The Resume Host / The search

What employers could fix cheaply

Several widespread practices cost applicants a great deal and employers nothing.

Advertisements that list twenty requirements without distinguishing essential from desirable deter well-matched applicants and attract poorly matched ones, and the effect is documented as being uneven across groups. Naming the three that actually matter costs a sentence.

Application forms that require manual re-entry of information already present in an attached document impose an hour on every applicant to save minutes for the employer, multiplied across the whole field. Salary ranges omitted from advertisements waste both parties' time through to final stages.

Silence after an application, and particularly after an interview, is the most commonly reported grievance and is close to free to fix. An automated closing message to unsuccessful applicants at the point the role is filled costs nothing and is still not standard.

These are not ethical arguments so much as efficiency ones. Each of these practices reduces the quality of the applicant pool, and organisations that fix them are competing for the same people with a lower barrier.

The final point for employers is that most of these practices persist because nobody owns the applicant's experience. Recruitment is measured on time to hire and cost per hire, and the hours spent by unsuccessful applicants appear in no measure anywhere. That is the same structural blindness that produces bad meetings and unnecessary forms, and naming it is usually the first step to fixing any of it.