When should I use quick-apply?

Ordinarily we advise that teams use carefully constructed sift questions to assess candidates objectively and narrow the field fairly. The advantages of this include:  

1. You allow room for potential to come to the fore, revealing talent that you might otherwise have passed over.
2. You can give candidates realistic expectations of what the role entails, simultaneously selling the opportunity to interested prospects and saving the wrong candidates time and effort.
3. You reduce the risk of false positives - those candidates who look good on paper but end up underwhelming in the role - outmuscling other worthy candidates. 

There are scenarios in which this approach may not be suitable, however. For these cases, we've built a quick-apply route, which allows talent teams to invite selected candidates to bypass the sift assessment and go straight to interview. At interview they can be assessed in a structured way against candidates who have come via the sift-based Applied channel.

Such scenarios might include:

• You have an executive level role and have made some outbound approaches to candidates with strong track records. You've sold them on the opportunity and want to move quickly to ensure you maintain momentum and interest.
• The candidate has been assessed recently for another, similar role but you think the role you're inviting them to could be a better fit for their skills.
• You are concerned about the impact of sift questions on neurodiverse candidates and want to run a guaranteed interview scheme for these candidates.
• You are hiring for a niche, highly-skilled or otherwise hard-to-fill role and have headhunted a handful of candidates. You are competing with other organisations for their signature, however, and want to expedite the process to increase your chances of making a successful hire.

It is worth noting that candidates who tread the quick-apply path, in skipping our bias-free screening mechanism, will come with fewer objective data points on which to base your decisions. This is where bias is liable to creep in. For this reason, it is even more important to mitigate bias at the interview stage. We recommend using a structured approach to interviewing to give all candidates a fair shot.