Candidate Application Process - The Argument for making it easy

I have recently had a few conversations with friends and colleagues on different approaches to the job application process. This has been from both the point of view as a potential employer as well as an applicant point of view. It was sparked by a long and rather entertaining rant from a friend of mine. They had been applying for jobs (has since found a fantastic job) and was expressing their distain for onerous job application processes (specifically when you have to apply through Workday). They had reached the point where they refused to apply for a job if it used the Workday application portal. This was for a number of reason, including (but not limited to):

• The populate from your CV function making a mess of their application
• Why they need to enter in what they considered to be basically their whole CV, after supplying said CV.
• Mandatory fields that are not applicable or unnecessarily onerous.

Now I have not used this system myself and I am sure it is not the only system like this out there. So it prompted me to have some conversations in a number of forums to see what other people thought. Given how in demand my friend is and their skill set it caused me to wonder is such application processes are filtering out the best talent. The response so far has been mixed. The arguments for seemed to be centred around two points.

• These systems make it easier to filter applicants based on required skills, education experience ect. Particularly as it helped facilitate the use of automated tools that may struggle with interpreting this data from the applicants uploaded CVs. This is probably evidenced by the complaint about the "populate from your CV function making a mess".
• It was done intentionally by potential employers to filter for highly motivated employees and they have factored in the how this will influence applications from less motivated but skilled employees

The arguments against a system such as this that involved an onerous application process was largely around:

• Top talent being a key competitive advantage for organisations so that is what the recruitment process should be looking to find
• We are in a highly completive environment for top talent at the moment (are we ever not) so they can afford to be picky with regards to where they apply
• In the current environment this likely to attract those that are struggling to find employment elsewhere and that being the driving force behind the motivation and could result in a less than ideal candidate pool

Now this is all very interesting but was based more on opinion than evidence and at best was very subjective. So how much of it is true and how much is just conjecture. I started by seeing what the articles around the internet where saying on the subject. Perhaps unsurprisingly I couldn't find any that spoke directly about this topic. I did find some that similar to Cappelli (2019) talk about some of the current practices and the related issues. Cappelli (2019) specifically makes the interesting point that we don't know if these practices are working and follows up with with discussion about reducing the number of candidates that apply to roles. From a more academic perspective, there are studies that do touch on the subject. Lee (2011) finds that e-recruiting systems can result in a good ROI if implemented with a process integration as a key part of the decision making process. Whilst Lee (2011) doesn't specifically cover the effects of an onerous process, does suggest that the perceptions of job seekers should give valuable design guidelines to recruiters for those systems. With the availability of employer online review sites such as Glassdoor, that also include feedback on the application process, it is worth noting that these reviews can also have an impact on a candidates decision to apply (K?nsgen 2018). This decision may include highly motivated individuals that an organisation is targeting. (Carlson 2002) Posits that the single most effective way to attract higher quality applicants is to look at methods of attraction. Unfortunately the ease or difficulty of the application process is not really explored through that lens. Adeosun (2020) concludes that using online techniques that simplify and reduce the stress on job applicants will help attract the right kind of candidate and save time in filling vacancies. This would seem to suggest moving away from requiring more work from job applicants.

So what does all this mean. Well my quick look into this is far from comprehensive but I think there is some insight that we can get from it. Though some of what I state here is from my wider reading of the above material that I haven't directly covered. One is that there doesn't appear to be a great amount of research into this specific area. This means that it is difficult to know objectively what the best approach is. Indeed each approach might be different for every organisation. There also seems to be some difference in what is considered quality applicants. It also seems that systems such as Workday were developed from the organisation's process point of view with an eye to reducing the overhead of the application reading, filtering and selection process and in general has not really taken into account the applicants experience. Anecdotally is seems that applicants don't like these systems but it is an open question to whether that materially effects whether most will or will not apply. I suspect it does have at least some small effect and that this effect probably does filter out some applications from undesirable applicants, but it will also filter out some of the highest quality candidates.

Given how much of a difference to an organisations competitive edge the highest quality employees can make, this is not something that I would want in my own application process. I can see how some organisations may be able to find benefit in such a value proposition of those solutions. They are also companies I will be happy to compete against knowing I can probably attract higher quality talent.

References:

Adeosun, OT & Ohiani, AS 2020, 'Attracting and recruiting quality talent: firm perspectives', Rajagiri Management Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 107-120.

Cappelli, P 2019, 'Your approach to hiring is all wrong', Harvard Business Review, vol. 97, no. 3, pp. 48-58.

Carlson, KD, Connerley, ML & Mecham, RL, III 2002, 'Recruitment evaluation: The case for assessing the quality of applicants attracted', Personnel Psychology, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 461-490.

K?nsgen, R, Schaarschmidt, M, Ivens, S & Munzel, A 2018, 'Finding Meaning in Contradiction on Employee Review Sites — Effects of Discrepant Online Reviews on Job Application Intentions', Journal of Interactive Marketing, vol. 43, pp. 165-177.

Lee, I 2011, 'Modeling the benefit of e-recruiting process integration', Decision Support Systems, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 230-239.