Somewhere in your applicant tracking system, a candidate who would have been a strong hire opened your application, scrolled to the work history section, saw that it wanted the resume they had just uploaded typed back in by hand, and closed the tab. Nothing in your reports will show it. A form that loses people does not log who it lost.
New survey data puts a size on that loss, and it is large enough that most hiring teams should treat the application form as a screening tool they never meant to build.
What the Survey Found
Indeed's State of the Job Seeker survey drew on more than 1,500 job seekers in the United States, both employed people looking passively and unemployed people looking actively. HR Dive reported on September 29, 2026 that more than half of Generation Z and millennial applicants in the survey had stopped partway through an application, and that they frequently cited its length and redundancy. Allwork.Space, reporting on the same survey on October 1, put the overall figure plainly: "46% have abandoned an application because it was too tedious or time-consuming."
Indeed's own product team describes the cause the same way. Tyler Heidebrecht, a senior product marketing manager at Indeed, told HR Dive: "Job seekers are fatigued, in part, because the mechanics of applying for a job can be very difficult."
Two more findings explain why the redundancy stings. According to the Allwork.Space report, "79% of respondents said a resume alone does not capture why they are a good fit," and "77% said they feel forced to tailor their resume for individual postings." Candidates are already spending effort to make the resume fit your role. A form that then asks them to retype the same resume, field by field, spends that effort a second time and adds nothing new.
How a Form Gets Long
Almost no one designs a long application on purpose. It grows one reasonable request at a time. Legal asks for an attestation. A recruiter adds a question that once saved a phone screen. A hiring manager wants to know about a specific tool. The applicant tracking system ships with a default template that asks for full work history and education even when a resume is attached. Each addition makes sense on its own. Nobody owns the total.
The result is a form that no one on the hiring team has completed from start to finish, on a phone, as a candidate would. The people who decide what goes on the form are rarely the people who have to fill it out.
Many applicant tracking systems make it easy to count the applications you received. Fewer make it easy to see how many were started and never finished. If yours can show starts against completions for each posting, that ratio is the most direct measure of what the form is costing you, and it is worth checking before and after any change. If it cannot, the audit later in this post is the next best thing, because it shows you the form the way a candidate meets it.
Who Leaves First
It is tempting to read abandonment as a filter that works in your favor: the candidates who quit were not serious. That reading gets the incentives backward. The survey covered both employed passive seekers and unemployed active seekers, and those two groups face very different math when a form drags on.
A person who needs a job soon has every reason to push through a tedious form. A person who is employed, browsing on a lunch break, and considering a move only for the right role has every reason to close the tab. In many searches, that second person is the hire you most wanted to reach. A long form does not screen for qualifications. It screens for tolerance, and tolerance is highest among the candidates with the fewest options.
The Redundancy Problem
Length is one complaint. Redundancy is the more fixable one. The most common version is the double entry: upload a resume, then rebuild it in separate fields for employer, title, start date, end date, and duties. The second most common is the screening question that asks for information the resume already states, such as years of experience or a degree.
If your team reviews the resume anyway, the duplicate fields serve the system, not the decision. Many applicant tracking systems can parse a resume into structured fields automatically. Where yours cannot, consider whether the structured data is used before the first conversation at all. If it is not, it can wait until a candidate has a reason to invest the time.
Screening questions deserve their own review, because some do more than slow candidates down. As we covered in Knockout Questions: How One ATS Setting Auto-Rejects Qualified People, a single badly worded required question can remove qualified people before a human sees their name.
A Fifteen-Minute Audit
You can find most of the problem in one sitting. Pick your highest-volume open role and do the following:
Apply to your own posting, on a phone. Use a personal device, not the office network and not a desktop. Time it from the posting to the confirmation screen. Count the fields and the pages. Note every point where you would have been tempted to stop.
List every question and ask who uses the answer, and when. If an answer is not used before the first conversation with a candidate, it does not need to be on the application. Keep what counsel says is required at the application stage, and move everything else to a later step.
Remove the retype. If the form asks for a resume, it should not also ask for that resume's contents typed into fields. Pick one.
Tell candidates what to expect. State how long the application takes, and state when they will hear back. Then keep that promise. Silence after an application is its own kind of abandonment, from the employer's side, and it does lasting damage to a hiring brand, a pattern we described in our post on the silence candidates meet after a final interview.
Repeat the audit each time a field is added. The form grew one request at a time, and it will grow back the same way unless someone owns the total.
What a Shorter Form Changes
A shorter application does not lower the bar. It moves the bar to the part of the process where judgment happens: the resume review and the first conversation. That is where qualifications can be weighed in context, rather than collected as data that nobody reads. It is also where tools built to read a resume against the job, the way TrueScan HR's matching does, add the most value, because the resume carries the evidence and the form no longer has to.
It also widens the pool you see. Candidates who are qualified but do not match a rigid template, people the research on hidden workers filtered out by ATS settings has described, are the same people most likely to give up on a form that does not fit them.
The Bottom Line
Nearly half of job seekers have walked away from an application because it took too long or felt tedious, and among younger applicants the share who stopped partway is higher still. Every field on your form is a small cost to the candidate. Before you add the next one, apply to your own posting and decide whether the answer is worth the people it will cost you.
Sources: