Ninety Seconds or Nothing
The barista candidate is standing at a bus stop. The warehouse candidate is on break with one hand free. Every obstacle you add between them and your open role — an account, a resume upload, a forty-field history — empties your pipeline in proportion to its inconvenience. High-volume hourly hiring runs on a different physics: the application must be finishable before the bus arrives.
This is the 90-second apply. Five questions. No resume. Phone-first by design.
What Gets Cut, and Why
- The resume. Gone. Hourly roles are verified in person in the first week anyway; the document adds friction without adding signal at this stage.
- The career history. Gone. If hands-on experience matters for the role, that is one later question, not a chronological narrative.
- The cover letter. Permanently gone, everywhere, on principle.
What survives is the minimum a manager needs to offer an interview.
The Five Questions
- Name and mobile — one contact block.
- Which site or role — a dropdown of current openings.
- Right to work — a yes/no on eligibility.
- When can you start — a date field.
- One strength, one sentence — a short text, answered on a phone keyboard without suffering.
Keep every one of them required — with only five, completion stays near-total, and the data arrives uniform.
Put the Link Where Their Eyes Are
Hourly candidates are not browsing careers pages; they are in messaging apps and on the street. Share the link on WhatsApp, generate a tap-to-apply message with the WhatsApp link generator, and print the shareable URL as a QR code for the window, the counter, and the job-fair table.
The Instant Yes
Submission lands the candidate on a thank-you page that states exactly what happens next — we text interview slots within two days — and a notification to your own inbox means the manager hears about strong applicants while they are still reachable.
Frequently Asked Questions
Really no resume at all?
Really. If a role later needs history, a quick follow-up question or a two-minute conversation covers it. The resume’s absence is what makes the ninety seconds possible.
What about references?
A post-offer step for hourly hiring, not an application step. Collect them once an offer is real.
Can this absorb a seasonal hiring wave?
That is its native habitat — one link, unlimited submissions, identical data, and filtering in the responses view when five hundred applications land in a week.
Can we add one more question when we must?
One, occasionally — hours-wanted is the usual candidate. The discipline is noticing when ‘just one more’ has quietly rebuilt the form you deleted.