Attracting the best talent is no longer about offering the most money; it’s also about the experience. The best way to convince suitable applicants that working for you is a win is by providing a great experience from the very first touchpoint - the job application form.

If you want to succeed in creating an experience that does the persuading for you, don’t stop at learning how to make an application form for a job but aspire to learn how to make it practical, fun, and memorable.This article is here to do just that - help you create a job application from experience that will not only engage your applicants but take a huge load off your recruitment team!

How?

Using a secret ingredient: conversation automation.

Why Use a Conversational Job Application Form?

This tutorial takes you through the process of creating a conversational form rather than the traditional static one.Turning a form into a conversation has several advantages:

Improved Applicant Experience

Did you know that negative applicant experience incites further negative actions? 83% are likely to never apply to that company again, 63% would decline the job offer, and 59% would tell others not to apply!Positive applicant experiences lead to the opposite:

Chatbots can ensure your applicants feel comfortable throughout the process by, for instance:

• Offering an interactive conversational job application form experience that feels natural;
• Providing real-time personalization based on the candidate information submitted;
• Once the application is submitted, serving to automatically update candidates on their status should they inquire;
• Facilitating test stages of the application process.

In other words, conversational application forms can help out thought the entire process, not just the first touchpoint.

Real-Time Data Collection

Chatbots are capable to collect applicants’ data in real-time, saving each piece of information as the candidate progresses through the conversation. Even if the process is interrupted, when the candidates come back, they can simply continue where they left off as bots can remember previous visitors.

Alternatively, you can always allow candidates to re-active the application submission by asking to re-enter their email, just to be sure.

Instant Applicant Scoring/Screening

The last but not least of the top three advantages of using conversational applications is their ability to screen and score candidates instantly.

Thanks to functions such as conditional logic and variable calculations, bots allow you to screen applicants at the moment of their application submission. Hence, if you happen to have iron-clad requirements, you can weed out the irrelevant applications without having to lose time reviewing them. Better yet, you can use the bot to rank and categorize applicants based on experience and export all that data to a centralized database such as Google Sheets or Airtable project.

How to Create a Job Application Form?

NoCode Guide to Conversational SolutionTo make a job application with a conversational flair isn’t as hard as it might seem on first consideration.Using a no-code chatbot maker like Landbot, you can put together a conversational form in a matter of minutes or hours.

1. Decide Between Adjusting a Template vs. Starting from Scratch?

Even better, you can save conversational sequences that appear in every such form like contact information and employment history as reusable building ”bricks”. In other words, you create them once and next time you need a form you have your own application templates ready to go!With Landbot, you can either build a job application form from scratch or use our job application template:

It offers a pre-designed application structure gathering the basic contact and experience data:

While the template is a great way to get the feel for the experience, starting from scratch will enable you to tailor the form to your needs.

For the purpose of this tutorial, we will start from scratch but you are free to try our job application template.

2. Set up Welcome Message

Opening a new chatbot canvas in the Landbot builder, you will see a default welcome block. This block reflects the first message any user will see upon activating the bot on your website.

Editing the Welcome block is simple and straightforward:

In terms of a job application, you can decide on several different possibilities. They all depend on the level of capability you want your form to exhibit.Consider the following:

• Does the conversational job application form you have in mind serve to apply to one specific opening at your company or several?
• Is the form’s sole purpose to enable application submission?
• What other functions could the form address (e.g., summarizing job requirements; answering process FAQs; enabling application status check, etc.

Answering these questions will help you to decide how to structure your Welcome block.

Below are a couple of examples.

This tutorial will show you how to make a job application form as well as how to allow your applicants to check on their status:

3. Collect Personal Information

The first set of questions on every application circles around personal information.

Landbot builder provides a selection of format-specific question blocks designed to cater to this type of data collection:

Some blocks such as Name or Text block allow for free format but others like the Email or URL block require users to submit an answer that fits the required format.

Each of the special question blocks comes with a preexisting system variable (e.g., email block has @email variable). You can keep the system variable or create your own. Ultimately, the variables help you save and later export the submitted data.

There are quite a few personal questions to ask, so to simplify your flow, you can organize the sequence into a BRICK (a folder inside your flow) as follows:

Bricks can be very useful as they are reusable. To turn any brick into a reusable template, all you need to do is click on the three dots in the upper right corner of the brick and select the “Create Brick-Template” option.

This brick will be added to your library so next time you need a conversational job application form, you can add the personal info block in one second.

4. Leverage Buttons Block for Quick Classification

Buttons block is one of the most utilized blocks inside the Landbot builder, mainly because of its versatility.

You can use classic buttons or enrich them with emojis, gifs or images. The block also lets you create a multiple choice

You can use button choice to extract information in an organized manner that lets you review all the applicants objectively with a glance. Though, if you wish to give candidates a chance to submit a slightly irregular piece of data you can always include the “Other” option button and then follow that choice with an extra Text block for clarification.

‍Note: For the answer to be saved under the same category as the button answers, ensure the variable in the “Text” block is the same as in the buttons block:

In terms of the job application use case, you can use Buttons Block to simplify the application.‍

For instance, if one of the minimum requirements is a Master’s degree or a certain number of years of experience, you can lead all the applicants selecting anything lower than required down a different path and clarify they are not eligible for the position right there and then.It will help you to control the number of applications and avoid the type of candidates who apply for anything without reviewing the offer properly.

5. Leverage Buttons Block for Quick Classification

Another great feature you can leverage for your job application is the Scales block.‍

Rather than just asking candidates whether they had or didn’t have a skill but bidding them rate it on a numerical scale:

This is what the applicant will see on the front-end:

After a numerical assessment, you can ask for a short description as well!

6. Upload Files

Chatbots can not only collect information but also files. Hence, once you collect all the data that enable your quick review, you can also ask the applicants to submit their chatbot resume, cover letter, and even portfolio.

All you need to do is include “File upload” question in your flow:

Using this block, candidates will be able to upload files right inside the conversations. On the front-end the experience will look like this:

7. Export Data to Google Sheets

Once you have all the data you need, it’s time to export them from the employment application form to a database.Landbot makes it really easy to export the data to Google Sheets (or Airtable - whichever you prefer).

Before you set up the Landbot-Google Sheets integration, create a Google Sheet in your drive where you want to export the application data:

Once done, go back to your builder canvas and add a Google Sheets block.

First, if not done yet, you need to connect your Google Drive with Landbot.To do so, click “ADD ACCOUNT” and pair the two tools together.

Next, to integrate the bot with a specific sheet, you need to set the following fields:

• Select Google Drive account (email address) with which you want to pair your chatbot;
• Indicate the file where you want to send the data;
• Choose the sheet within the spreadsheet where you want to send the information.

Next, you need to “Select an Action” you want to perform:

• Insert a new row (Export)
• Update a row (Export)
• Get data from the sheet and bring them to the conversation (Import)

At this point, you want to create a new row for every candidate. Hence, select “Insert a new row”.

After this, all you need to do is pair the column names with variables you want to store in these columns:

Click SAVE and the integration setup is done.

Now, all the collected data will be sent to the sheet where you can review and filter them with ease.

8. Send Out Confirmation Email

After the applicants have submitted their online job application, you can send a confirmation email using the “Send an Email” block.

The block allows you to send an email triggered by the bot to both your candidates or your employees.

So, while the candidate receives a submission confirmation, your HR team can receive a notification each time a new candidate applies.

Note: If you want to take your online form to the next level, you add an additional layer by introducing conditional logic to, for example, only inform HR about top-quality candidates.

9. Arrange for Application Status Check

Last but not least, let’s arrange for an application status check!Go back to the beginning of your flow - the welcome message.

This time, draw an arrow from the “Check Application Status” button.

First, ask the applicant to resubmit their email, so you can identify their data set. Second, insert another Google Sheet integration.

Set up the sheet connection as before.

The only difference being the action:

This time, we will be getting data from the sheet.The setup is very similar to the “insert data” action. However, this time, you need to set up a reference variable that will help you identify the row from where to retrieve the data:

This way, the bot will pull whatever you enter into the “Status” column in the sheet. You just need to set up a message block to share this information with the applicant:

Now you have all the knowledge you need to build your very first conversational job application form!

Go Beyond a Job Application Form

As mentioned before, the charm of chatbots goes way beyond orderly data collection.You can enrich your online employment application experience by adding additional functionalities such as:

• Providing candidates with information about your company & position;
• Answering FAQs about the recruitment process;
• Testing! Besides gathering data, you can include a skill or personality test as part of the application;

There are really no limits to what you can achieve. Now you can build a personalized recruitment chatbot without coding; one that allows you to speed up the applicant review and ensure all top talent receives quality experience.