Candidate drop-off is the silent killer of recruitment pipelines. A large share of the candidates who begin an application never complete it. For agencies, that is talent lost before you even know it existed.
The biggest culprit is time. The longer an application takes, the fewer people finish it, and every additional form field gives a candidate another reason to stop. Legacy ATS platforms that require candidates to manually re-enter information already on their CV lose people at exactly the moment their interest is highest.
The second factor is the device. Many candidates now begin an application on a phone, yet many agency application flows were designed for a desktop screen. Candidates are left to pinch-zoom through desktop forms or, worse, are redirected to third-party career portals that break the experience entirely.
The fix is to ask for less. A CV-upload-first flow with AI parsing replaces the long form: the candidate uploads one file, checks what was extracted, and confirms. Fewer fields, no account to create, and a layout built for a phone remove the reasons people give up. The Placr candidate flow is built on exactly that sequence.
