Ben West recently mentioned that he would be excited about a common application. It got me thinking a little about it. I don’t have the technical/design skills to create such a system, but I want to let my mind wander a little bit on the topic. This is just musings and ‘thinking out out,’ so don’t take any of this too seriously.
What would the benefits be for some type of common application? For the applicant: send an application to a wider variety of organizations with less effort. For the organization: get a wider variety of applicants.
Why not just have the post openings posted to LinkedIn and allow candidates to use the Easy Apply function? Well, that would probably result in lots of low quality applications. Maybe include a few question to serve as a simple filter? Perhaps a question to reveal how familiar the candidate is with the ideas and principles of EA? Lots of low quality applications aren’t really an issue if you have an easy way to filter them out. As a simplistic example, if I am hiring for a job that requires fluent Spanish, and a dropdown prompt in the job application asks candidates to evaluate their Spanish, it is pretty easy to filter out people that selected “I don’t speak any Spanish” or “I speak a little Spanish, but not much.”
But the benefit of Easy Apply (from the candidate’s perspective) is the ease. John Doe candidate doesn’t have to fill in a dozen different text boxes with information that is already on his resume. And that ease can be gained in an organization’s own application form. An application form literally can be as simple as prompts for name, email address, and resume. That might be the most minimalistic that an application form could be while still being functional. And there are plenty of organizations that have these types of applications: companies that use Lever or Ashby often have very simple and easy job application forms (example 1, example 2).
Conversely, the more than organizations prompt candidates to explain “Why do you want to work for us” or “tell us about your most impressive accomplishment” the more burdensome it is for candidates. Of course, maybe making it burdensome for candidates is intentional, and the organization believes that this will lead to higher quality candidates. There are some things that you can’t really get information about by prompting candidates to select an item from a list.
Ben West recently mentioned that he would be excited about a common application. It got me thinking a little about it. I don’t have the technical/design skills to create such a system, but I want to let my mind wander a little bit on the topic. This is just musings and ‘thinking out out,’ so don’t take any of this too seriously.
What would the benefits be for some type of common application? For the applicant: send an application to a wider variety of organizations with less effort. For the organization: get a wider variety of applicants.
Why not just have the post openings posted to LinkedIn and allow candidates to use the Easy Apply function? Well, that would probably result in lots of low quality applications. Maybe include a few question to serve as a simple filter? Perhaps a question to reveal how familiar the candidate is with the ideas and principles of EA? Lots of low quality applications aren’t really an issue if you have an easy way to filter them out. As a simplistic example, if I am hiring for a job that requires fluent Spanish, and a dropdown prompt in the job application asks candidates to evaluate their Spanish, it is pretty easy to filter out people that selected “I don’t speak any Spanish” or “I speak a little Spanish, but not much.”
But the benefit of Easy Apply (from the candidate’s perspective) is the ease. John Doe candidate doesn’t have to fill in a dozen different text boxes with information that is already on his resume. And that ease can be gained in an organization’s own application form. An application form literally can be as simple as prompts for name, email address, and resume. That might be the most minimalistic that an application form could be while still being functional. And there are plenty of organizations that have these types of applications: companies that use Lever or Ashby often have very simple and easy job application forms (example 1, example 2).
Conversely, the more than organizations prompt candidates to explain “Why do you want to work for us” or “tell us about your most impressive accomplishment” the more burdensome it is for candidates. Of course, maybe making it burdensome for candidates is intentional, and the organization believes that this will lead to higher quality candidates. There are some things that you can’t really get information about by prompting candidates to select an item from a list.