All good quality ATSs provide candidate experiences that render on a mobile screen. That problem was solved years ago. But responsive design and a genuinely good mobile application experience are two very different things - and our latest data suggests most organisations have only solved the first one.
Our Talent Insights Report Q1 2026, drawn from 20,000 live vacancies and 12,500 jobseeker survey responses across 18 sectors, found that 68% of UK job applications are now submitted via a mobile device. In leisure and hospitality, that rises to 85%. In social care and transportation, it sits above 80%. The same report found that 27% of candidates spend over an hour completing an application.
An hour. On a phone. That's not a process designed for the way people actually want to apply for jobs in 2026. It's a desktop-era process sitting inside a mobile-responsive wrapper - and the distinction matters enormously.
When a candidate opens your application on their phone, the first real question they face is not about the role. It is: how much is this going to ask of me?
That answer is set long before any candidate arrives. It is set by the decisions your recruitment team made when configuring the application form. How many fields are mandatory? Are you asking candidates to re-type the contents of their CV into separate form fields? Are you requesting information genuinely relevant to shortlisting, or gathering everything you might ever need, just in case?
Our jobseeker data found that 55%+ of candidates are most influenced by written content about the job and organisation when deciding whether to apply. They have already made a positive decision about the role. At that point, the application process should get out of the way - not present new barriers. Every unnecessary field is a tap on the brakes for a candidate who was already sold on your organisation.
This is the objection that comes up almost every time the conversation turns to simplifying applications - and it is a fair one. The short answer is: not if you design your screening properly.
A shorter application form and robust qualification filters are not in conflict. They work best together. The mistake many organisations make is treating form length as a quality filter - reasoning that anyone willing to complete a lengthy process must be serious. But form length does not screen for suitability. It screens for patience. The most qualified candidates will simply look elsewhere if the barriers are too great at the initial stage.
The right tool for filtering unsuitable candidates is targeted screening questions, not form length. Killer questions - straightforward yes or no responses to core eligibility criteria - can establish within seconds whether a candidate meets the minimum requirements. Does the candidate hold the required licence? Do they have the right to work in the UK? Do they meet the minimum experience threshold? Candidates who do not meet the criteria are automatically declined, with a time delay applied if preferred. The filtering happens before the application is completed, not after you have reviewed a pile of unsuitable submissions.
A candidate who does not hold the required qualification should find that out in thirty seconds - not after forty-five minutes. And a candidate who does meet the criteria should not be penalised for the fact that others do not.
The purpose of an initial application is not to gather everything you will ever need. It is to establish, quickly and simply, whether this person is worth taking forward.
Name and contact details. Core eligibility answered through well-designed screening questions. Possibly a CV. That is often enough to make a meaningful initial shortlist of candidates who are both qualified and genuinely interested. Everything else - competency questions, supporting statements, equality monitoring, certificates - can follow once you know they are in contention.
This is the logic behind two-stage applications. Our two-stage application functionality splits the process into two distinct phases: a short, simple first stage for initial shortlisting, and a fuller second stage released only to candidates you want to progress. The result is a simpler experience for candidates, a cleaner and more qualified pool at stage two, and a more focused dataset for your team. The Isle of Man Government used exactly this approach and increased candidate satisfaction to 100%.
Our report found that 10% of candidates still felt the application asked for too much - even in a dataset where the majority rated their experience as straightforward. Applied to real volumes, if 500 people start your application in a month and 50 abandon it, you are not seeing a reporting problem. You're seeing a pipeline gap you have quietly accepted as normal.
The fix rarely requires new technology. It requires a conversation about what each question is for, what is essential at stage one, and what can be deferred or replaced with a targeted screening question. Most organisations that go through this exercise find significant room to streamline - without any reduction in the quality of candidates reaching shortlist.
The data on this - and a lot more - is in our Q1 2026 Talent Insights Report.
[Download it free here →]
Apply for one of your own roles. Do it on your phone, with a fresh email address and no insider knowledge of your system. Time how long it takes. Count the mandatory fields. Ask yourself which questions are establishing genuine eligibility and which are simply gathering information that could wait.
What you find will give your team a clear brief for what to change - and a strong case for why simplifying the front end does not mean accepting lower quality. It means moving quality control to where it belongs: at the point of eligibility, not the point of endurance.