5 things educators hate about your job applications
Have you ever tried applying to one of your own jobs just to see what the experience is like for educators applying to vacancies at your college?
Putting yourself in the candidate’s shoes like this is the only way you can really know what the job application process is like for them – and most importantly, if there’s anything that could be scaring them off.
A messy application process can give candidates a bad enough impression of your college that they drop out of the recruitment process completely: “If their job application is this bad, what will they be like to work for?” You really can’t underestimate the impact a bad application experience can have.
Here are a few of the most common issues we see with college job applications - and what you can do to fix them.
You still use downloadable application forms
Education is one of the only sectors that still works with downloadable job applications, and it’s something we really need to move away from.
If you’ve ever had to fill out a downloaded job application, you’ll know just how awkward and time-consuming it can be. You need a PDF editor to do it, and the whole experience is extremely clunky compared to a simple digital form that would take a fraction of the time to complete. And what sort of impression do you give of your college by making the process so slow and manual, except that you’re stuck in the past?
Downloadable job applications aren’t just impractical for the candidate either – they create a lot of extra work for you too. Transferring information from applications to candidate profiles in your ATS is a time-consuming process that most colleges automated years ago. Just think about the disadvantage this puts your college in if you’re still managing applications manually.
So while the move from paper to digital application forms might seem like a scary transition, once you digitise the process, you’ll never look back.
Your application form is too long
There’s a real discrepancy between how long employers think it would take a candidate to complete their job application and how long it actually takes.
Research has shown that 70% of employers think candidates spend less than an hour applying to their jobs. But in reality? The average candidate spends 3-4 hours per application.
With this in mind, it’s worth thinking about how you can make your applications as streamlined as possible while still gathering the information you need.
Her are some points to consider:
- Do you really need to gather this particular information at the initial screening stage, or is this something you could ask later in the process (during the candidate interview, for example)?
- Is this essential job application information, or can it be parsed from their CV?
- Does this applicant already have a candidate profile in your recruitment CRM that would fill in a lot of the blanks automatically if it’s linked up with their application?
The great thing about working with a digital job application process is that you can easily customise your application to suit each role, removing any questions you don’t necessarily need.
Your application isn’t mobile optimised
Almost 70% of job applications in 2021 were completed entirely on smartphones. In 2024, this number will be even higher. When you consider this statistic, it makes you wonder why we focus so much of the discussion around desktop applications. We might manage candidate applications on desktop, but clearly candidates are searching for roles and filling them out on their phones.
This is where applying to your own jobs regularly becomes an essential part of optimising your recruitment process. Test out the entire application journey on your smartphone or tablet (including initial job search, applying through job boards and hitting the ‘apply now’ button). Can you go from start to finish without encountering any issues? Does the process look like it’s optimised for mobile, or are you having to do a lot of zooming into tiny text and scrolling to make it fit the page?
And what does your Career Site look like on mobile? Do all the buttons work as they should? Does everything load as quickly as it should? With so many candidates applying to roles on smartphones nowadays, ensuring the whole process is mobile optimised should be a priority.
You don’t offer Fast Apply applications
If you’re unfamiliar with the term Fast Apply, here’s why more than 30% of FEjobs’s customer base are using it right now. But the best way to explain how Fast Apply works is to think about how job applications work without it.
If a candidate applies to one of your roles through an education job board and there’s no Fast Apply, the process looks like this:
Step 1: The candidate enters their personal information, uploads a CV and completes any initial application questions on the job board website. They hit ‘Apply’.
Step 2: The candidate is redirected to your Career Site where they’re told they need to re-enter the same details all over again.
As you can imagine, this extra step is infuriating for job hunters. With Fast Apply on the other hand, your Career Site is integrated tightly with the job board so that any information the candidate provides at the initial job board application stage will be automatically parsed through to your website. That way, the candidate only has to apply once.
If you don’t have the Fast Apply feature, this creates a really bad experience for candidates and can cause huge numbers of candidates to drop off from the application process before they even reach your website.
You don’t send confirmation emails
If you’ve ever poured blood, sweat and tears into a job application only to finally hit the ‘submit’ button, and get an error message, you’ll know just how devastating this can be.
Of course, the most effective way to prevent this happening to your candidates is to work with reliable recruitment technology in the first place. A software that doesn’t time-out during job applications and autosaves applications to the cloud as the candidate goes along. But aside from this, a simple, auto-generated email to confirm that the candidate’s job application has been received goes a long way.
Of course, no college hiring team has the time and resources to manually send out confirmation emails to every candidate who submits a job application – and they shouldn’t have to.
Any good recruitment software will allow you to set up a communication workflow that automates these confirmation emails for you. By digitising the process, applications come in directly to your hiring pipeline so you get a clear overview and can move candidates along the recruitment process easily with no application falling through the cracks.
Technology is key to improving your job application process
Perhaps you noticed there’s a running theme here: Technology.
All the job application issues candidates experience nowadays are related to recruitment technology not being used efficiently by colleges, or not being used at all.
Creating a positive job application experience for all your educator candidates all comes down to using the right technology; to modernise and streamline the process so it’s as easy and seamless as possible (which makes everything much easier for you, too!).
Digitising the application process also allows you to track your applications, so you can use your recruitment analytics to better understand application drop-offs, why they happen and how you can improve the process for future candidates.
Interested in digitising your job application process, or optimising the one you already have? FEjobs has supported hundreds of colleges in making the transition to digital applications. Just request a call back to get the conversation started.
About the author
Katie Paterson
Katie Paterson is a writer and digital marketer specialising in recruitment, marketing, HR technology, and business growth. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.