Recruitment is a human business. Humans... have expectations.
If you are running a recruitment agency, don't step away from the expectations without putting in functional replacements.
A recruiter who doesn’t advertise their roles?
There are many reasons for a recruitment agency to not advertise open roles on its website or platform. In this AI age, where a LinkedIn job posting can attract 100s of applications within hours of opening, quality control and just plain old “control” are tough tasks. AI is a tool that can help recruiters sift through volumes of applications. It is not the final solution.
For a successful recruitment agency, the quality of the candidates they place matters. They have to find one human who will successfully fit into another tribe of humans. No matter how detached we try to become from business, recruitment is tribal, human, and sensitive.
Breaking a pattern comes with risks.
Study the flow below (I have experienced it enough times to now write about it). There are multiple points of friction in the user journey that will make a potential candidate drop off and search elsewhere.
The two big drop-off points are:
The job seeker’s inability to see roles
Having to go off-platform to establish contact.
Simple fixes
Job seekers expect to see a “live roles” page. They expect to see who the recruitment consultant for a particular posting is. They expect proofs of trust and credibility. Without these key points of interaction, the agency is going against the norm, breaking the established mental model for a recruitment company and the recruitment experience.
The reasons for not implementing the standard pattern are understandable (as explored in the introduction). And yet, breaking away from the pattern creates disharmony for the job seeker. They are going through enough already.
There are simple fixes. It’s all about communication and expectation management. If you are in the recruitment business, here’s how this flow can be improved:
Replace the “Live roles” page with a page called “Applying through <Agency Name>”. The page will explain the types of roles the agency hires for and the sectors it serves.
Ideally, support this page by either portraying the approach as a statement from the principal consultant or with a team photo. This helps build trust.
Collect their details through a well-designed form.
Next, they are expecting some kind of exchange. This helps retain the pattern.
Now they don’t have to search for a way to contact you. They don’t have to go off-platform.You will have to get them to check the privacy policy and terms & conditions. As long as this is easy to do (just a tick in the box), this experience makes your service feel more legitimate. That’s just how we are wired.
Send a confirmation email that lets them know that the agency will be in touch whenever there are suitable roles; ensure.
Or, if possible, establish a human touchpoint here.
You can step away from a standard design pattern. But, you must ensure that there’s an alternative in place that helps the user manage the “new experience”.
Caring for the customer
Job seekers need to feel that you will be taking care of them and advocating for them. And, just a few simple implementations can make them feel this. It makes them choose your agency over another.
The form design will be quite important. The data that an agency collects needs to be easily assessable. A generic form with 20,000 job titles and 40,000 industries won’t do. But that’s content for another case study!
If you’d like to have a conversation about successful software development as a non-technical stakeholder, you can book a call through this link: https://calendly.com/sharmapulkitmukesh/30min or write to me at pulkit@pulkit.co.uk
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