What Makes A Great Recruitment Website Application Form?

Application forms are a necessary evil. No one particularly likes filling them out. From a candidate perspective they can be long winded, tiresome and repetitive. Bare in mind candidates may end up applying to dozens of roles, filling out application forms for each of those vacancies. Some of those application forms may be a few fields long and some could be pages. However you feel about them, they are needed to capture the applicants data. We need to find a balance between the application form being too short and easy to fill out and too long, difficult and off putting. We'll give you a few quick tips to firstly ensure your prospective candidates will be super happy, secondly to lower your bounce rate on your vacancies pages and thirdly increase application rates. 

Now this article is a little tricky to write as specific application form styles or formats may work better in particular markets. Also your recruitment agency could quite easily recruit for a few different sectors and may need a different style application form for each particular sector. I’m going to approach this from the perspective of a recruitment agency that recruits for one specific niche. You want your application forms to be comprehensive but also to be quick, simple and easy to fill out for candidates. 

Form Fields

I would always push for the minimum number of application form fields. In my opinion you should collect their first name, last name, email address, telephone number and CV. At the initial application stage I don’t really think you need any more than this. If you want to do some further snooping then it should be easy enough to find their LinkedIn profile and social media accounts or hopefully they’ve included their LinkedIn URL on their CV. 

Autocomplete

You know when you fill out a form and it prepopulates or auto suggests what should go into that field? That’s called “autocomplete” and it should be on all form fields. For example you developer could use the following code so that your application form is automatically filled in by the user’s browser history..

<label for="firstName">First Name: </label>

<input name="firstName" id="firstName" type="text" autocomplete="given-name" />

<label for="lastName">Last Name: </label>

<input name="lastName" id="lastName" type="text" autocomplete="family-name" />

Minimum & Maximum

Each input field should have a minimum and maximum number of characters to ensure data integrity. You want to ensure the data you’re sending through to your CRM is clean data. So for example I would recommend having a minimum of 2 characters for the first and last names and maximum number of characters of say 20. Most UK telephone numbers will have 11 digits so specifying a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 12 characters, should avoid any incorrect numbers.

Validation Type 

When writing the HTML code for your application form, your developer should specify the “input type” for each form field. There’s around 25 different input types but some of the main ones are “email”, “tel” and “text”. These input types can give us a degree of validation when it comes to the data we’re accepting but we need to add another layer on top of this to check that the email they’re providing is a valid email, the telephone number they’re providing is valid and so on. 

Placeholder Text Versus Labels

When it comes to your application form you need to tell your users what the form field represents i.e., what information they need to input. We typically choose placeholder text and / or form labels. Form labels sit above the form field and placeholder text sits inside of the form field. You can use either but sticking to just form labels is typically the preferred practice as it’s more accessible for users. 

CRM Integration 

There are so many integrations available these days but this can be a great time saver for your consultants and also ensures the integrity of your candidate data. A direct integration between your website and recruitment CRM allows your candidate CVs to be directly and automatically added to your CRM, against that particular vacancy. Now you may or may not want this depending on your sector. If for example you work in recruiting entry level talent for sales roles then your database could quickly fill up with irrelevant candidates who didn’t move past a telephone interview stage with you. 

I’m Not A Robot

Candidates are using more and more AI & automation tools to apply for roles, which means more (often irrelevant) applications to sift through. This translates into a huge drain of your already precious time. We can counter these tools, in part by using checkboxes or reCAPTCHA boxes as automation tools often can't detect these on the page or can check them. 

Confirmation Email 

These are pretty easy to set up with a little bit of backend code in your agency website. Once the user applies for a role we can use their email address to send them a confirmation email from a general “info@recruitmentagency.com” email address. It gives them a record of the roles they have applied to and also lets them know we’ve received their application. Great user experience all around! 

This should give you a great foundation for your application form and if you have any other questions then just get in touch!