Some behind the scenes of our data collection.
Everyone’s started from somewhere, even Jeff Bezos had no experience once. How do you break through the first barrier of finding your first job ?
We wanted to find the root of what made candidates feel hopeless. After speaking to my friends I had an expectation that there are other people out there with similar experiences as me. I decided to open my survey with the main focus of the topic “Have you ever felt hopeless whilst completing an online job application?”
Out of all of our participants we found that the most common response was 62 this shows that the majority of participants have experienced a feeling of hopelessness while completing online job application forms. I was happy to see that people had shared my experiences.
There is room for change needed in the future of job applications.
One of the issues that factored into participants feeling hopeless was that they were not receiving the opportunity to express their personality and soft skills. Which is why we asked the next question “What would make you feel less hopeless in the future while completing an online job application.”
The two most common responses were that participants found that job applications were too lengthy with too many questions and lacked the opportunity to convey your personality.
I learned that job applications should be changed to simplify their processes to make participants feel motivated for future job prospects.
For me personally I would love to see a video option to express my personality across and for me to feel like I have a fair chance.
Which is why I was surprised to see the responses on question 3 “Which of these would make you feel less hopeless and even excited about your prospect of securing the job?”
The ability to answer questions via video recordings ended up being the lowest chosen option. Although this differed from my own personal choice, it made me broaden my perspective on the change that others wanted to see in the future of job applications. The highest choice was the “easy and simple application form” answer because it probably generalised all the other answers in one.
I wanted to find out how participants wanted to convey their personality through video recording and what limitations they would adhere to which is why i asked the question “When recording your answers via video… would you like to have the ability to re-do your recordings to perfect them?”
We found that the majority of participants selected the “unlimited amount of retries” option. This was expected as I would also prefer to have enough chances to convey my personality to the best of my ability.
Yes, it would be ideal to have an unlimited number of retries on your video as there are many obstacles such as human error and technological errors but to be realistic I don’t believe that companies would be happy to introduce this as it allows you to almost fake the whole process. How can your personality and soft skills be accurately assessed when you have been practicing over and over?
This is something HR professionals should keep in mind while creating future job posts.
I wanted to know which video length was preferred for video interviews to effectively convey personality. This is why we asked “What’s your ideal video length while submitting your video responses?”
You wouldn’t want your video responses to be long and awkward or too short and brief. This explains why the most popular response was the video having a cap of 3 minutes. This is also beneficial for HR professionals as 3 minute videos provide enough content to assess but is not too lengthy and time consuming.
Overall the majority of participants wanted to see change in the future of job applications. The main trend was that people wanted the processes to be simplified and easier to portray their personality across, specifically if they had no past experience.
The results showed that I wasn’t the only one feeling hopeless when applying to job applications. I was also pleased to find that my views were generally shared across the whole survey from the root of why they felt hopelessness to the optimistic view of video interviews.
Overall we found that the online job application scene needs reform. Hopefully you’ll think twice before posting that job next time to get the next generation hired !
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