Dive Brief:

• A survey by CheekyMonkey in the U.K. found that 65% of millennial job seeker respondents rank online job boards as their favored places for finding a new job despite their reputation "for out-of-date listings, reams of irrelevant jobs to sift through and non-responsive search tools." But industry-specific recruiters were the preferred method for nearly 44% of respondents.
• Recruiters must ensure that their website is well-designed and responsive, as nearly 63% of respondents said a poor website was their top reason for not using a recruitment agency to find a job. Online portals are largely preferred; only 19% of millennials like cold calls from recruiters, even though the practice is common.
• To improve the interview process, survey respondents said they'd like to see more transparency about salaries before interviews, to receive feedback if unsuccessful and to meet the people they would be working with after the interview.

Dive Insight:

The key for recruiters is to balance the human aspects of interviewing — meeting people, engaging in-person — with a seamless online experience. Technology can speed up recruiting by closing the costly time-to-hire process, freeing up HR managers and recruiters from burdensome administrative recruiting tasks and enhancing the candidate experience. But if recruiters aren't careful, a bad candidate experience could completely negate the hiring and engagement efforts of a company overall, previous studies have shown.

Based on the results of this survey and others, recruiters, job boards and agencies might need to reconsider how they look for and interact with candidates. Job seekers say they want more pay transparency from recruiters, for example, which many companies have begun to take seriously; many now feature salary information directly on job ads. And generally, candidates don't like feeling as though employers are "ghosting" them — aka leaving them without any information about how to move forward in the interview process. If employers don't prioritize a strong candidate experience, they may discover that employees will "ghost" them instead.

A job site provides ample opportunity for an employer to incorporate its brand and engage applicants from the first step. And HR departments that encourage strong branding in its initiatives tend to get more funding overall.