Why answering applications pays
Not because it is nice. Because the people you ignore are the same people you will want next year, and they remember.
What somebody else measured
Of job seekers surveyed:
61% simply stopped hearing from an organisation during the hiring process
This is the one. Not rejected, not turned down. Just silence after somebody had put their name to something.
49% turned down an offer because of a bad experience while being recruited
An employer who treats the process as free is paying for it at the offer stage, where it costs the most.
67% gave up on a role because the process took too long
Not because the job was wrong. Because nobody moved.
92% have run into poor recruiting practice at some point
Which means a candidate arrives expecting it, and an employer who does the ordinary thing well stands out for very little effort.
Where those came from, and what is wrong with them
PwC, Future of Recruiting survey. Every figure above is from that one piece of research, and here is what you should hold against it:
- It is a UNITED STATES survey. British hiring is not American hiring and we are not going to pretend the figures transfer exactly.
- It is about ONE THOUSAND people. That is a real survey and it is not a census.
- It was published in 2019. Old enough that it describes a different labour market, and we would rather say so than quietly drop the date.
We publish that because a percentage with no source is decoration. An agency site we looked at carries eight of these as bare numbers with nothing attached. The numbers turn out to be real, which is worse rather than better: they had something checkable and published it in a shape nobody can check.
What we measure, which is a different thing
A survey asks people what they remember. This board records what actually happened. The two are not the same kind of evidence and we are not going to mix them in one row of big numbers.
Every employer's answering record is published on their own adverts
Once there are enough applications for the figure to mean anything, the percentage answered appears on the advert itself, next to the job. Not a badge we award and not a promise about the future: a record of what that employer has actually done.
Nothing counts as an answer unless an email really went to the applicant, sent by us when the employer recorded a decision. It is not a box anybody can tick.
10 days is what we ask
Not a rule, a target, and it is what the figure is measured against. Shortlisted, interviewing, offered or not this time. Four buttons. The one that takes the longest is the one that means the most to somebody who has been waiting.
And the one we can deliver without you
If an advert closes and no decision was recorded, we tell the candidate that ourselves: the advert has closed, nothing was recorded, treat it as unsuccessful and put your effort somewhere else. We cannot make an employer answer. We can make sure nobody is left refreshing their email for a month, and that is a promise about our own behaviour rather than about somebody else's.
What it costs you to do this
Four buttons per applicant, once. That is the whole thing. There is no form, no wording to write and nothing to sign off, because the email is written already and it goes out under your name.