A school that we worked with was struggling to recruit cleaning and catering staff.
The jobs themselves were perfectly reasonable. The pay was average, albeit hidden behind terms like ‘Scale 7, Point 4’. The hours probably suited the type of people they were trying to reach. There was nothing particularly wrong with the reputation of the school.
But they had zero applications.
The obvious conclusion the school reached was that people simply were not interested, they needed to either increase the hours or the salary. They also suggested the advert needed rewriting and ‘promoting’ further. Perhaps there was, somewhere, a more exciting photograph of a mop that would finally turn things around.
What we found, was that the real problem was much less dramatic.
The application form was a Word document.
Applicants had to download it, find it on their device, fill it in, save it and email it back. A completely straightforward process, provided you had a laptop, Microsoft Word, a reasonable understanding of some unusual Microsoft Word behaviours and the patience to work out where your phone had hidden the file.
But the challenge was that many of the people the school wanted to recruit were using a mobile phone – and didn’t have access to a PC or Laptop.
So the process that looked simple from inside the organisation was quietly filtering out perfectly suitable candidates before the school ever knew they existed.
After we pointed this out, the document was changed to a short online form (Microsoft Forms), written in a plain English and designed to work properly on a phone.
We’d removed references that were hanging over from the form about salary scales and QTS information – that was naturally on a form for teachers, but never should have been there for support staff.
Within a week, they received 25 applications for three jobs.
Nothing about the roles had changed. The pay had not increased. There was no exciting recruitment campaign. Nobody commissioned a video involving smiling employees walking purposefully through a corridor.
No additional cost to the school.
They simply removed the barrier.
The people who disappear rarely tell you why
That is friction. It’s the small (or sometimes large) amounts of effort, uncertainty or inconvenience that sit between wanting to do something and actually doing it.
And we’ve all experienced it first-hand.
Friction rarely looks like a locked door. It is more like a staircase where every step is slightly too high and getting higher along the way. You can climb it if you are determined enough – or the reward is worth it. But most people will simply decide that it is not worth the effort.
One extra field on a survey that seems ambiguous or unclear. One verification step that requires a DNA sample and a genealogy expert. A document that needs printing and scanning. One instruction that makes sense only if you already work there.
The difficult part is that organisations mainly see the people who made it through. They see the completed applications, successful purchases and submitted enquiries. They are totally unaware of the people who quietly closed the tab.
Just as a shopkeeper never sees the people who decided not to enter.
Most people will not send a helpful email saying: “I was interested, but question 17 asked for information I did not have, your postcode checker rejected my address and the page refreshed while I was looking for my National Insurance number.”
They leave.
From the organisation’s point of view, nothing happened. Demand looked low. The campaign apparently failed. Another meeting is arranged to discuss the messaging.
But the message may have been great, in fact it may have been better than you’d imagined. But the path that followed it did not match.
Look at the journey, not just the offer
You should choose one thing you want people to do: apply, book, donate, buy, register, report, engage or ask for help. Then try to do it yourself as a new customer or service-user.
Do it on your phone. Do it without using any knowledge you have gained from working inside the organisation. Better still, watch someone else attempt it and resist the urge to explain what they are meant to click.
Ignore them when they say “What should I put here in this box?”
Notice where they pause. Notice what they reread. Notice when they have to leave the page to find something. Those tiny moments are where momentum begins to leak away.
Then ask a few blunt questions of yourselves. Do we genuinely need every field? Does this work on the device people actually use? Is the first step obvious enough? Are we asking people to change channels halfway through? Do our words match the words they would search for?
Do not stop at the website. Speak to receptionists, customer service teams and the people managing the main inbox. They know which questions appear again and again. Repeated questions are not evidence that the public refuses to read. They aren’t being ignorant or stupid. They are evidence that the organisation has made the answer difficult to find.
Removing friction does not always require a major digital transformation, a new platform or a project plan with more coloured boxes than actual decisions. It doesn’t need a new plan or a new ‘working group’. Sometimes it means shortening a form, moving information to the place people look for it, or allowing somebody to submit a form without all of the required information.
The point is not to persuade people to fight harder through your system.
It is to stop making them fight it at all.
The hardest barriers to see are the ones everyone inside the organisation has learnt to step around. We help organisations walk those journeys from the outside, find where people are getting stuck and redesign the path so taking action feels obvious.