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Today’s candidates have so many options for employment that they won’t engage with a complicated application process. Because of this, it’s essential to make the hiring process as streamlined and frictionless as possible for both the candidate and the hiring manager. Eliminating inefficient, unnecessary, or repetitive steps helps keep your applicants interested and engaged from the moment they hit the apply button to the moment they put on a uniform. 

“Job applicants in today’s market want immediacy,” explains Rich Crawford, CEO of TalentReef. “We talk with our customers regularly about how we can make the applicant experience the fastest, the easiest, and with the least amount of friction.”  

We talked to Crawford to learn more about how frictionless engagement is the real key to increasing applicant flow, decreasing interview ghosting, and — most importantly — getting more hourly workers to their first day. 

Q: How do you define frictionless engagement? 

A: When we think about points of friction, we put ourselves in the shoes of our customers. It could be a corporate office, could be a location-based office, but they have all of these potential points of friction: What positions do I need to hire? How do I describe that job while staying compliant? How do I go out into the market to find these people? For hiring managers, frictionless engagement means automating processes and optimizing workflows and configurations so that they have time to respond to and interview qualified applicants promptly. 

For candidates, frictionless engagement means giving them options in how they apply and engage with a brand so that they can move through the hiring steps quickly and smoothly. It’s reducing or eliminating the roadblocks that prevent or deter them from successfully navigating the application and onboarding process.  

An ATS helps companies organize sourcing. But then you have to start thinking about the next steps, so we can’t talk about frictionless engagement without talking about flexibility.  

Q: Why is flexibility important in optimizing the hiring process? 

A: There are so many aspects to creating a frictionless process — hiring managers may need to post in different places, sponsor a post, elevate a post, or change a headline. It’s essential that your talent management system offers the flexibility to meet those needs quickly.  

Then once you find the applicant, how do you move them through the hiring process? If the candidate doesn’t get some sort of instant feedback, they’re probably moving on to someone else. 

That manager, executive, or team member who has to make tacos to serve the demand because they don’t have enough employees can’t stop helping customers to go answer a text or schedule an interview. At TalentReef, we’ve thought about how to automate and even anticipate what candidates might want or need to know so that our platform can offer multiple ways for the applicant to engage.  

Both sides can easily exchange information and no one has to fight through friction for these connections can be made. 

Q: How does frictionless engagement move candidates through the process once they submit an application? 

A: Frictionless engagement is also automatically sending that applicant to a background screening or to have the background check done, to provide information to WOTC provider, to send it over to the payroll system, etc. Think about your end-to-end workflow: the sourcing strategy, engagement strategy, application strategy — there are all of these strategies and you have to optimize every piece, right?  

And if you’re a national brand with locations in multiple states and cities with different job titles, you have to optimize by brand, by area, by location, by job description, by time of year… at TalentReef, we understand how all of these things are linked together, so we can see what’s working, what’s not working, and make adjustments so that all of these components can be optimized and get the best return on investment. You can’t throw away money while you’re already a low-margin business. 

Q: Why is TalentReef leading the industry when it comes to frictionless engagement? 

A: Over the course of more than a decade and working with more than 100,000 locations, we have a tremendous understanding of the problems of our customers. Whether it’s a quick-serve restaurant location, service business, restaurant business, or hospitality business, if they don’t have labor, they can’t generate revenue. A meatpacking business, janitorial service, entertainment business, convenience store, grocery store — I could go on and on, but all of these industries have that common characteristic.  

We also have deep expertise about what the other requirements are necessary to effectively and efficiently hire hourly workers. We’re stitching together processes that we’ve automated and created in the past 7-10 years — like digitizing the manual process, developing texting and Chatbot capabilities, fine-tuning posifit questions — so we can flow through a new and dynamic workflow based on what you need, when and where you need it. 

If we can reduce or take out a lot of the effort, conflict, and friction on both sides by making the software do the work, our customers are able to provide the best applicant experience. The better we can anticipate, the better we can reduce time and friction between all of these variables and the different steps that may occur throughout the process.  

Ideally, the interactions and transactions drive how we change that dynamic at any given point in time. Things like hiring in the spring versus hiring in the winter, for example.  

We need to think about this as a dynamic system, something that’s constantly changing, constantly evolving — and that’s the kind of innovation that TalentReef is doing. 

Download our white paper here to learn more about frictionless engagement and the five components that are essential for a successful talent management system. 

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