What's the topic for which you hear "I don't have time" as the most used excuse in recruitment? Applications right?

When I first joined folk, I was reviewing application one by one. Crafting follow-up emails from scratch for each one. It took quite some time and wasn't valuable cause I was repeating myself a lot and here came the "I don't have time" excuse.

So I did the complete opposite. I categorized applications. For each category, I used a pre-set follow-up email (location, expertise…). But I wasn't satisfied with the hiring experience it provided both for me (not interesting not to provide feedback) and for candidates (not interesting not to get clear feedback) so once again the "I don't have enough time" excuse came in the way.

And then I realized that “I don't have time” wasn't an excuse but the symptom of a lack of efficiency. I got back to my workflow and took another look at it. Thinking twice about the part I could and should value much more: the feedback.

So what's the latest improvement over our applicant workflow at folk? No surprises we use folk 😉

We've build our career page and job descriptions onto Notion to give us a lot more flexibility that generic pre-built ATS materials and we chose Typeform to build our application form.

Each application is automatically brought from Typeform to a dedicated group on folk (thanks Zapier). While reviewing an application we fill out the reasoning column with a personalized paragraph to explain why we're moving/not moving forward.

Selection churn reason and adding Custom applicant feedback

This reasoning column is used as a custom field in folk's messaging system so it's directly integrated in our follow-up templates.

Selecting the adequate Messages templates from our library

View of our Messages template

Personalized Messages based on selected churn reason and including our Custom applicant feedback.

We're one step closer to finding the right balance between automation and valuable hiring experience (both for candidates and for our team). Most importantly, we got rid of the "I don't have time" excuse by investing time to improve our system.

Disclaimer: this system works well at folk as we don't have 300 applications to deal with (yet 😉) but the most important for me was to share the thought process we took to get there 🙃