5 ways to improve applicant quality

July 7, 2026

Attracting more candidates isn’t the same as hiring the right ones. And finding the right ones is getting harder.

One-click apply, application automation tools and AI-generated resumes have made it easier than ever for candidates to fire off dozens of applications with minimal effort. This volume, which was once celebrated, is now an omen – a hallmark of a funnel flooded with poor-quality applicants.

What is applicant quality?

Applicant quality is how closely a candidate’s skills, experience, cultural alignment, and intent match the requirements of a specific role. A high-quality applicant must be technically capable, but what’s more, they have taken the time to understand the role, picture themselves in the organisationorganization, and put forward an application that demonstrates this. Low-quality applicants, by contrast, add noise to your funnel, consume recruiter time, and slow down your ability to hone in on the people who matter.

Applicant quality is also directly linked to downstream metrics measured by leaders in talent acquisition: sourcing channel effectiveness, quality of hire, offer acceptance rate, and first-year retention. When the quality of candidates entering your funnel improves, every metric downstream tends to follow.

If you’re ready to shift your recruitment strategy towards candidate quality, here are five tips to help you get started:

1. Get a little help with shortlisting

When hundreds of applications land for a single role, screening becomes unmanageable, and genuinely strong candidates risk being buried in the volume.

This is where tools like Paige, PageUp’s AI recruiting assistant, can help. Rather than juggling multiple apps and tabs, Paige brings everything into one conversation, answering questions, surfacing candidate information, and cutting the admin that eats into hiring time.

For the evaluation itself, PageUp’s Skills Matching takes the manual work out of assessing fit. It extracts relevant skills from job requirements, matches them against candidate resumes, and provides the reasoning behind each match. It explains why a candidate is a strong fit for a particular skill, while keeping humans in control of the final decision.

Alongside skills matching, AI Resume SummarisationSummarization instantly distils hundreds of resumes into concise, consistent summaries, allowing hiring teams to review candidates in seconds without sacrificing quality. The result is a shortlist built on evidence rather than gut feel, and a faster path to the candidates who genuinely fit.

2. Build (and hire from) talent pipelines

Our PageUp customers have found it takes just four applications from their talent community to make a hire, compared to 73 from job boards. That’s about an 18x improvement in efficiency.

By continuously building pools of pre-engaged candidates (through expression-of-interest forms, event sign-ups, silver medalists from previous roles, and alumni networks) TA leaders create a warm audience of people who already know and like the organisationorganization. When a role opens, you’re not starting from zero. You’re just activating existing relationships.

Building and nurturing these talent pools consistently over time is what separates organisationsorganizations that are always scrambling to hire from those that can move fast. AI can further accelerate this by helping with candidate rediscovery. PageUp’s Candidate Recommendations is designed to surface silver medalists and best-fit candidates that might be hiding within your database, saving you in sourcing spend, and improving the quality of the candidates you progress.

3. Showcase an employer brand that allows self-selection

The most underrated quality filter in recruitment is arguably your careers site. When a serious candidate lands on it, they’re trying to answer one question: “Is this actually the kind of place I’d want to work?” Your careers site needs to be able to answer this question authentically. It should reflect a consistent, specific brand voice that communicates your EVP, values, and what day-to-day life actually looks like.

Visitors who read a blog post on a career site are four times more likely to complete an application, meaning content that educates and engages doesn’t just improve quality, it improves conversion too. Pair that with tools like Employee Connections, which lets candidates ask real questions of real employees, and you give serious applicants the confidence to move forward while gently discouraging those who aren’t a strong fit.

4. Write job ads with the right candidates in mind

Poorly written job descriptions are the top frustration for candidates in their job search, and for a senior or specialist candidate evaluating multiple opportunities, a confusing job ad is often enough of a red flag, to move on entirely. Clear, honest, specific job ads function as a quality filter before a single application is submitted. They set accurate expectations, attract candidates who genuinely meet the requirements, and reduce the mismatched applications that consume recruiter time downstream. PageUp’s AI-powered Job Ad Assistant helps TA teams write tailored, compelling ads at scale, improving both the quality of candidates attracted and the speed at which roles go live.

5. PrioritisePrioritize candidate engagement

Quality applicants have options. If your process goes silent after submission, the candidates most likely to disengage are the ones with the most alternatives, which means the pool that remains skews toward those with fewer choices. PrioritisingPrioritizing proactive communication like status updates, clear process timelines, and personalisedpersonalized touchpoints – these things keep strong candidates warm and signal that your organisationorganization takes people seriously.

Putting it all together

Improving applicant quality isn’t a single fix. It takes the right mix of tools and a focused strategic approach. But, the investment is certainly worth the effort: stronger candidates mean better quality of hire, higher retention, and less time spent firefighting further down the line. The organisationsorganizations successfully snapping up top talent are the ones that have made it easy for the right candidates to find them, trust them, and say yes.

PageUp helps TA teams improve applicant quality at every stage of the hiring process. Book a demo today to see how.