Five Sources of Friction to Eliminate From the Hiring Process

In recent blog posts, we’ve been exploring ways to make it easier for good candidates to join a company’s talent pool. We are asking customers if they want candidates to be able to:

• interact with employers via text message.
• get answers from chatbots at any time of day or night.
• get answers sooner from employers about their prospects thanks to innovations like faster background checks.

Today’s job applicants have options

We have good reasons to work on this. People looking for jobs in a strong economy don’t need to deal with friction in an employer’s hiring process. Friction in poorly designed online career pages can cause applicants to abandon forms as easily as they might an online shopping cart. And in competitive markets, like information technology, relying on B and C players is a certain path to irrelevance and failure.

Sources of recruiting friction to eliminate

We designed Njoyn to provide all the tools recruiters need in an interface that’s easy to navigate.

We do the same in the candidate interface. We can do this since, over many years, we’ve learned from other online recruiting processes that cause friction.

Here are five of the most common sources of friction for applicants.

1) Overly involved profile creation

Every day, candidates face recruiting systems that demand comprehensive profiles. Applicants regularly complete enough forms to experience what we call “form fatigue.”

We looked outside recruiting to learn how other industries ward off form fatigue. For example:

• Popular shopping websites have people save information in online accounts so they never have to re-enter payment card numbers or shipping addresses.
• Certain professional sites let their audiences fill in forms by importing data from existing social media profiles.

2) The pre-screening question burden

Employers often want all candidate qualifications immediately. They may not stop to consider whether they need to know a candidate’s life story to whittle down the applicant pool for a given position.

3) Interfaces that aren’t browser-agnostic

Adobe Flash. JavaScript. Popups. These and other browser-enhancing technologies can improve online experience. But tech-savvy candidates may prevent these tools from running due to performance or security concerns. If they do, and your recruiting website relies on such technologies, the application could prove clunky or unworkable.

You can’t control for every setting or nuance, and you can’t support outdated technology, but your site must be usable on as many modern devices as possible. Don’t expect all candidates to figure out what to do when your recruiting site doesn’t work as it should.

4) Interfaces that aren’t mobile-friendly

This element of browser agnosticism deserves a deeper dive.

Gone are the days when younger workers would sit in front of a computer for online banking, communications, social media and other electronic interactions. They can (and often do) handle all this and more from their smartphones.

But that won’t happen if they have to navigate a website built exclusively for full-sized computer screens. There’s only so much pinching to zoom they will tolerate.

5) Difficulty in accessing documents

Applicants may upload documents to your recruiting system that pertain to positions you posted. These can include multiple versions of their resumes, transcripts, and copies of professional certification. Your applicant tracking system allows this to make it easier for candidates to apply for multiple positions. This ease of use also encourages candidates to return to your site. Those repeat visits improve the applicant pool for future job openings.

But not all document management systems are created equal. Can candidates quickly add documents to new applications from the application screen itself? If you oblige them to navigate to different screens to copy documents one by one to another job application, you subject them to needless friction.

Optimize the job application process

“Abandoned shopping carts” will continue to plague many an online recruiting presence. That’s why we continue to remove needless friction in the hiring process for everybody involved: candidates, recruiters and hiring managers alike. (Check out our recent blog post about the partnerships we’re building to bring market-leading innovation into the Njoyn interface.)

Do you want to improve your company’s efforts at attracting top talent? Maybe you need to discuss forms of friction that applicants experience that we haven’t mentioned here today. Give us a call. We’ll help you figure it out.