How to Build a Consistent, Compliant Hiring Process Across Locations

How to Build a Consistent, Compliant Hiring Process Across Locations

For small businesses with multiple locations, it’s important to establish consistent hiring practices, not only for compliance but also to preserve your brand identity. Building a consistent hiring program may present some challenges across locations. Read on for some ideas to help you find good quality hires for your entire business.

Challenges of Hiring Across Locations

Managing multi-location hiring comes with its own share of challenges.

Centralized vs. Local

Your company will have to decide whether to use a centralized hiring department or have each location hire its own staff. 

Consistency

Without a central hiring department, you may struggle to maintain consistency in policies and practices between locations. Each manager may want to hire in their own way.

Compliance

Particularly when locations are in different states or even countries, it can be challenging to ensure your company adheres to local labor laws regarding minimum wage, overtime, or mandatory breaks.

Company Culture

Hiring practices that vary slightly can affect how your employees experience company culture and how prospective candidates see your company, influencing their desire to work there.

Best Practices for Consistent and Compliant Hiring

To overcome the challenges inherent in hiring across multiple locations, it’s important to implement best practices that promote consistency and compliance. Consider some of the following tips:

Develop a Hiring Strategy

HR consulting firm CPR suggests a 5-part approach to developing your recruiting strategy:

  1. Assess workforce needs
  2. Define clear goals
  3. Outline key components
  4. Align with culture and values
  5. Measure and adjust

Within each of these steps, you may need to address location-specific concerns. Examples include local labor laws or variable shift patterns. With a strong foundational approach, your team can implement a hiring strategy that attracts talented workers.

Focus on Job Descriptions

A potential hire’s first impression of a job and your company comes from the job description. If companies often use vague, cliché-filled job descriptions that don’t properly represent the responsibilities, the relationship can sour quickly. Job seekers need accurate language with specifics like expected duties, shift hours, and compensation. Avoid mimicking other companies’ language; use your own voice to accurately represent the job and your culture.

Choose a Compliance Expert

For multi-location businesses, especially those across state or country lines, designating a compliance expert is vital. State labor laws differ from one another in a variety of ways. You must ensure your workers are in compliance to avoid costly fines or lawsuits. A compliance expert on your team will keep track of each location’s labor laws and follow up with managers to ensure each location is in strict compliance.

Compose Fair Interview Questions

A series of structured interview questions ensures that the company is well-represented in each location and that each applicant is treated fairly. Initial phone or video call screenings may be under the purview of the central hiring team, while in-person interviews may be better suited with managers at each location. Sometimes, role-playing or problem-solving during an interview can be as revealing as more standard questions.

Use an Applicant Tracking System

ApplicantStack is a valuable asset on a variety of hiring fronts. You can easily keep track of applicants by location, record each stage of the hiring process, communicate with prospective candidates within the app, and create reports that reveal the metrics your hiring team cares about. Learn which locations are receiving the most candidates, and their recruitment source, so you can readjust your budget to give attention where you most need it. Understand the valuable time-to-fill metric to determine whether your hiring team is spread too thin and needs more attention. An ATS provides real metrics that can translate into actionable changes.

Design Custom Onboarding

While many of your company’s onboarding materials will be similar across locations, some specific characteristics may apply only to individual locations. For example, you may need to address the makeup of the customer base, adjusted hours, local customs, differences in labor law compliance, or differences in workflow. Your management on the ground at each location should contribute their insights to the onboarding programs to ensure that all relevant information for the business and the location is included in onboarding new employees.

Gallup polls consistently find that most new employees find their companies’ onboarding lacking.

“Companies should make sure new hires feel welcomed and immediately appreciated, quickly developing a sense of purpose and belonging.”

Consistency and compliance are the goals for hiring across multiple locations. A centralized hiring team can outline clear job descriptions, create a strong team to monitor compliance, and use software to keep hiring goals on target.

How an Applicant Tracking System Helps Reduce Hiring Bias

How an Applicant Tracking System Helps Reduce Hiring Bias

Recruiting is a task that can have many goals. Your company may aim to achieve the quickest turnaround, attract the highest-quality hires, and foster job satisfaction and retention through robust onboarding programs and work-life balance-focused policies. To focus your goals, you may also consider how bias affects your recruiting efforts and how best to reduce it.

What Is Hiring Bias?

When certain personal facts about a potential candidate help or hinder them from receiving a job offer, that’s bias. Outright bias that discriminates against applicants because of disability, age, race, gender, or religion is prohibited by federal Equal Opportunity Employment laws, but unconscious bias can influence hiring, too. 

To help understand how this may be affecting hiring decisions, examine some of the types of unconscious bias:

Halo Effect

This refers to the holistic judgment of a person based on a single positive characteristic, such as assuming that an attractive person is also competent, friendly, and collaborative.

Horn Effect

The inverse of the halo effect, this type of bias prompts holistic judgment based on an unappealing characteristic. Both the halo and the horn effect put the candidate at a disadvantage as they are held accountable for inaccurate perceptions.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias affects humans inside and outside the interview room. It describes seeking information that confirms what you already believe and filtering out information that doesn’t affirm those beliefs. In hiring, this could manifest in interviewing a man and a woman for a supervisory role. If an interviewer believes men are better managers than women, they would look for things in the interview to discount the woman candidate.

Affinity Hiring Bias

This describes a natural compulsion to hire those most like themselves. It may seem like you’re hiring someone who you perceive will best fit the culture, but different backgrounds, interests, and life experiences make up a rich workforce and can help you confront affinity bias.

Stereotype Bias

Stereotype bias occurs when you judge someone based on what you perceive as a characteristic common to their group, often applied to certain genders, races, or age groups. These are dangerous biases because they stop you from fairly assessing someone’s actual personality and qualifications in favor of an unfair and harmful perception.

Nonverbal Hiring Bias

This type of bias places heavy emphasis on certain nonverbal actions by a candidate. For example, judging someone’s hirability based on the strength of their handshake or the frequency of a smile. Communication involves both verbal and nonverbal cues, so some people may interpret and prioritize nonverbal ones. But in an interview setting, some otherwise highly competent candidates may find it challenging to pass the unwritten test of nonverbal communication.

How an ATS Helps Reduce Hiring Bias

It’s helpful to understand the nuances of unconscious bias and have a sincere desire to overcome them. An applicant-tracking system (ATS) can be a valuable tool for putting tangible reminders about fairness and bias elimination in front of each member of the hiring team. Here are some benefits:

Structured Workflow

A workflow is a series of connected steps or tasks that are designed to achieve a specific outcome or goal. It represents the sequence of activities, processes, and tasks involved in completing a particular project or business process.”

Hiring demands this level of precision and order because each step builds on the previous, and you often have more than one person at different points in the queue. 

Because hiring teams are often made up of Human Resources and other managers, it can be challenging to coordinate schedules and keep the process moving at an ideal pace. A tool like ApplicantStack keeps each candidate’s status front and center, with a clear visual of what’s been done and what’s pending. Communication within the app ensures that no email or text gets filtered out or languishes in the inbox of someone on vacation.

Standardized Evaluations

Standardized evaluations screen all candidates according to the same criteria, none of which is subjective. When a job requires a set education level, number of years of experience, or other objective criteria, the ATS can filter out candidates who don’t meet those standards. This is where standardized evaluations are strong. Once you have collected a pool of potential candidates, focusing too much on standardization can reduce people to a series of facts and figures, and doesn’t allow you to assess the many soft skills that make up a quality hire.

Still, the ATS can help you quantify and categorize valuable soft skills as described in resumes, and you can choose to interview those who best fit a set of important criteria beyond the first evaluation. 

Documentation

Hiring can be an overwhelming task, particularly if your company has multiple open positions, multiple locations, or a hiring surge. The ATS’s ability to document and track every step of the process means candidates can feel assured they are all treated fairly and equally. Mistakes can happen in human processes, but in the event of an accusation, your company can produce a data trail demonstrating the consistency of your hiring process.

Overcoming unconscious bias is vital for equitable and fair hiring practices. Modern job seekers examine the reputations of companies before considering an application. ApplicantStack is a valuable tool in reducing hiring bias.

Top Hiring Metrics Every Employer Should Be Tracking in 2026

Top Hiring Metrics Every Employer Should Be Tracking in 2026

Hiring metrics are a valuable tool to track the success of your company’s recruitment efforts. In a competitive market, attracting top talent requires attention to every aspect of the hiring process. If you’re not sure where to start, consider some of the following top metrics to track.

Why Track Hiring Metrics?

For small businesses whose staff and budgets are stretched thin, hiring may happen reactively. A position opens, someone posts the old job description, you hastily collect the resumes, and the main metric anyone really focuses on is “Did the position get filled?” But you don’t have to be the size of Google to realize that tracking metrics can help your company be a bit more proactive in developing a hiring strategy.

“Metrics provide a picture of the overall health of an organization’s recruiting process, says recruitment expert Elissa Tucker. “They indicate how well the organization is balancing the need for cost-effective and efficient recruiting with the need to secure the best talent fast, whenever a business need arises.”

For small businesses looking to use their hiring dollars most efficiently, metrics can reveal where to focus their efforts to make the best possible hires within the budget.

Top 4 Hiring Metrics to Track in 2026

1. Time-to-Fill

Time-to-fill measures the number of calendar days it takes to find and hire a new employee. The starting point is typically either the approval of the job opening or the posting of the job description. The endpoint may be either the candidate’s acceptance of your offer or their work start date.

(This metric is different from time-to-hire; that metric measures the experience from the candidate’s perspective. It starts when a candidate applies and ends when they accept an offer.)

Tracking time-to-fill has some important benefits:

  • Measures the costs of open positions. Unfilled jobs cost the company both in dollars and in opportunity costs. The uncovered work falls on current employees, compensated either as overtime or comp time. If they start to feel the strain of overwork and under-appreciation, they may become frustrated or burn out, leading to strained relationships. The quality of work may suffer, and, in the worst-case scenario, you end up with more job openings to fill. 
  • Exposes internal delays. Without tracking, you may not realize that there’s often a long gap between when a job gets approved and when the posting goes live, or that there’s a long delay in communication between potential candidates and members of the hiring team. You’ll learn how long it typically takes to contact candidates, schedule interviews, and extend offers, all of which affect a candidate’s perception of your company. If a preferred candidate has a better experience elsewhere, you may lose out.
  • Provides measurable data. Numbers don’t lie, whereas human perception is often mistaken. If you asked four people involved in a recent hiring how long they thought it took, you’d likely get four different answers. The numbers may reveal that you’re much slower than you thought, and light a fire for setting more proactive company policies.

2. Source Effectiveness

The source effectiveness metric reveals which of your recruiting sources yields the best results. Options like LinkedIn, job boards, recruiters, or referrals can all provide potential candidates, but their efficacy can depend on a variety of factors, some of which may even change over time.

To start, record the number of leads you get from each source you use for a job posting. Then note the quality of the leads: how far did they make it in the hiring process? How many interviews did you conduct? Did you extend offers? Were the offers accepted? 

Receiving dozens of resumes that lead to no interviews may reveal that either your job posting needs work or that the source isn’t reaching the right candidate.

Employee referrals of unqualified candidates may reveal that your internal communication about the job isn’t detailed enough.

If external recruiters don’t bring you the right candidates, you may need to evaluate that relationship or consider how effectively you’re communicating your needs.

3. Cost Per Hire

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) estimates the average cost per hire at $4,700, and for some companies, it may be up to three times that amount. They estimate that 30 to 40 percent are hard costs (job-posting boards, recruiters) and 60 percent are soft costs (time spent by department managers supporting HR roles). 

To measure your cost per hire, account for all the costs your company incurs while hiring a new employee. Some of these may include:

  • Job postings
  • Advertising
  • Recruiter fees
  • Internal administrative, hiring, and legal costs
  • Travel expenses
  • Relocation bonuses
  • Company referral incentives

Divide the total by the number of hires in a designated hiring period. This number provides insight into the true cost of hiring at your company, which can inform budget adjustments in either direction. 

4. Quality of Hire

Quality of hire may be a more elusive metric to track because it takes time to reveal itself. The broad key drivers of quality of hire include:

  • Job fit
  • Company fit
  • Performance

Talent solutions research at LinkedIn suggests a formula to measure the quality of your new hires, with some suggested factors:

Job Performance score + Ramp-up Time score + 

Engagement score + Cultural Fit score

—————————————————–                        = Quality of Hire

                                N * 

* N = number of factors or indicators

It’s up to you to determine the factors that matter to your company. Once you’ve established that criteria, score them on a scale of 1 to 100 and plug them into the formula to get a measurable statistic. Objectively evaluating new employees in this way gives you insight into whether you rushed the process, settled for a candidate to quickly fill the job, or followed a sound process.

Hiring can feel like an overwhelming process, but it can be made simpler by gathering valuable metrics. The results of your efforts can help you make significant improvements in future hiring endeavors.

Using ApplicantStack offers access to the data you need to keep track of these key hiring metrics. Explore the applicant-tracking system to find out how it can help you take your hiring efforts to the next level.

Writing Job Descriptions That Attract the Right Candidates (Not Just More)

Writing Job Descriptions That Attract the Right Candidates (Not Just More)

Job descriptions are often the first introduction someone has to your company, and they have the potential to set a lasting impression. When hiring feels urgent, it may feel easy to just press send on a hastily-assembled or recycled job description. But consider some of the ways you can make improvements that will draw in the best talent for the role.

Focus on Clarity

Clarity describes the ability to convey your point using specific, precise, and engaging language. Achieving clarity almost always takes a few editing passes to cut unnecessary words, rephrase clunky sentences, and ensure your meaning is clear.  

When writing job descriptions, there are a few ways to achieve clarity:

  • Avoid clichés. Job descriptions across industries are often filled with buzzy words that no longer have meaning. Rockstar. Team-player. Self-starter. Competitive salary. Set your job descriptions apart by avoiding them altogether.
  • Include essential information. This can include compensation, benefits, work location, work type (in-person, remote, or hybrid), and reporting structures.
  • Describe specific responsibilities. Use specific, descriptive words for job responsibilities rather than generic language. For example: “Responsible for keeping manager’s daily schedule, including email follow-ups and recording meeting minutes” instead of “Assists manager.” 
  • Define any company-specific terms. Different companies may use the same words to describe different roles; for example, your company’s program manager may have direct reports, whereas at another company, a person in that role works alone. Watch out for jargon that could be ambiguous or confusing.

Be Specific About Qualifications

Qualifications can fall into two categories: “not optional” and “nice to have.” Too often, job descriptions are written as if they all carry the same weight, which may discourage an otherwise talented candidate who thinks they don’t meet your absolute requirements. 

While for some jobs a college degree is not optional for both legal and training reasons (e.g. physician, attorney, accountant), for other jobs a college degree may fall into the “nice to have” category to widen the potential pool to include people who have the job experience and soft skills that would make them an ideal candidate. Using it as a hard requirement for certain jobs may draw a line in the sand that narrows your options significantly.

Consider the soft skills that an ideal candidate might have. Browse this comprehensive list from the U.S. Department of Labor and match soft skills to job duties to best describe the candidate you’re seeking. 

Use Inclusive Language

Among the reasons to edit past job descriptions before posting is to scrutinize them for unconscious bias. Though many companies’ stated objectives and core values include diversity and inclusion, you may not realize that language in job descriptions can undermine those goals. Biased language can discourage talented people from even applying for open positions if they perceive that you’re looking for a certain type of person. 

Stereotypes persist based on age, gender, race, and class, and many people may not realize that certain phrases reinforce those stereotypes. Some examples are obvious; for example, “We don’t need you to be a slave to your work,” which uses a harmful racial reference in a casual idiom, or “Looking for a young go-getter,” which clearly excludes older job seekers. 

Others may not feel as obvious; for example, “Work hard, play hard” may imply a company culture where long workdays are followed by the expectation of socializing outside work hours, which excludes parents, people who care for elderly parents, or people who feel uncomfortable in crowded social situations. 

Consider that words like “aggressive” or “outspoken” are unconsciously associated with masculinity and may discourage a woman from applying. Words like “college-graduate” or “cultural fit” may discourage minority applicants. Those words can imply racial bias. A phrase like “hit the ground running” can alienate a disabled job applicant. 

This kind of language doesn’t overtly violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibiting employment discrimination, but it may turn off potential candidates who feel uneasy with what it implies.

Create a Company Template

The Human Resources department at Northwestern University created a template and guide to use for writing job descriptions. It includes HR’s approach to job descriptions and provides a template that includes fields like “Job Summary” and “Job Description,” a bullet-pointed list of 7 to 9 duties in order of importance.

By establishing a house style guide for job descriptions across all departments of your company, you can both make the task easier to approach and present a unified brand identity to job searchers in a variety of roles. Your company can be known for its clear, concise, and uniform job descriptions. ApplicantStack makes it easy to create templates and share them when roles open up that need to be filled. Explore how the platform simplifies this step in the recruiting process by ensuring that job descriptions are consistent and compliant.

Posting a job description is an act of faith that the right person will see it, recognize themselves in the job duties, and submit their application. To give yourself an edge in attracting the best talent, focus on clarity, specificity, and inclusivity in your job descriptions. 

Streamline Your Hiring Process without Compromising on Quality

Streamline Your Hiring Process without Compromising on Quality

Traditional hiring methods follow a tried-and-true process that may have room for improvement. It’s easy to stick with what works, but consider some of the following ways to help streamline your hiring process – and still find the quality candidates your company needs to succeed.

The Traditional Hiring Process

When your company is ready to hire, it may look something like this:

  1. Determine hiring needs
  2. Crowdsource job description content
  3. Write and edit job descriptions
  4. Post jobs to boards
  5. Sift through responses
  6. Contact possible candidates for the first round of interviews
  7. Coordinate schedules with hiring managers
  8. Coordinate schedules with potential hires
  9. Conduct multiple rounds of interviews
  10. Extend offers
  11. Wait for responses
  12. Officially hire
  13. Onboarding and training

If this feels familiar and laborious, it may be time to interject a dose of efficiency into these steps.

4 Tips to Streamline Your Hiring Process

Follow these tips to improve your hiring efforts and create a more seamless process.

Evaluate Real Hiring Needs

Rather than sticking to past hiring schedules, department sizes, and positions that have traditionally existed, take the time to determine what your company needs going forward systematically. The recruitment professionals at Sheer Velocity suggest some of the following criteria:

  • Define your business goals
  • Evaluate current staff skill strengths and note skill gaps 
  • Analyze technology and workforce trends in your industry to consider future growth
  • Consult key stakeholders to open lines of communication about current and future needs
  • Develop a hiring plan that aligns with your overall business strategy

Reconsider the “Bureaucratic Hiring Method”

This term, coined by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross, describes a “consensus-oriented hiring culture” where multiple colleagues and hiring managers are part of a lengthy interview process. In companies where new hires will work with multiple people, it can seem respectful to solicit their input on potential candidates. Add hiring managers into the mix, and hiring becomes a dance where people don’t always feel free to express their true opinions. 

It all feeds into a culture with the potential for “loss aversion, the well-established bias that often the pain of losing or doing a mistake is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining or doing the right decision,” say Atta Tarki, Tyler Cowen and Alexandra Ham. “In reality, the bureaucratic method of hiring destroys a lot of value by missing out of stellar candidates while adding little value.”

They suggest a few measures to counteract these tendencies:

  1. Reduce the number of interviewers: More than four or five interviewers in the process probably costs you more than it benefits.
  2. Assign someone to the final decision: Additionally, determine who has veto power and emphasize that not everyone will have final approval.
  3. Establish a numerical rating system: This helps the committee see an overall view rather than focusing on negatives. Ask for ratings privately to avoid groupthink.
  4. Remove the “Dr. Deaths”:Track committee members who reject the most candidates, and remove them from the process.
  5. Reward those who recognize great hires: Change your culture away from penalizing the occasional bad hire and focus on good outcomes.

Scrutinize Recruiting Practices

Though job boards are the path of least resistance, consider the volume and quality of responses you’re getting. How much time do you spend sifting vs. offering interviews? Do you find that you mostly attract underqualified applicants? Does it always feel like you’re missing out on a valuable segment of potential hires? If you use an AI-powered screening tool, is it catching the right candidates or could it use some additional personalization to help you connect with top talent?

Consider, too, how the potential candidates interact with your hiring system. Is your application process cumbersome and repetitive? Does the technology all work properly, with no dead pages or broken links? How quickly do candidates receive a response?

There is usually no one-size-fits-all tool for recruiting. It may require a multi-pronged approach of job boards, networking, referrals, and recruiters to fill the entry- and manager-level positions in your company. 

Implement an Applicant Tracking System

Goals, adjustments, and culture changes give you the “why” of your recruiting efforts. An applicant tracking system like ApplicantStack gives you the “how.” The approach of gathering applicants and responding within the software means nothing gets lost in the inbox of a hiring manager on vacation, or sent to a spam filter and discarded. Applicants can chose if they would prefer emails or text messages, which helps keep communication current and active. A thorough record of each applicant’s place in the process is available at a glance for each member of the hiring committee, ensuring timely interactions.

It’s easy to follow traditional approaches to hiring. People feel comfortable doing things the way they’ve always been done. It takes some effort to reimagine the hiring process at your company, but taking some active steps can help you streamline and acquire the best possible candidates. Implementing ApplicantStack can help you take the first step and get access to the tools you need to streamline recruiting.

Why Candidate Experience Matters More Than Ever (And How to Improve Yours)

Why Candidate Experience Matters More Than Ever (And How to Improve Yours)

Within the ebbs and flows of the job market one thing stays consistent: the potential candidate experience matters. Your company’s ability to hire top talent starts with creating a positive experience with clarity, transparency, communication, and speed. Read on to discover how to leverage those characteristics into your hiring process

Understanding Job Offer Acceptance Rates

The overall job market plays a role in offer acceptance rates. A stronger job market influences the rate, since candidates have more offers to consider. But companies have control over some of what affects this metric, which can be calculated by:

Offer-to-acceptance rate = (# of offers accepted/# of offers extended) x 100

So if an organization extended offers to 30 candidates and received 18 acceptances, their acceptance rate (18 / 30 x 100) would be 60 per cent.

You can compare your rates with some recent trends identified in a Talent Trends Report from Ashby:

By industry, OAR rates in 2024:

  • Business Services: 82%
  • Health Technology: 80%
  • Saas and Cloud: 79%
  • Financial Technology: 77%
  • Online Marketplaces: 76%
  • Consumer Apps: 73%
  • Media & Entertainment: 72%

The small differences indicate that “the role itself, application process, and other factors likely have more weight than the industry the open role is in.” That’s good news for the four characteristics your company can tweak for a good candidate experience.

Clarity

Someone’s first introduction to a job opening at your company is often through the job description. Unfortunately, they can tend to run long and be chock-full of unnecessary information that doesn’t actually explain the vital parts of the job. As the writer of the text, try to put yourself in the shoes of job seekers. They are likely reading dozens, if not hundreds, of job descriptions, and will quickly tire of all-too-common clichés: rockstar, go-getter, team player, self-starter, fast-paced, hard worker, change-maker, results-driven. 

If these phrases ever had real meaning, their pervasiveness has stripped them of value. Taking time to write concise, accurate job descriptions with specifics will help you stand out in a sea of words and will show candidates you’re serious about finding the right fit.

Consider a few tips from the experts at The Forbes Research Council:

  • Write short, compelling copy
  • Keep it simple and original
  • Clarify necessary skills from desired skills
  • Get insight from current employees
  • Provide clear expectations
  • Make the description employee-focused

Transparency

Transparency goes hand-in-hand with clarity. A candidate’s first introduction to the job should be easy to understand and feel honest and straightforward. That includes pay transparency. Job postings should have a listed salary or range, and the range should not be so vast that it’s impossible for the candidate to determine what they would be paid. Listing benefits is another way to communicate a commitment to transparency and fairness. It emphasizes that you invite discussions of fair compensation.

Another move towards transparency is for “Hiring managers and interviewers [to] share a copy of their interview questions, or share a list of clear topics and experiences they want to ask about,” says Sisi Wei of The Markup. “The point is to give all candidates an equal chance at doing well—regardless of whether they’re introverts or extroverts, or if they have the right experience or connections to guess what interviewers might ask.”

Communication

The first contact after receiving an application or résumé can set the tone for all further communication. Candidates want to know someone on the other end received their information and that it didn’t just get sent into an inbox void with no indication of a reply. Even an automated response can go a long way in establishing a line of contact and trust. Bonus points if the response indicates a possible timeline for further communications. 

Even if that candidate isn’t the right fit for the open job, a courteous rejection can ensure a positive reputation. Referrals are a vital part of the recruiting toolkit, and you never know the connections of the person on the other end of the computer. It also keeps the relationship cordial for future job openings.

Good communication requires organization, and the best way to keep track of who has received responses and who is still waiting is by using an applicant tracking system. Applicant Stack provides the candidate an option how they would like to receive communications, ensuring they can be available for your timely responses. By sending responses within the ATS, each member of the hiring committee can quickly scan for finished and pending communication tasks. It eliminates responses getting lost when workers are out of the office or miss an email.

Speed

Candidates who’ve been in the workforce for awhile have seen dramatic changes in the way the hiring process plays out, and may be used to waiting longer for responses to applications and arranging interviews. Gen Z, on the other hand, says Kate Beckman “expect a quick feedback loop from companies, and prefer to be rejected than ‘ghosted’ during the hiring process. Not only does a swift response demonstrate respect for candidates and foster a positive candidate experience, but it also holds the potential to make a significant impact on the company’s ability to stand out and secure the best talent out there.”  

Even if the ultimate response is a rejection, candidates prefer to be kept in the loop during all stages of the process, without long gaps between actions. Though each candidate is different, many Gen Z job searchers prefer to communicate via text message. Meeting each candidate at their preferences enhances their experience. 

By focusing on four related goals: clarity, transparency, communication, and speed, you can offer a positive candidate hiring experience and find top talent for your company’s open roles. With ApplicantStack, the hiring process can become more streamlined. You can stay connected with candidates throughout the process via email and text-based communication. Automated workflows ensure that everyone stays in the loop and top applicants can receive and accept offers. Try it for free today!