There’s a strange myth floating around talent acquisition that job seekers treat your openings with reverence. As if they show up to your career site with a hot cup of tea, a clear mind, and unlimited time to devote to your lovingly crafted content.
Reality check. Candidates behave online exactly like the rest of us do: distracted, skeptical, impatient, and one bad click away from disappearing forever.
This isn’t speculation. Research on how people read online has said the same thing for two decades. Folks don’t read. They skim. They look for emotional or informational anchors. They piece together context from fragments.
And if they can’t find the answer they’re looking for in the first few seconds, they don’t keep digging. Like the kid who’s just too cool for the party, they bounce before you even know they were there.
Hiring often forgets this because it still clings to a fiction that job seeking is a deliberate, linear journey. It’s not. It’s browsing. It’s opportunistic. It’s happening in five-minute windows between meetings or during whatever random YouTube video someone’s half-watching in the background.
The thing is, candidates aren’t looking for a relationship. They’re looking for a hookup. They’re not ready to commit. They’re ready to swipe left or right. The primary mission of your career site is a lot like a profile picture on a dating app. If it isn’t enticing, or easy enough, to merit a second look, then even the most perfect fit is going to end in a missed connection.
Most career sites, though, think that candidates have already fallen for them, and are ready for a long term commitment. This is a fundamental fallacy. And as much as we want to believe in the power of employer brands, they just aren’t all that necessary for anything in the front of the funnel. An overwhelming majority of job seekers who arrive at your career site land on a job page first.
And the reason people click job ads isn’t because they’re looking to research your employer value proposition - that stuff becomes important only after they’re further along in the funnel. Nope. They want to do one thing: find a job they’re qualified for, and apply.
The only call to action they really care about is “apply now.” And if it redirects to some lightly branded ATS sign in page, chances are, they won’t. That’s not to say not every candidate just applies without critically reviewing the job description. It’s just that they’re looking for stuff like salary range, responsibilities, location, and benefits.
If those are buried underneath paragraphs of copywriting about who you are, and what you do, before even getting into the actual role, responsibilities and requirements, then chances are they’re going to lose interest. Curiosity should be met with clarity, not employer branding collateral.
No wonder the majority of career site visitors never get far enough to click apply. Let’s be honest. If you landed on an e-comm site that required you to scroll past an entire photo slider, three paragraphs of brand story and a sustainability pledge without telling you the price, you aren’t going to go “wow, what an inspiring narrative.”
You’d go right down to the similar items section and find an expedient alternative. If you’re looking for a white t-shirt, you’ve got plenty of options. And candidates, after all, are consumers. They don’t care about reverence. They care about relevance.
It’s really that simple.
All of those “qualified applicants” you’re going after, however, have better things to do. Like their jobs.
So, what’s the fix? The good news is that it doesn’t require rewriting every JD, or going through yet another brand refresh. Like a 12 step program, the first step is acceptance: candidates are digital consumers, and they have options. Once you internalize that immutable fact, optimization becomes clearer.
Like a newspaper article, you bury the lede, you lose. Think inverted pyramid: the most important information needs to be in the first couple of sentences, or whatever’s above the fold.
Job seekers are skimmers, not scholars. And because when they hit a career site, they’re looking for simplicity and superficiality; this requires a clean UI/UX that reduces the number of decisions candidates have to make in the first few seconds they’re on site.
Decision fatigue is real, and research shows that if the cognitive cost of an ostensibly mindless task (like getting through an ATS workflow) is too high, then there’s a high likelihood that task will be abandoned. Driving conversions means reducing that cognitive load as much as possible.
Ultimately, though, TA teams must shift their collective mindset from “how do we make people want to work here” (being an employer of choice becomes much easier leveraging a scarcity mindset than competitive positioning, for what it’s worth), to “how do we capture which people want to work here?”
The answer has nothing to do with employer branding, or AI, or applicant tracking system workflows. It’s got to do with getting enough information about the candidate to qualify them as quickly as possible; applications are the highest intent signal imaginable, but that signal is ephemeral.
You don’t need a voluntary disclosure form or an automated prescreen to convert that signal into a personalized engagement opportunity. You just need the basics.
And as long as you’re not doing cohort based hiring, the optimal time for a candidate to fill out an application isn’t at the beginning of the process - it’s at the end, after they’ve been shortlisted or, better, selected. You don’t need to know everything about the candidate to know whether or not they’re going to be a “fit.” You just need to know whether they’re qualified, interested and available.
If they are, well, there’s a good chance you’re not the only company they’re applying to; but done right, you’ll likely be the only real company they’ll actually interact with that’s not transactional or logistic. And that - that personalized candidate experience - is a competitive advantage that no career site, or job ad, can ever overcome.
Candidates are consumers, and while the supply and demand ratio very clearly favors employers today, the labor market is cyclical. So it’s best to remember that ultimately, at least for top talent, you’re not the one doing the shopping.
Consumers today don’t want couture; they want convenience. If that doesn’t describe your career site and application, well, then it’s time to rethink your approach to visual merchandising. Or, as we call it, “candidate experience.”
Not sure how your career site is performing today?
Dalia offers a free audit to help you understand the quality of your career site traffic and identify opportunities to reduce reliance on low-performing sources like job boards and programmatic networks.
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Your audit will include:
A breakdown of your current applicant sources and their conversion to hire.
Insights into where you're overspending on low-quality volume.
A customized plan to improve career site conversion and drive more applicants and hires with your existing traffic.