How to create a job application form

You can use Typeform to make your recruitment and hiring process a more personalized and seamless experience for your candidates and people teams alike. 

Whether you’re a tech company or a startup, a talent agency or an HR service provider, you’ll find several useful Typeform features for use cases like building candidate pre-screening questionnaires, job application forms, and sending automated feedback after interviews.

This is a practical guide to making a great job application form with Typeform, where we'll walk you through building and branding your form. Then you’ll learn how to share your job application form, and how to notify your candidates and HR teams.

Here’s a list of features for this use case:

• Contact Info question
• File Upload question
• Google Drive integration
• Branching logic
• Brand kits
• Follow-up messages
• Calendly integration
• Video questions
• Video and Audio answers

Build your job application form

Here’s how to build your form:

1. Open up a Workspace and click + Create a new form to do just that. 

2. Click Start from scratch to start building your job application form with Typeform.

You can also go to the template gallery to pick a template from there. In this example, we’ll be using a job application form template to take you through the steps of creating a form. You can click here to get started with this template [link].

Add your questions to the form

Here’s what to include in your job application form:

1. First up, add a nice Welcome Screen to introduce the job you’re hiring for. You can also customize the button text with something relevant, like Apply now, or in this case, Let’s find out!.

2. If you want to take your introduction to the next level, you can also add a Statement question with a video question instead of a Welcome Screen. You can talk about your company and the role people are applying for through your form to add a personal touch to your application form and establish a connection with your applicants by letting them put a face to your name. 

3. Start adding the questions you want to ask your candidates to the form. In this example, we’ll start with a Contact Info question to make sure that we’re getting all the information we need to get back to our applicants.

4. Once you’ve collected some information about your respondents, you can add a little personal touch to the following questions by using Recall information to call your candidates by their name. Just type @, then select which question you want to recall information from.

5. Another important detail that can’t be missed on a job application form is a File Upload question. This will let your respondents upload their CV, resume, portfolio, references, or any other relevant documents.

6. You can also click the Required toggle to make this (or any other) question required in your application form. This will ensure that people can’t skip these questions, and you’ll be able to collect all the information you need when your candidates submit the application form.

7. You can also connect your File Upload question to our Google Drive integration to send all the documents uploaded by your candidates to your Google Drive. Just click Connect next to Google Drive in the Question panel on the right to get started with the integration.

Alternatively, you can find other file management tools among our integrations in the Connect panel, like Box, or Dropbox.

8. Use the Long Text or Short Text question types to ask people why they want to join your team, what they’re passionate about, or any other relevant open ended questions that might require a more detailed answer.

9. A great way to get to know your candidates a little bit better is to ask them to respond to a question by recording a video response. To do this, simply select the Video option from the Answer dropdown.

10. After choosing Video as your answer type, you can select to enforce video answers, or to let people send a text response, if they don’t want to record a video. 

11. Toggle the Allow text answer switch to let people have the option to write a response instead of recording a video. This switch is toggled off by default, which means that people can only respond to this question with a video.

12. If you also want to set up a screening interview with your candidates, you can add a Calendly question to your form. Typeform’s integration with this simple scheduling tool will let your candidates access your calendar and book meetings with you.

13. If you have candidates applying from different regions, you can also add a Multiple Choice question asking about their location, and use some Branching logic to show people different booking options. For example, you could let European candidates schedule a call with your European colleagues, and candidates in the US with your colleagues in the US. To do this, all you have to do is add multiple Calendly questions and connect them to different accounts.

Add Branching logic to your job application form

1. Now that you’ve added your question to your job application form, let’s head to the Workflow panel to add some Branching logic.

2. Now let’s set up branching for the Calendly questions we’ve added. This will be based on the Multiple Choice question asking people about their location.

Tag your qualified candidates

You can qualify your candidates as High, Medium, or Low based on their answers. For example, you can add tags to candidates based on their leadership experience, or other experience relevant to the job you’re hiring for. 

Add design and branding

The job application form you’ve seen in this use case guide is based on a template that already included all the design elements to make it on brand.

Here’s how you can add images and your own brand assets to a form:

1. You can add images, gifs, and videos to your form questions by uploading them from your computer, or using our image gallery. You can customize the layout and focal point of these images, and make other adjustments to it in image settings.

2. Click the Design tab in the Content panel to apply themes and brand kits to a form. 

3. Brand kits will allow you to customize your forms to match your brand by adding your logos, color palettes, fonts, media collections, and themes. 

You and your teammates will be able to use these brand assets across all your forms in different Workspaces in your organization. You can even enable Brand kit enforcement, which will only allow the use of the brand assets you’ve uploaded to your Brand kits for your organization members.

Send follow-up messages to your candidates and HR teams

Follow-up messages will let you send automated messages to candidates applying through your job application form or the recruiters in your HR department when the form is submitted.

Here’s how to set this up:

1. Click the Workflow tab and select + next to Messages to add a new message.

2. Now you can set up when a follow-up message will be triggered. For example, you can choose to only fire a message to your hiring team when your applicant said they have plenty of experience leading a team. In this example, we’re using the High quality segment we’ve previously set up when adding Branching logic to the form.

You can add another action if you want to send automated messages to your candidates about the status of their application as well.

Find out everything about sending follow-up messages to yourself and your respondents with Typeform here.

Share your job application form

Now that you’ve finished setting up your job application form, it’s time to share it with your applicants. 

1. Click Share to publish your form, and you’ll be taken straight to the Share panel.

2. Here you can choose between several sharing options. A great example for this use case would be to use the LinkedIn option, which will allow you to share your job application form there. 

3. You can also customize the link preview information, like the thumbnail image, title, and description of your form here.

4. After clicking the LinkedIn icon, you can share your job application form embedded into a LinkedIn post. This will give you the opportunity to talk a bit about the job listing and make it visible to your professional network. Click Post when you’re done.

You can also embed your job application form on your website, launch it in an email, customize its form URL, and much more.