Talk about Frightening… are you scaring away applicants?

Happy Halloween! Most of us are probably taking part in some type of festive event tonight. My kids are getting older, so the innocent trick or treating is giving way to haunted corn mazes and Halloween parties. It always amazing me that we are willing to pay to have someone jump out at us or chase us. I guess we are always out for a good adrenalin rush, whether it is from a haunted house, a horror movie, or even a tv show or 2 about zombies.

This is a good time of year though to bring up a certain type of scaring that is probably not fun and games for your company, or for the job seekers looking to work for you. It’s called the “haunted hiring process”. 

If you’d like to meet a group of people who are in a general state of shock from how they are treated by businesses, it is the average job seeker. We are in pretty much constant communication with job seekers around the US, and very few of them have anything nice to say about the average hiring process. 

The average job seeker story that we hear goes something like this:

 "The job ad was full of bullet points that really provided me little insight into why I should want the job, and lacked the real answers that I needed to make a decision like pay, shift, career potential, etc. Unfortunately, there was no way to contact the employer to ask them for clarification about the job, so I was left with the choice to either apply for a job that I had questions about or look for a job somewhere else. It was almost like they didn’t care at all about whether I applied or not. The application process was long and over bearing, asking me questions that I wasn’t totally comfortable answering, and requiring a significant investment of my personal time. Then, after doing my part to jump over all of the obstacles that they put in my way, they didn’t even bother to reply back to me. It’s like I was applying to a black hole. Not only will I never apply to that company again, I will think twice the next time I think about buying something from them."

Now I’m sure that you aren’t one of the offenders here, but just in case you are curious about what the bad employers are doing wrong out there, I’ve build a quick list of things to look out for. This is my top 10 list of things NOT TO DO in your hiring process.

1. Having a job ad that overstates requirements, is littered with “preferred” qualifications, and that generally your current employees aren’t even a fit for.
2. Using your job description as an ad. There is nothing engaging about reading a legal job description.
3. Hiding from potential job seekers by not being willing to answer their questions before they apply.
4. Posting jobs that you aren’t actually hiring for just to fish for resumes.
5. Asking for a social security number as part of the initial application process. It’s even scarier when you realize how many companies collect this on an unsecure web page, or ask the job seeker to fill it out and email it to them. (Doing this makes you look like an overseas scammer!)
6. Having an initial application process that takes more than 5 minutes to complete and doesn’t work on a mobile device.
7. Asking for references before an interview. (These are the job seekers most important professional contacts and you want them to give you their email addresses?)
8. Not sending out confirmation emails to inform job seekers that you received their application.
9. Sending interview requests by email that might get lost in spam or go unnoticed until after the date that you were hoping to schedule the interview for. (especially when hiring with millennials).
10. Not sending out rejection emails or letters to everyone who applied because you “don’t have the time”.

Not only do these 10 items scare off potential job seekers, they also harm your own hiring results as you miss out on great talent that ends up going to your competitors. Maybe it's time for you to do a dry run through your own hiring process and ask yourself this simply question: "Would this make the candidates opinion of our company better or worse?"

As we move from the scaring season into the season of kindness and thanksgiving, take some time to find a few simple changes that will make your hiring process just a bit easier on your applicants. The result will be a huge benefit to your company!