When was the last time you used a job board? I mean really used a job board - not just uploaded a role to it. As a candidate, it’s confusing, repetitive, and - often - requires you to click three separate apply buttons before you ever find the ‘real’ apply button.
Every action that comes between your candidate and applying to the role is an opportunity for them to leave your sales funnel - an opportunity for them to apply for a role with your competition where their time won’t be wasted.
Yes, we’ve all heard the theory - maybe we don’t want those candidates if they can’t jump through the hoops? Maybe they need to prove their dedication by navigating arbitrary processes?
Experienced and valuable candidates - the ones who’ll walk straight into that ‘exciting’ role you want them in, won’t put up with it.
Old solutions to new recruitment problems
We’re hitting that recession point where the old advice no longer works. The best candidates won’t already be in a job, and the passive candidates are about to become active. With furlough ending, and redundancy incoming, we’re about to see a major shake-up in the way candidates research and apply for roles.
We’re touching a little on behavioural economics here. The study of why people make the decisions they make instead of some other decision. There’s so much we can learn from even basic nudge theory.
One Yale researcher, for example, experimented with monkeys to find the absolute baseline for behaviour and decision making. Something they dubbed ‘Monkey Brain’.
The team quite literally gave pebbles to monkeys to simulate an economy and found that in times of scarcity, the monkeys held on to their pebbles - their currency - and in times of plenty, they were more likely to share. Ultimately, they proved that purchasing decisions weren’t the sole responsibility of intelligent and evolved creatures like us.
Keith Chen, Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Management, spoke on the research: “The economic view says people are aware, rational and in control of their major decisions. Social psychology cuts in the opposite direction, maintaining that people are often unaware of the forces that dictate their behavior.”
The Yale research proved not only that changing behaviour was a feasible goal, but also that, with the right stimulus, it was highly probable. In terms of recruitment, that behaviour, naturally, is clicking on, engaging with, or generally viewing a job advertisement in a positive way. The challenge is positioning your roles in a way that speaks to the Monkey Brain - something candidates look at and immediately like, without necessarily knowing why.
So how can we identify the right behaviours to identify and act on?
Candidate ‘purchase’ decisions and nudge theory
Job ads can be better. From start to finish; from copywriting to promotion. With new, experienced, candidates coming on to the market, it’s a race to get them on the books before securing them an interview with your client.
But how many recruiters will AB test job titles? Check the performance of opening lines? See which CTAs are most effective? Identify which promotion strategies deliver the highest proportion of quality applications for the most attractive price point? All this information is already available, and easily accessible.
We’re all aware that actions can be nudged - pushed in the right direction with the right action. What business owners tend to discount, however, is just how much effort is required to change that action.
Monkey brain economics tells us that avoiding losses (Fear of Missing Out - FOMO) is nearly twice as powerful an impetus as acquiring gains. So where is the immediacy in existing advertisements? Why should a candidate apply now?
Today, we’re seeing triple-digit percentage increases in applications-per-role. For recruiters and hiring managers, it’s more important than ever to know: where their applicants are coming from; why they are clicking thorough; and what’s attracted them to the role in the first place. By being more strategic with the initial candidate attraction phase, recruiters can dramatically increase their viable candidate pool.
To do this, however, the recruitment industry has to go back to basics. Back to when one-to-one contact with applicants and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the industry was the norm. The scattergun approach is not only no longer fit for purpose, it will overwhelm recruitment teams with irrelevant applications and paperwork.
Nudging candidates in the right direction is a simple question of tracking what works, leaving what doesn’t, and doubling down.