Why You Should Apply for Compliance Jobs only through Company Job Portals?

Did you have a situation that you apply for 50 compliance jobs on LinkedIn and get 0 interview invites? If so, this article is for you.

Why Compliance Hiring Managers Often Miss Strong LinkedIn Applicants

From my experience as a hiring manager, every time a new compliance vacancy is posted, you usually receive CVs / applications from 4 main sources (I call them batches):

(i) LinkedIn Applicants – often over 1,000 submissions (yes, I know – most of them don’t meet the job requirements, but you still have to scan them to find some hidden talents with great potential).

(ii) “Top Candidates” Batch Selected by LinkedIn Algorithm – as you might know, LinkedIn Recruitment Tool scans all applicants who applied for a position against job requirements. Based on such scan, it usually selects around 5–10 profiles as the best matches for the role.

(iii) Career Portal Submissions – on average 30-40 applicants who applied through the company’s website.

(iv) Referrals – typically up to 10 referrals from colleagues and networking.

And here is where psychology comes – a typical hiring manger would usually have only 1 week to review all these submissions and will be able to spend maximum 1-2 hours per day. In such cases, most hiring managers will naturally want to delay the >1,000 LinkedIn applications as they feel overwhelming. Instead, typically you will start from smaller batches like career portal submissions, referrals batches and top candidates and get to LinkedIn candidates only once the other batches are finished.

As a result, as a hiring manager you allocate more time and priority reviewing the referrals and career portal applications comparing LinkedIn submissions.

Most LinkedIn Applications Get Skimmed (Scanned), Not Read

When you apply through a career website – a hiring manager reviews your full resume. Meanwhile when you apply through LinkedIn, the manager will most often review only a short summary about you prepared by Linkedin.

The way LinkedIn Recruitment Tool works – it does not show to the hiring manager your profile or resume. Instead, it just creates and shows a brief summary of your profile (not the full resume).
As a hiring manager, I have to scroll through 100–200 of these summaries in one sitting.

And here’s the truth: after the first 100, you concertation becomes weak, the summaries prepared by LinkedIn appear to be very similar to each other, and you start overlooking really strong candidates.

In my previous role I was hiring for a mid-level anti-corruption compliance manager – and I completely overlooked a candidate who was a perfect fit (they applied through LinkedIn). I was exhausted reviewing hundreds of applications and just missed her LinkedIn submission. Luckily, she messaged me directly — and I invited her to an interview.

Why it is Always Best to Apply through Company Websites?

(1) Tailored Resumes Help You Stand Out in Compliance Hiring

When you apply through the company’s career site, you usually can upload a custom (tailored) resume — and this gives you a huge competitive advantage. In contrast to LinkedIn (where it does not make sense to change your profile when applying for each role), on career website – you can tailor it as much as you want to increase your chances.

For example: imagine you are applying for a Compliance Culture role (e.g. focused on conducting compliance training, running culture campaigns and surveys, and doing internals comms). Meanwhile, your current role is more generalist compliance staff and compliance culture are only 30% of your work. In such case, you can tailor your resume to move your culture-related experience to the top. You can also properly highlight the culture-related projects and slightly deemphasize investigations, risk assessments and third-party due diligence.

(2) You Can Optimize for ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems)

Many companies use an ATS to conduct initial screening of resumes. If you apply through their job portal, your application goes straight into that system. And this is a super critical part – even if you are a really strong candidates, but your resume is structured improperly in terms of ATS, you might not go through the screening. This is so terrible!

You might be one of the most qualified candidates for the position and the only reason why you might not get to interview rounds – is because of some wrong formatting in your resume, or not properly using keywords.

(3) HR Is More Likely to Forward Your Resume to the Hiring Manager if You Applied through the Company Career Page

One thing I’ve noticed is that very often HRs immediately forward to hiring managers resumes they receive through referrals and company career portals. And in my case for example, I usually open them immediately (this is a kind of task taking less than 10 minutes to do and so as per the Getting Things Done approach (David Allen) I try to do it immediately. That extra internal step doesn’t always happen when you submit your application through LinkedIn.

In the meantime, there are still some scenarios where it makes perfect sense to apply through LinkedIn over the career website. Please read it in the article in comments.

When Should You Still Use LinkedIn to Apply for Compliance Jobs?

To be fair, I believe there are several scenarios where applying through LinkedIn might be a smarter strategy comparing to the company career website:

• If you know that LinkedIn’s algorithm consistently ranks you as a Top Candidate.

• If you’re reaching out directly to a recruiter or hiring manager via LinkedIn message

• If you have something on your LinkedIn (e.g. recommendations from top professionals in your industry) that you don’t have on your resume.

• If you have a lot of mutual connections with the hiring manager and believe this can increase the trust (however, in such case better to ask for a referral).

Something Very Important

I know this might sounds obvious but: if you are really serious about getting your next compliance job – you should forget about the “Numbers” (how many applications for jobs you sent).

Unfortunately, this often does not work at all. Instead, focus on quality. Take the extra few minutes to apply through the company’s site, tailor your resume per the job description, and do your best to ensure your application go through the ATS initial screens.

Frequently Asked Questions

Question: Is it better to apply through LinkedIn or company websites for compliance jobs?

For most compliance roles, applying through the company’s career website gives higher changes of being noticed and reviewed by the hiring manager.

Question: Why have not received any response after applying for compliance jobs on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn applications often go into a huge bases of 1,000+ candidates, and LinkedIn Recruitment Tool only shows to hiring managers brief summaries (not full resumes – unless the hiring manager purposefully decides to open a resume).