A job candidate goes to their favorite job board. They see a job they like. They click to apply.

Despite uploading their resume, they’re given a multi-page application by the applicant tracking system. 

Parts of that application keep giving them an error — like, it says the “college” field is required but the candidate has already filled it in. So they bail out.

Or the job seeker gets toward the end, and are a bit put off by the personal questions they’re supposed to answer. So they bail out.

Amazingly, this almost-applicant is not passed on by the applicant tracking system to the organization that’s doing the hiring. That organization with the open job never finds out about the talent they missed out on.

If They Don’t Complete It, They Don’t Exist

To reiterate, with some applicant tracking systems, if a job seeker doesn’t finish their job application, they just disappear. Nothing is passed on to the recruiter or hiring manager.

The company doing the hiring never knows that this person tried to apply and gave up. They can’t market to them. They can’t nurture them, or put them in a talent community. They can’t send them a weekly or monthly email about their new headquarters, the fairs they’re attending, or the new patents they received. They have no contact information about the job seeker.

This is ludicrous. 

The good news is that we’re working to solve this problem with the customers of ours that are in this frustrating situation. We’re able to help get around it. We can help configure your career site and applicant tracking system to:

• Pass on the information on a candidate that is complete, such as their name, email address, and perhaps a resume or link to their LinkedIn profile.
• Identify where the bottleneck or problem is. Where did people stop completing their application? How much time was spent on each part of the application, or did they continue returning over and over to one spot? (We’ve seen instances where no matter how many times a person puts their zip code in the ATS, they’re still told the field is empty and “zip code is required.”)
• Improve the candidate experience. We’ve seen instances where candidates make it to the near end of an application and then are offended by what they’re asked. We’ve seen candidates stuck realizing their school isn’t listed as an option and the “other” option isn’t working.

These are all preventable issues with certain applicant tracking systems. Let us know if you want to talk about how we’re helping many organizations never lose an applicant.