More than 14 million job seekers' applications went completely ignored in a single quarter last year, according to one hiring platform. Now, sites like Greenhouse and LinkedIn are experimenting with new ways to hold companies accountable for making the hiring process so miserable for applicants.
Three of the biggest job search sites -- LinkedIn, Indeed and Greenhouse -- have put tools in place to highlight which companies frequently respond to applicants in a timely manner.
The changes come as frustration mounts among U.S. job seekers, an increasing number of whom are languishing in long-term unemployment as the labor market slows. The job search has always been painful, but these days applicants feel more than ever like they're sending their résumés into the void. According to Greenhouse, half of applicants say they've been ghosted after an interview.
Meanwhile, new artificial intelligence tools have made it easier for candidates to play a numbers game, generating tailored résumés for hundreds of roles. But that's led to an increasingly overwhelming flood of applications for companies.
Eliminating pain points
In a bid to boost transparency, LinkedIn is adding "responsiveness insights" that show applicants which listings are being actively reviewed by employers. It's testing the insights on a small number of job postings before rolling them out sitewide in the coming months.
The platform is also refining its "job match" feature that uses AI to see how qualified a candidate is for a given listing. The feature is designed to help cut down on the flood of applications companies are receiving by nudging users to focus their efforts on jobs where they have a good shot at hearing back.
The feature is a game-changer, LinkedIn product manager Rohan Rajiv said -- one made possible by AI. "These next 12 months are going to be a pretty dramatic change in terms of how this whole process works," he said.
Indeed chose to focus on encouraging employer responsiveness after the issue showed up as the biggest pain point for job seekers in a recent survey. While the platform has issued "responsive employer" badges since 2018 to recognize companies that consistently reply to more than half of all messages, it started releasing even more details in 2023, including labels that share the employer's median response time with candidates.
Indeed has launched a mobile app for hiring managers it says has made the process easier and faster for busy bosses to communicate with applicants on the go.
Greenhouse, meanwhile, is testing a set of four badges that would verify an employer meets the platform's respectful, communicative, prepared and fair hiring process standards for a given job posting. To win the "respectful" badge, an employer must do things like ask for applicants' pronouns and name pronunciation, as well as send out confirmation emails.
For "communicative," they're expected to clear out active candidates on closed jobs and send out rejection emails. To earn the "prepared" badge, hiring managers must have a clear plan of exactly what questions they will ask and what they're testing for. For "fair," they need to do things like anonymize résumés and take-home tests to reduce bias.
While there's a lot of talk about how badly candidates are being treated by some companies, other businesses take pride in being courteous. "So the question is: How do you find them?" said Jon Stross, Greenhouse's president and co-founder.
The badges are meant to reward those companies that are working hard to do right by candidates, Stross said.
Keeping the human touch
Clarence Lal, the global head of talent acquisition for satellite imagery company Planet, said he looks at the new Greenhouse badges as an accountability measure and a way to see how well the hiring process is working.
"Everybody talks about candidate experience and it's a bit of a buzzword," he said. "But at the end of the day, it's just another human being on the other side of that interview."
Planet has earned the respectful and fair badges and is working toward earning verification for being communicative and prepared.
Already, Lal said his team has seen improvement: with about 2,000 active applicants across 34 open roles -- all handled by four recruiters -- they've seen their time to hire drop by 43% from the year before and the rate at which candidates accept offers rise by 5%.
