How to Improve Your Job Application Completion Rates

According to iHire’s 2024 State of Online Recruiting Report, 27.5% of employers and hiring managers are frustrated by candidates dropping out of the hiring process. In many cases, candidates start or partially complete their application and decide not to finish for one reason or another. For example, they may realize the job is not a good fit or simply don’t have the time or patience to complete a lengthy and multi-step application.

So, what can you do to prevent potentially great talent from abandoning their applications and falling out of your recruitment funnel too early? How can you create a good application form that won’t deter top applicants? Keep reading to learn some job application best practices and hear from real job seekers about what they appreciate when applying for jobs online.

Job Application Best Practices

Your job application completion rate is an important hiring metric, so before you make any drastic changes to your process, make sure your applications have the basics covered. This includes ensuring they follow guidelines from the EEOC, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and other federal, state, and local employment laws and regulations.

Along with the obvious legal issues, if a candidate sees unusual questions that could be construed as discriminatory, they may stop filling out the application and leave with a negative impression of your company.

Also, when posting a job, keep in mind the audience that will see your application. If you’re hiring for a specialized position or one that requires prior experience, you may try posting the position on industry-specific job boards, which tend to attract more qualified candidates. That way, a candidate won’t get halfway through the application before realizing they’re unqualified and abandon the process altogether.

Finally, remember that the job application is your initial touchpoint with the applicant. It can be tempting to put in numerous prescreening questions, but that can bog down the application and make it take longer than the candidate has time for (more on that later). If you keep the application short and to the point, you’re much more likely to raise your job application completion rate. You can always ask some of the more detailed prescreening questions when you begin the interview process.

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Addressing Applicant Challenges

When asked what employers could do better to get them to apply for their online job postings, job seekers surveyed for iHire’s 2024 State of Online Recruiting Report provided a variety of answers. Let’s take a look at some of their responses, which offer insights into advice for reducing application abandonment rates.

Shorten the Application Completion Time

In our survey, 34.9% of job seekers said they’d be more likely to apply for a job if an employer shortened the time it takes to complete an application. But how much time are they willing to put into applying? According to iHire’s What Candidates Want: 2023 Job Seeker Report, 62.6% of candidates want to spend less than 20 minutes on an online application.

You can make your application shorter by reducing the number of prescreening questions or streamlining the process so that the applicant only has to submit one application without navigating through other forms or websites.

If you must direct the applicant to another site, say, from a job board to your company’s applicant tracking system (ATS), make sure that happens first in the process. There’s nothing more frustrating for a job seeker than submitting a resume and clicking “apply,” only to have to re-enter all that information again on your site. Working with a job board or recruitment platform that offers seamless integration with your ATS can mitigate those issues.

Include the Salary for the Position

Putting the salary range in the job posting can go a long way toward motivating job seekers to finish their applications. In our State of Online Recruiting survey, 54.7% of candidates said they’d be more likely to apply for a job if the employer specified the salary in the ad. Just make sure the salary you’re offering is competitive and comparable to the going rates for similar jobs in your industry. A lowball salary is a recipe for applicant drop-offs.

Boost Your Job Posting’s Credibility

Several job seekers surveyed for our 2024 State of Online Recruiting Report selected the “Other” option and commented that they struggled to differentiate legitimate job postings from “scam” postings. Adding a company profile and following our job ad guidelines are some easy ways to show job seekers that your ad is legitimate and improve application completion rates.

You should also make sure your ad is formatted well and avoid using all caps or excessive exclamation points. Not only does that come across as scammy, but 8.6% of job seekers wish employers would ensure their ads are properly formatted or easy to read.

Communicating With Applicants

The final thing you can do to help candidates complete their applications is to communicate with them throughout the process. In fact, not hearing back from employers, or “ghosting,” was the most pressing challenge job seekers mentioned in our 2024 State of Online Recruiting Report.

To help minimize ghosting, consider specifying the next steps in your hiring process right in the job posting. When can candidates anticipate hearing back from you? When do you plan to conduct interviews (50.1% of respondents want employers to include this detail in their job ads)? That way, job seekers will know what to expect and will be more eager to finish applying.

Another option to improve communication and increase apply rates is to set up an automated email contacting candidates who have started an application but didn’t finish it. Encourage them to come back when they have time and share a few details about your company culture to reengage them.

For more insights into common job seeker challenges, and tips on how you can improve your hiring metrics such as application completion rates, check out iHire’s 2024 State of Online Recruiting Report.