What are spontaneous applications?
Imagine that a candidate enters your Careers page and after a while already knows that he wants to work in your team. So he looks for a list of open vacancies but doesn’t find any jobs whose requirements he sufficiently meets.
He abandons your Careers page. And he may never return to it again.
Spontaneous application allows candidates who visit your Career site and social media to add their resume to your candidate database.
It’s an ideal method to avoid losing the interest of candidates who you have already managed to get interested in working with you – but at that point haven’t found the right one on the list of your open vacancies.
Where can you collect spontaneous applications?
There are several places and circumstances for collecting spontaneous applications:
- Career page – which is the most natural place that people who want to work with you visit. It’s a good idea to give candidates this opportunity right next to open jobs listing
- Job fairs and conferences – during these you have direct contact with many people whose data you can collect. For example, you can have a tablet with a simple form to collect applicants data.
- LinkedIn – do you exchange private messages with potential candidates often? Even if they are passive candidates (they are not actively looking for a job now) – you can ask them to leave a resume for future reference.
- Career Offices at universities – if you are open to hiring interns or people with no experience; be sure to contact Career Offices
- Your email footer – see how many emails you exchange each day. Use a footer in your email to encourage recipients of your emails to leave a resume in your database.
Spontaneous applications – why should you collect them?
First – not to lose the interest of people you have already managed to convince to visit your Career page.
Another argument for collecting spontaneous applications is the talent acquisition cost. Instead of paying for publishing jobs when a vacancy appears, you can collect spontaneous applications on an ongoing basis (and free of charge!) – and then come back to them when a position to be filled arises.
What’s more, our research (check TRAFFIT Recruitment Benchmarks report) shows the incredible effectiveness of your candidate base as a source of applications:
Don’t forget about relationships. If we were able to establish a relationship with potential candidates – it’s worth topping it with collecting consent and applications!
What should you ask for in a spontaneous application form?
The spontaneous application form is similar in its design to the application form for a specific position.
Here you can find some tips:
- The headline – use it to explain, that a spontaneous application does not mean participating in a specific process, but being added to the candidate database – and they can expect any contact from the recruiter when there is a new vacancy for which the submitted application fits.
- Gather information allowing you to assign the candidates to a specific talent group – for example, in which departments the candidate could develop his career.
- Ask what convinced the person to submit a spontaneous application
- Remember to collect GDPR consents in the spontaneous application form for contact in future applications!
Spontaneous applications – what should you do with them?
The most common mistake made by companies collecting spontaneous applications is…. doing nothing with them.
Therefore, once you start collecting them, be sure that for newly opened positions you start by searching your candidate base, including those applying spontaneously, and contacting those who match.
You can also launch a newsletter to the candidate base; e.g., once a month or once a quarter to inform candidates by email about what’s going on in the company and listing open vacancies.
E.g. TRAFFIT Talent – a newsletter and periodic webinars for our candidate base – held in my company. This is one of them:
Spontaneous applications examples
Here are some real-life examples:
TRAFFIT Future Stars
On TRAFFIT’s Careers page, potential future candidates have the opportunity to leave their resumes by category: IT, Success Management, Sales, Marketing and Product:
Tigers digital agency
Meet Tigers and their Careers page, where you can find an option to upload your resume to the database right below the jobs listing:
Hasco-Lek S.A.
Hasco-Lek’s Careers page with two separate tabs; a list of open vacancies (left) and a spontaneous application form (right: Send your CV):
What do these examples have in common? All the forms were created in TRAFFIT!
If you want to collect spontaneous applications and manage them effectively – try TRAFFIT for free and see how our recruitment system can make it easier!
