When hiring, which applicants should you make jump through hoops?

One of my favorite, work-related groups on Facebook is Recruiting Brainfood. It is a community of those who care about the world of talent acquisition. Some are in-house recruiters. Some are third-party recruiters. Some, like me, are on the vendor side. But we’re all trying to make our little slice of the world a better place.

A question today provoked an interesting exchange. In a nutshell, a recruiter asked in his Indeed job posting for candidates to enter a specific word in their application. He did so, he said, in order to determine which candidates had good attention to detail.

I haven’t looked at Indeed’s 1-click apply for a while now, but I commented that it is possible that it makes it difficult to impossible for candidates to enter that magic word into their application. It is also possible that the 1-click apply allows candidates to enter a magic word into their application if they’re applying using Indeed’s site but not if they’re applying through the mobile app or site. If that’s the case, then the recruiter’s beef with these candidates was misplaced.

At College Recruiter, we recently hired three people for our operations department. We followed the same process we used with success in the fall when we hired a full-stack developer: every applicant received an autoresponder with a link to a fairly simple assessment that we built to measure their competencies with the technology etc that we use. You could, of course, use an off-the-shelf assessment if it aligns well with what you actually need in your workplace.

We found that candidates who looked the best on paper often performed terribly on the assessment and vice versa. The assessment also made it easier for us to hire based on competencies instead of somewhat arbitrary factors like who interviews “the best” or who jumped through the most irrelevant hoops that really had nothing to do with their job. An example of such a hoop would be to include a magic word in an application…unless you’ll be paying them to apply to jobs with other companies that also require them to include magic words in their applications.

The days of needing to assess candidates indirectly by looking at proxies are long behind us, thankfully. There’s just no need to guess at whether someone has the skills to do a job well anymore. Just test them for those skills. Test all applicants for those skills. Many aren’t good at writing resumes or interviewing but excel in the work that they’re actually paid to do.

What we’ve found over the years is that the best (and worst) candidates can’t be bothered to jump through hoops like this. I’ve seen a lot of recruiters over the years theorize that the best candidates are the ones who are willing to put up the most onerous application processes. But the data shows the reverse: they don’t need your job. They can find just as good a job (or better) with less effort from the employer across the street and so they don’t apply to your job at all or just use minimal effort like not entering magic words into applications.

Another benefit of putting 100 percent of applicants through the assessment process was far better diversity emerged. Full-stack developers are hard-to-hire at the best of times, let alone those who are also diverse. We hired one. And hiring military veterans, for many employers, is also challenging. We hired one of those too.