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Improving Your Online Application Process

Posted on: Saturday, 15 October 2005, 03:01 CDT

By Onley, Dawn S

Make sure your online application process keeps candidates engaged.

An employer has roughly four minutes before an online applicant will turn their attention elsewhere, so a company would be wise to use the time well.

Research conducted by Brass Ring, a software and services company for workforce planning, recruitment, hiring and career management, headquartered in Waltham, Mass., shows the clock starts ticking as soon as a potential candidate sits down at a computer and calls up an online job application.

To keep them on task during those four minutes, an automated software tool should let applicants know where they are in the process and how much longer it will take. For all their hard work in filling out electronic applications, candidates really want something in return, explains Deborah Besemer, president of Brass Ring.

"Give them something back," says Besemer. "It can't feel like a one-way street. Something back could be just an acknowledgment or a thank you. ... Some companies have an applicant fill out a lot of paperwork and never give feedback," she adds.

In the fierce competition to hire the best and brightest job seekers, businesses that maximize the effectiveness of their online application process stand to gain a bigger pool of qualified candidates and create a more satisfying experience for those who apply.

Avoiding Turnoffs

Brass Ring studies the reactions and behavior of job applicants by putting them in a room with a two-way mirror and a microphone and having them talk openly while they are applying for positions.

What the company has learned is that the biggest turnoff is asking an applicant to key in the same information two or three times, Besemer says. Yet, this is exactly what companies do when they have a job seeker cut and paste a resume and then ask them on a separate page for their name, address and place of employment.

"I can't tell you the number of companies that ask you to paste in your resume and then [ask you to] provide this information," she says. "You only have so much time to keep a candidate's interest online, so don't use that time asking them to give you information they've already given you."

A smart software tool can draw key data from a submitted resume, such as a candidate's name, the college he or she attended, and current and previous work information, Besemer adds.

Long gone are the days when human resource staff sifted through paper resumes and applications by hand to bring the most-promising job candidates in for the coveted interview. Paper applications take longer to process, fill up cabinet space, are harder to organize, and don't have much utility after a candidate is either hired or passed over for a position, some experts say.

Building a Better Way

Many experts see online tools as better able to manage the human capital supply chain. Others, like Besemer, say that when online tools are used strategically, they can promote "active candidate mining," a means of developing a pool of online candidates and remaining in contact with candidates even if they're not ultimately hired for the initial position.

Jerome Holton, former director of technical research, analysis and communications for Defense Group Inc. (DGI), an Alexandria, Va.- based technology services and hardware company, remembers a time when paper resumes would come in and senior executives would sit around a table in a conference room to discuss the merits of each applicant before deciding who to bring in.

The process was time-consuming for hiring managers, and not all of senior management was in the decisionmaking loop. Even worse, company executives weren't always good about documenting what they liked and disliked about a candidate, he says.

DGI, with roughly 90 full-time employees, was hiring about 30 subject matter consultants a month to serve its niche market. Since the company is so specialized, executives were routinely challenged by trying to recruit talent in a manner that was more sophisticated and yielded greater results than word-of-mouth.

Still, when Holton first suggested the idea of moving the paper process to the Internet, he says he met with some resistance from human resources executives. Holton, who has since left DGI, finally convinced HR that the company needed to be recruiting online, yet he conceded it took a while before they agreed to "move away from running an ad in the Sunday Washington Post.

"We all knew the process was inefficient, but where were we going to change it?" Holton recalls. "I got them to explore just doing a web-only ad. That cut our recruiting costs way down and got our response time way up."

Holton developed a web-based system for the small company that provides research, development, analysis, integration, management and marketing support to federal, state and local agencies. The system sends e-mail alerts to top staffers when someone applies for a job and links to a candidate's resume.

At Bond International Software, companies choose one of three online application software modules, based on the size of the company and the number of job applications it receives. Bond, headquartered near London, is the largest staffing and recruiting software vendor in the world and has been chosen by seven of the world's 10 largest staffing organizations.

The company provides software for staffing firms, like Manpower and Kelly, as well as for small, mid-size and large corporations like Georgia Pacific, Carnegie-Mellon and Huntington College. Large organizations employ Bond's Adapt software, while eEmpACT Essential and eEmpACT Plus are used by small and mid-range firms.

The Bond software products range from $700 to $2,200 for up- front software installation per recruiter location, with additional costs for maintenance, training, help desk support and product customization.

Some firms require a lot of software customization to cover government compliance issues where employers must keep track of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission questions covering gender, ethnicity and disabilities.

ISO: The Perfect Match

Tim Giehll, CEO of the eEmpACT staffing division of Bond, located in Minneapolis, says the company's software completely automates the online application process, something that staffing giants responsible for filling millions of positions a day now find hard to live without.

"We're not just getting the data in. We're filtering the information and finding the needle in a haystack, the perfect candidate," Giehll says. "With staffing firms, the only way they make money is if candidates they're providing to customers are good candidates and the process is efficient."

The software filters resumes, manages automatic job postings, handles resume management and provides an intake questionnaire.

Resume filtering and staying in touch with applicants are sure ways to combat the "post and hope" approach that many companies employ-posting a job to a job board and hoping the right person comes along, Besemer says.

"We believe very strongly in the building of pools of candidates," Besemer says. She also suggests that companies keep in touch with candidates, even if they fail to land the job, so they can be potential targets for future positions.

"I think [companies] are of the mind-set that there are so many candidates out there and we don't need to treat them well. Some industries already know better," she adds, referring to health care facilities that put a premium on nurses and retailers that realize every potential candidate is also a customer.

Zachary Thomas, manager of workforce solutions at Bond's Richmond, Va., office, says the software helps standardize the application process.

"These products allow corporations to create a repeatable hiring process. It allows them to automate the process and ensure that they have accurate reporting," Thomas says.

Retail companies like the software, Thomas adds, because it carefully sifts through the names of applicants, compares them against the Negative Theft Database-which is populated by a consortium of retailers-and removes those who were dismissed from previous retail jobs because of theft.

Speeding Up the Process

Telos Corp., an Ashburn, Va., company with nearly 500 full-time employees, began using a software tool several years ago developed by Denver-based Recruiting Solutions.

The tool allows recruiters for open positions to go in and manage the job responses and decide which candidates should be brought in for an interview. Once someone applies, the recruiter automatically receives an e-mail alert that ties the applicant's profile to the posted job. Recruiters then decide whether to forward the application to the hiring manager for the job.

"All open positions go through this system," says Chris Frost, the company's HR information systems analyst. "After seeing it in action, I cannot believe it can be done any other way. It's so fluid compared to how it was without this."

Frost says his company pays for licenses to use the software, and some of the security features added include standard 128-bit secure sockets layer encryption along with user-unique passwords.

At DGI, the system developed by Holton has an interface that allows all senior managers to log in.

"We could choose who we were interested in interviewing. After the interview, we could document whether \this candidate was good with a score and the rest of the staff could see our notes on the screen," Holton says. "It was a screen where everyone was in the process. As interviews were scheduled, date and time would appear."

In addition, the scoring aspect added to the program satisfied the human resource department's documentation requirements, Holton notes.

"After I interviewed someone, I went into the system, clicked on the scoring icon and a sub-window opened up. The scoring was 1 through 5 with 5 being the best rating, and I had a text field for me to document my score," he says. "That satisfied the recordkeeping requirements for HR.

"The other thing it did was made one-and-a-half- to two-hour staff meetings almost unnecessary because you could see what everyone thought," Holton says.

When it came time to offer a candidate a position, most of the prework had been conducted completely online.

"The generation of an offer turned into a few clicks," Holton says. "You could do contingency offers, let them know whether there was a relocation allowance, and send a request to the vice president of HR that an offer request had been made. We turned letters of offers into a 50-second process."

Beating the Competition

In today's highly competitive recruitment market, improving the application process by installing online tools puts a company in a superior position.

"As hiring heats up and as baby boomers start retiring, that's going to be the double whammy," says Giehll. "Companies' HR departments, if they try to hire the old-fashioned way, they're going lose."

Online Resources

For additional information about creating an effective online application process, see the online version of this article at www.shrm.org/hrmagazine /05October.

'These products allow corporations to create a repeatable hiring process.'

'We turned letters of offers into a 50-second process.'

DAWN S. ONLEY IS A WASHINGTON, D.C.-BASED FREELANCE WRITER WHO SPECIALIZES IN TECHNOLOGY ISSUES IN PRIVATE-SECTOR AND FEDERAL WORKPLACES.

Copyright Society for Human Resource Management Oct 2005

Source: HRMagazine

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