A friend of mine calls me the other day. "People are not applying to our job posting. And when they do apply, it's not the right talent most of the time. What should we do? You're a recruiter and a long-time hiring manager, give us some advice."My answer was simple. "Your application process is terrible. It's too difficult and too long. Too many questions. Too many hurdles. It takes way too much time to apply."Their response: "Yeah, but we only want people who are serious to apply, so we make it that way."Here is what I told them, and what I tell every company that says the same thing.
The highly qualified people, especially the ones who are currently employed, will skip right over a painful application process. They have options. They are not going to spend 45 minutes filling out fields that are already on their resume so they can maybe hear back from you in two weeks.The people who will grind through your 50-question application and three-page cover letter requirement? They are the ones who need a job badly enough to tolerate it. That does not mean they are bad candidates. But it does mean you are systematically screening out the people with the most leverage and the most options.Will making it easier mean more unqualified applicants hit your inbox? Probably. But you will also catch the ones you are currently losing. And if your systems are set up right, sorting through volume should not be the problem.
Let people apply with just their resume. If you are still making candidates manually enter their job history, education, and contact information into separate fields, you are living in 1985. Their resume has all of it. Stop making them type it twice.If you use Easy Apply, keep it easy. Do not bolt on 15 additional screening questions and call it a simple process. The whole point is low friction. If your Easy Apply takes more than two minutes, it is not easy.Stop asking questions your software should answer. If you need to know whether a candidate has a certain certification or years of experience, your ATS should be parsing that from the resume. Do not make the candidate do your system's job for you.Get the right software. If you have humans manually reviewing every resume to determine basic fit, you are behind. It is 2026. Resume parsing and AI-driven matching tools exist and they are good. Use them. Free your recruiters and hiring managers to spend their time on the candidates who actually made it through, not on sorting the pile.Make it work on mobile. A huge percentage of employed candidates are browsing and applying from their phones. If your application is painful on mobile, you are losing high-demand talent before they even start.Kill the cover letter requirement. I say this as someone who has reviewed thousands of applications. Almost nobody reads them. The candidate is using AI to write it and your recruiter is skimming past it. It is a hoop that adds zero signal and creates one more reason for a good candidate to move on.
Make it easy for resumes to get into your system. Make it easy for your systems to find the best match from those resumes. That is the whole game.If you make it difficult or time-consuming for people to apply, you are not raising the bar. You are just making sure the best people never walk through the door.