How to Reduce People Rage Applying to your Job Posts
As a business owner or hiring manager, the hiring process can be time-consuming and stressful. With so many applicants to sort through, it can be difficult to find the right person for the job. Even more so when a high number of unqualified applicants are flooding your inbox. Lately, this is the result of the "rage applying" trend.
What is Rage Applying?
Rage applying is the act of job seekers impulsively applying for multiple job openings without giving much thought to the position or the company. This often happens when a job seeker is feeling frustrated and desperate—whether in their role or while unemployed—and sees multiple job postings that seem like a good fit. The problem with rage applying from a business’s perspective is that it results in a high volume of subpar applications. That’s a waste of time for both the job seeker and whoever has to sort through them!
How can you reduce the number of people that rage apply to your job postings?
While the trend is frustrating, there is a solution to this problem! And the steps are things that will make your job postings better in general, so it’s a win-win. To deter a rage application, there are three main ideas you want to convey with your job posting:
Your screening process is thorough, and your standards are high. Yours is a desirable place to work, and you are careful about who you select to join your team.
Going through your interview process requires effort. You may have several interview steps, or require a short demo project or presentation to prove skills.
You will only contact applicants that have a reasonable chance of success. This is out of respect for everyone’s time; there’s no point doing a screening call for someone without the right qualifications.
Remember, the people that are rage applying are using a low-effort approach in the hopes that something sticks. They are turned off by knowing that multiple interviews will put them under serious scrutiny, and that their references will be called.
How to update your hiring processes and job postings
Taking our above ideas in order, here are some steps you can take to start making change:
Your interviewing process is an expression of how you develop and promote people within your organization. Think about it: when you post a job, you should know in advance what skills, knowledge, experience, and competencies a person will need to be successful in that role.
But it goes beyond that too! You want to also know how you can grow and eventually promote them in the long term so you can retain their institutional and cultural knowledge.
So the best way to interview is to work backwards from what you know. Identify the keys to success for this role and how to spot the potential for advancement, then go and look for them.
You can read more on what we’ve said about a cohesive HR strategy here.
Your interview strategy should be in sync with the role in question. That means an appropriate series of interviews, and potentially a (short) work project. Plan this in advance and make it a standard operating procedure (this also helps reduce some hiring biases).
Share the process in your job posts so the rage appliers will know in advance that it’s more work than they want to put in.
Tell them what kinds of references you expect (i.e. previous direct managers or CEOs, not just their work buddies), and that you will be contacting those early in the process. Someone who’s rage applying—as opposed to a serious applicant—will balk at this information.
Raise the threshold on who you contact, and say it. You’ll save time by reducing the number of applicants you interview, and also telegraph that submitting a weak application is a waste of their time, not yours. Your hiring managers will thank you, too!
How to Get Started
If you’re unsure of where to start, or would like to talk to an expert that can help you plan effectively, then good news: that’s where Hello HR can help! Hiring is a tough environment right now, and sometimes an expert perspective is what you need to get ahead of the competition.
Drop us a line and we can get the ball rolling with a free discovery call.
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