? “Stressful” and “time-consuming”
Do these words describe your applicant experience?
If you’re thinking the answer is “no”… are you so sure about that?
3 out of 4 job seekers are frustrated with the process.
Could you be losing out on great talent?
This is one of my favorite speeches of all time. I feel like this speech captures exactly how I feel about life. Nothing more here…I hope you enjoy it and receive as much inspiration from it as I have.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
At this point you probably guessed the lie. In truth, vending machines are 2.5x more likely to kill you than a shark. I can’t wait to see that horror movie about killer vending machines comes out!!
It’s a common misperception that applicants just want the quickest and easiest applicant experience. Yet study after study disproves this assumption.
Does the application process need to be a reasonable time to complete, absolutely. Studies show that any applicant experience over 15 minutes will result in losing more than half of your applicants. I would suggest making it 10 minutes or less on average. When is the last time you personally took and timed your own applicant experience, both on desktop and mobile?
In this article (link in the comments below) data suggests that job applicants overwhelmingly see value in assessments. 94% of respondents said they felt assessments demonstrate their potential to succeed in a job either “very well” or “somewhat well.” Résumés just don’t tell the whole story!
74% of job applicants agree that assessments are a great way to highlight their full potential to employers, with 45% “strongly agreeing” and 29% “somewhat agreeing,” while only 6% “somewhat disagree” and 3% “strongly disagree.”
In addition, non-white job applicants were more likely to “strongly agree” that assessments demonstrate their potential beyond their experience and better their chances of getting noticed. Only 31% of white applicants “strongly agree” while 60% of Asian applicants, 47% of Black applicants, and 42% of Hispanic applicants “strongly agree.”
This disparity also holds true with younger applicants. 53% of applicants under the age of 25 “strongly agreed” that assessments demonstrate their abilities, while only 26% of applicants 55 and older felt the same way.
This is all great information, but here’s the conundrum…how do we have a reasonable (10 min. or less) applicant experience time-to-complete, that is easy, mobile friendly, and assesses qualifications for 100% of applicants equally?
Resumes are Inefficient, ineffective, and biased.
Why?
If you have hundreds of applicants to shift through, can you say you screen everyone? Do you open each resume one by one? Do you have time to do everything else you need to do or do you turn into a professional resume reader?
When you read through, are you just looking for keywords? “Proficient in Excel”, what does that mean? What is the context? How do they compare with others who are “proficient”? What about those folks who are great at their jobs, not so great at writing resumes, shouldn’t they be considered if they have the right skills? How would you know who you’ve missed?
Resumes are FULL of sources of bias (age, education, assumed gender and ethnicity). Training and experience can help you with conscious bias, sure, but unconscious bias? It’s, you know… unconscious. It creeps in to your process right from the start. It shouldn’t.
Only using resumes because you don’t know what else you’d use?
Check out SmartRank. Resume-free screening is the future.
We’d love to debate about it, objections are very welcome.
This is one of my favorite quotes.
Too many times in business, people want massive results with minimal effort or a willingness to try something different.
Resisting change is hardwired in our brains because we perceive change as risk. Thousands of years ago that thinking probably served us well, but we’re not facing the same threats anymore.
One of the areas I consistently hear people wanting to solve problems is talent acquisition. Almost universally I hear talent acquisition practitioners lamenting about the fact that they never have enough time. And I understand why. Tons of manual & tedious tasks, manually reviewing résumés, back and forth with hiring managers and applicants, and the list goes on and on.
For all the talent acquisition professionals out there….if you want meaningful time savings then you have to come at that problem with a different level of consciousness. For example, don’t try to figure out how to review résumés faster (“same level of consciousness”), instead just stop reviewing résumés all together!!!
