What’s the obsession about completion rates of application forms?

Does it matter what percentage of those that started making an application online actually end-up submitting it if you are still making quality hires?  Especially right now when there are more candidates chasing fewer jobs.

In the past incompletion rates were a big deal because it meant that the organisation was ‘throwing money way’ on expensive application packs. If the organisation was sending out 100,000 packs at a cost of £3 and getting 1/3 back then £200,000 was wasted. It sometimes prompted recruiters to invest in redesigning application forms in order to increase the completion rate.  But did this activity do any good?

Consider for a moment the extra time spent on chasing the additional applications – were they the people that ended up being hired? Did the extra time and cost translate into better hires or did it just end up increasing the volume of applications to be processed? Did the hiring managers notice a difference in the quality of candidate?

There is often a lot of noise about improving the means by which candidates apply. Normally this is about making it easier to apply and improving the candidate experience but seldom does it mean investigating the quality of the application mechanism as a selection tool.

At a recent Best Practice Consultancy UK team meeting Su Oakley led a session about application completion rates - we began by looking at relative completion rates, number of applications, which application forms or CV worked best etc but quickly came to the conclusion that these measures are irrelevant.

In the old world, volume measures lead us to believe that more was better – it gave us comfort to think that by having lots of applications we would eventually be able to recruit the right person.  Volume measures gave an indication of the potential workload for resourcers; the number of application packs sent out, the number of applications that might be received, the number of interviews etc all helped in managing the response.  Likewise application deadlines were introduced so that recruiters could efficiently bulk process applications - often applications wouldn't be reviewed before the cut-off date and applications wouldn't be accepted after.  It was kind of arbitrary but these practices helped to maintain an effective screening machine.  Do we still need these practices?  Do we still need these measures?

If you were to design the perfect application mechanism - the one that gave you a shortlist of qualified candidates, ranked against your selection criteria and from that shortlist you were able to hire a suitable candidate every time - would you really care how many had applied?  Sure, if you are looking at an empty shortlist or a short-shortlist that might bother you, that might prompt you to look at your sourcing strategy, job design or other factors and if your corrective action does not result in a decent shortlist then maybe that tells you something about the vacancy.

So, do you need application completion rates for workload planning and managing candidate response?  Not really.  If the automated screening and selection features are robust and you take advantage of the mass candidate management features of your recruiting platform then dealing with the short-list should be a piece of cake.

So what measures should you be looking at instead of application completion rate?

1. Rejection stage - this tells you how well your selection tools are working
2. Rejection reason - this tells you what you need to do to change your job design or campaign plan
3. Comparative performance of sources, both historic and for the current vacancy - this tells you the probability of making a quality hire  
4. Customer satisfaction - this tells you whether the vacancy holder is satisfied with the quality of candidates

Of course there are measures that can give insight into other areas of your recruiting activity but, if you are looking to replace out-dated measures that lead to out-moded practices, this is a good place to start.

Tags: analytics, application, cold war for talent, cost per hire, CV, management information, measurement, metrics, resourcing, Resume, selection, Talent Acquisition, time to hire

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Talent Acquisition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.