Make It Easy For Applicants

Could your application instructions be limiting candidate response?

Could your Applicant Tracking System be a reason you aren’t getting the best candidates?

At StyleCareers.com we have always been big proponents of making the application process as simple as possible for job seekers.  This is particularly true for the strategic and hard-to-fill positions that our site caters too.  Why?  Simply put, people are busy.

In a recent survey of roughly 2000 fashion industry professionals, we asked specific questions about application instructions to learn how they impact candidate response. Here are the findings…

What is your preferred method to apply to job listings?

Over 65% of job seekers said that attaching a resume to an email message is their preferred method of applying to job listings.  The response to this question doesn’t vary much between the job seekers who are Employed, Under-Employed or those that are Unemployed…

How likely are you to apply to a job listing that requires salary information to be submitted?

Roughly 30% of fashion industry job seekers said that they are Less Likely or Not Likely to apply to a job listing that requires salary information to be submitted with the application.  So as not to limit response to an ad (by almost 30%), a better strategy may be to include compensation information in the job listing.

Here’s how it breaks down for fashion industry job seekers who are Employed, Under-Employed or those that are Unemployed…

Statistically, there isn’t a lot of variation between the Employed, Under-Employed and the Unemployed.

How likely are you to apply to a job listing that has time-consuming applications instructions? ex: including samples of your work or answering specific questions.

46% of all fashion industry job seekers and 51% of fully-employed fashion industry job seekers (below) said that they were less likely or not likely to apply to job listings that had time-consuming application instructions.

The big takeaway here is that companies are potentially cutting their prospective candidate pool in half by requiring candidates to jump through hoops to apply to job listings.

Please complete the following sentence: Most company job boards are…

Just over 40% of fashion industry job seekers claimed that company job boards/applicant tracking systems are somewhat or very hard, cumbersome to time-consuming to use.  Those companies that have less-than-elegant Applicant Tracking Systems, could be limiting their total number of potential applications to just 60% of the entire candidate population.

Here’s how it breaks down…

Not a lot of variation between the Employed, Under-Employed and Unemployed.

Have you ever stopped applying to a job listing because a company job board was too hard/cumbersome/time-consuming to use?

The big takeaway from this question? Almost 77% of all fashion industry job seekers have stopped applying to a job listing because the hiring company’s job board was too difficult to use.

A lot of recruiters take the attitude:  If they want to work here, they’ll take the time to apply.  The reality is that cumbersome application instructions and difficult to navigate applicant tracking systems are keeping some of the best talent from applying to jobs.