How A 2-Stage Job Application Process Saves You Both Time & Effort
An average application process involves an application being submitted (usually at the click of a button) and the employer either rejecting them or inviting them in for an interview.
The problem with this is that it is too easy for candidates to get to interview.
This can create several negative issues for an employer; all of which can be solved by building a 2-stage application process.
The first issue can be summed up by the popular saying “easy come, easy go”.
The job market moves alarmingly quickly and applicants (especially good ones) will likely have multiple options at any one time.
If an interview is easy to come by, for example all they had to do was send a CV online, it may not be valued by a candidate and they may cancel or not show up.
The second and more common issue is that the candidate will not have a true grasp of what the opportunity is.
The only requirement at this stage is that they have responded to an initial advert.
As much as we like to believe they read it, considered their options for a day and then responded the likelihood is that they hit send as soon as the job title and salary matched their needs!
The candidate may attend the interview and dislike the opportunity, a huge waste of time and effort.
The third issue is that there is no screening in place and we can end up interviewing a larger than necessary pool of poor quality applicants.
Screening at this stage does not need to be a telephone interview, which can be carried out later in the process, it can be a simpler and less labour intensive step.
A 2-stage application process will help us solve these problems and present us with an opportunity.
It gives us the opportunity to make our job advert a genuine advert.
The main purpose of the advert is to attract as many applicants as possible.
Obviously we do not want to needlessly attract irrelevant people but we do want to attract good numbers of people.
We can write an advert that includes the best parts about the job, the company and the key details such as salary and job title.
There is no need to “sell the dream” or create false expectation but it is an advert, so it must be attractive.
The 2nd stage of the application process is where we can provide more detail and add a layer of difficulty that will immediately repel the weakest candidates.
We recommend that employers send out a good old fashioned application form!
The form should be sent with a full job specification and must be returned with X number of days in order for the application to be consider complete.
This will immediately weed out anyone that is not really interested, people that are not really confident of being successful and will give you more information to help your initial screening.
You can now be confident that any further conversations, which may require more senior level staff, will be of high value.
It may take some time to implement the 2-stage process but that one time investment will save you time and effort with all future recruitment.