Is your application process leaking applicants without you knowing?

As you will appreciate, life is tough out there for social care recruiters these days. A lot of time and money is spent placing, tweaking and refreshing adverts for frontline staff, all the while attempting to get the attention of a seemingly diminishing group of suitable job seekers.

But what if an awful lot of that time, effort and cash is wasted because it is just too frustrating for an interested job seeker to make a successful application to your company? This is more common than you think. In fact, it is present in every recruitment process to a greater or lesser degree.

To get a grip on how leaky the first stage of your application funnel might be, I’d like you to try this simple test.

Health-check your own application process

What I’d like you to do is get a friend to apply for one of your own jobs. You can ask them to apply sometime in the next month at a time to suit them. They don’t need to go as far as an interview, what we are interested in here is how easy it is to register interest and receive an acknowledgement.

Make sure they test each of the main methods you expect job seekers to use. If you use an internet job board then get them to search for a job role in your area, click on your advert and see if the steps are easy to follow. If you offer a route to apply via your website, get them to try that too. In fact, test every route, including a phone enquiry. Then ask them to answer these questions:

1. How long does it take to apply? Both time to submit and total time to get a response
2. Is it obvious what to do next at each step?
3. Is the text (or whoever answers the phone) friendly in tone? Do they get given reasons why they should work for you or did it come across as impersonal, unfriendly or full of restrictions?
4. How much information did they have to complete up front? Compare that to how much is really necessary at this early stage
5. Does any imagery used feel genuine to them, like pictures or video of real staff, or are they obviously stock shots?
6. How long do they have to wait before they get a response? Did they get one at all?

So, how did your application process do?

This first appeared as a guest blog for QCS and can be viewed at https://www.qcs.co.uk/blog/.