, less cumbersome application process, good follow up communication, finding a way to actually engage a Candidate without screening them out arbitrarily, a friendly and encouraging interview process. (let's have people beating down the doors to get in, rather than the scorn that is earned from a cumbersome and often disrespectful hiring process)
• Good People treat other People with respect and compassion. So, let's fix the mess that currently exists with Hiring processes today to demonstrate that we do treat Candidates with respect and compassion, from the get go. Many Candidates' first contact with an Employer is when they apply to a Job Posting. So, just how inviting have you made that process to encourage people to apply and to also refer their friends to you?
• Good People understand that the current Job Market is very difficult to navigate. So, what effort have you made, intentional effort, to demonstrate that your firm needs and wants to find good people to help you continue to grow and thrive. Confusing and time consuming application processes, exceedingly long interview cycles, lack of real-time feedback (of any sort), trick questions, questionable personality profiling, low-balling salary offers, these are not the marks of a professional and successful organization. (sorry, not sorry, really not sorry)
• Good People understand that seeking work is a humbling, often frustrating, and anxiety laden process. What have you done to make a Candidate feel at home when you first reach out to do a pre-screening phone interview with them, do you understand that anything but an in-person meeting is something that has a higher likelihood for mis-interpretation on both sides of the table. What have you done to alleviate anxiety to help a Candidate get ready for their on-site interviews, and when those interviews take place, how have you hosted this guest in your work home to shepherd them through that half day, full day, multiple meeting-laden process? Do you understand what Interview Fade is, ie. a Candidate gets fatigued telling their own story over and over again to multiple people they meet, so the Staff they meet at the beginning of the interview cycle may have completely different feedback than the Staff they meet at the end of the day... Have you taken any steps to avoid this?
• Good People have a lot to offer, but you do have to talk with them to really find out what that is. How have you missed Good People with your automated screening process when they apply, the whole hiring cycle stops before it ever really got going in that case. How have your Recruiters, who typically have never done the role they're trying to fill, filtered out Good People because of their own biases or lack of knowledge? If I had a nickel for every internal Recruiter I've met over the years that "felt" they alone knew exactly what the Hiring Manager was looking for, but when asked for details about the Manager and the Role, suddenly their knowledge appears to get thinner and thinner. The most amazing (amazingly sad, that is) situations I've seen are the ones where I have simply asked - what are the Manager's Top 3 must-have skills/experience, what are their next 3-5 highly desired skills that would make a viable Candidate stand out, what is the current project or focus of the work that this Candidate will be doing when hired in -- and -- the answer is then basically a regurgitation of an out of date and very non-specific Job Description. (need another pause for a really deep breath and a very disappointed sigh) ... It's been my experience, you do have to actually know what you're looking for, you have to know what the Hiring Manager is really looking for, if you truly expect to identify the right Candidate...
• Good People won't keep applying to your Company after having a bad Job Application experience. Zero feedback after you apply, definitely sends the message that either you are so under-staffed in your Talent Acquisition efforts you can't reply, or you just don't care to be professional in your behavior towards that Candidate. Perhaps you believe you have more than enough Candidates to pick from and just don't have time for that sort of nonsense. Trust me, it's not nonsense to the Candidates, I assure you. Good People also know other Good People and they tend to share negative hiring experiences with their friends, so there is a definite Reputation/PR opportunity that gets lost when you don't treat Candidates as though they truly matter. Arrogance, Incompetence, lack of Compassion, lack of proper staffing in HR, Discrimination (Gender, Age, Race... all the protected Classes really), viewing Employees as easily replaceable, are these the messages you really want a Candidate to come away with related to your hiring processes? Most (if not all) of the TA professionals I know, would resoundingly say "No" to that question, but their Application and Interviewing processes may be saying and demonstrating just that. (take a pause now, time for some honest reflection to see if you or your firm is guilty of any of these)
• Good People are getting missed every day on your open positions either due to your overly cumbersome Application processes, a Resume that doesn't always do a Candidate's work history justice all by itself (hence the need to have someone talk to the Candidate), arrogance by Recruiters who screen out good Candidates who may actually be experts in their field - they just aren't experts at writing a resume - or a Recruiting Staff who is looking at all the wrong resumes due to how you're filtering them upfront. Do you really want the best candidate for the job, or the just the best of worst from how you may be improperly filtering your Applicants? (please think about that one for just a moment before moving on, please...)

An overly cumbersome Application process, one that requests more than a Resume, Contact information, and basic Details about a Candidate's situation comes across as either ignorant, arrogant, or just plain clumsy... (sorry, not really sorry, once again)

If you feel you're a good Employer, but your Application process is rather cumbersome and in some cases downright unfriendly, and yet you like to hype how you have a culture of inclusivity, diversity, and one of mutual respect, you really aren't demonstrating that to the Candidate Community with what is probably the very first contact a Candidate is actually trying to have with your firm -- when they apply.

Some of these Application processes are completely convoluted, really, I mean talk about something that feels like a lot of red-tape. Rather than a simple process which allows a Candidate to tell you how to contact a them, what position they're really interested in, and to provide you with a Resume so you can start to understand their background. What is actually being presented is a bunch of hurdles to overcome, where a Candidates' patience is being tested, and what appears to the Candidate as a rather poorly designed business process that runs the risk of alienating the very Candidates you claim you're trying to reach. There is no second chance to make a first impression, and that flows both ways between an Employer and a Candidate, so what impression do you really want a Candidate to have of your firm and your hiring practices?

Also, I have to say that most of these systems do a pretty poor job of updating a Candidate about their status once they have applied. Maybe it's me, but whenever I buy something on the Web, I love getting order processing and shipment updates from the Retailer, they help manage my expectations, they keep me informed, they acknowledge my order was received, they acknowledge that my order is being processed, they tell me when my purchase has shipped out the door, and then provide routine updates on where my shipment is physically located until I receive it. I don't know about you, but I actually appreciate and value those updates. I'm much more likely to do business again with that Retailer because of all those updates. Unfortunately, most ATS systems don't do anything even close to this, but they really should... A firm's reputation can be made or completely damaged by how they're handling contact with Job Applicants and word does get around, please trust me on that.

Once someone applies to your firm, they should, at a minimum, receive a confirmation that you have their information on file and you appreciate their efforts to apply to a posted position.

Once a Recruiter reviews their background, assuming a Recruiter actually does review their background, the system should let the Candidate know that fact and if an immediate rejection is decided, the Candidate should be thanked for applying and told that other Candidates appear to be a closer match to the position and they will not be moving forward with a phone interview at this time. It's called closing the door while still respecting the individual, all at the same time.

Once the Phone Interview has been done, the system should let the Candidate know their disposition, ie. good first round meeting we'll be in contact for next steps, the position does not appear to be a good match for the Candidate, or other Candidates have more closely matched the needs of the position, so they won't be moving on in the interview cycle.

Once the in-person Interviews are completed, the system should then let the Candidate know what the next step is going to be or provide a declination AND some sort of summary as to why. This one is actually pretty important in the scheme of things, you see -- you have already invested time and energy in pre-screening and then meeting the Candidate. If the reason you are now passing on their background happens to be from a misperception gained during the interview, the Candidate (if told about it) then has an opportunity to let you know that something doesn't add up and you may be making the wrong decision. They can't do that if you don't inform them of the reason why you are passing... Could be you're saying "no" to them for the wrong reason, so let's just make sure our investment of time and energy isn't completely wasted when that happens. Interviewing is not a very natural inter-personal process, it's done infrequently in a Candidate's career, it's usually laden with anxiety for the Candidate and sometimes laden with anxiety for the Employer's interview team, so there could just possibly be some mis-interpretations going on for either side of the table.

Do you have your Interview Cycle well defined, ie. do you follow a standard workflow for the whole Application-Consideration-Disposition process? If not, you could be opening yourself up to a liability situation where a disgruntled Candidate claims you are showing discriminatory behavior towards different Candidates. If you don't actually evaluate everyone using the same steps and processes, they could be right. It certainly makes it much harder to benchmark and analyze your efforts/results if you don't follow a standardized and consistent process for hiring.

An example of a standard interview cycle might be -- Online Application review -> Resume Review -> Candidate selected for initial interview or declination -> Pre-Screening Interview (usually done on the phone with a Recruiter) -> Candidate selected for in-person interview or declination -> In-Person 1st, 2nd, 3rd... round Interview(s) with a determination at each step either to continue on or rejecting the Candidate at that point -> Job Offer.

At each step, once completed, there should be some sort of feedback provided to the Candidate giving them an option to respond with additional information, if and when appropriate. It's called two-way communication, a dialogue, building a relationship rather than just a one-way heavy handed interaction.

So, it's time to do a little soul searching and honestly answer for yourself, is your Application process simple, straight forward, ethical, and fair? If it is, I know plenty of Candidates who would really like to talk with you about a Job. Is your interview Cycle well defined and non-discriminatory? It should be for ethical, professional, and legal reasons. Do you treat Candidates with respect at every stage of your interview cycle, especially when delivering bad news? You should be, if you want to build an Employer of Choice reputation. Do you provide continuous feedback at each step of your interview cycle, if not, why not? When done correctly, this demonstrates respect to the Candidate and one day when you're a Candidate again yourself, you were a Candidate once upon a time you know, you'll want this sort of respect for yourself. (time to pause again and really think that last one through, no seriously, please think that last statement through)

So, is your Application-to-Hire process poetry in motion, or is it something else....

Companies enjoying streamlined and efficient hiring results would say it is poetry in motion, everyone else is frustrated - both Candidates and Hiring Managers alike. So, you do need to decide how you want to be perceived in the Job Market when you need to hire - either easy to work with and a place that is desirable to work for, or not...

How you handle the Application process determines that result.