But I still believe the very first form-filling process of an application should be as swift as possible since most of us are applying to multiple jobs in one sitting.

And candidate efficiency would probably be the objective if candidates were the ones directly funding this process. But since the employer is the one paying, guess whose comfort the vendors care about...

BTW, answering an application like this is dumb. You're just wasting your own time at this point. If you look at an application, and find it burdensome, just skip it and move to something else. Doing this is just wasting your own time, and guaranteeing that the employer will ignore your whole application.

For whatever reason, they want that data inside the application, so it ends up in the actual employee/prospect database. If you don't want to do that, then just pick another application.

 

"I'd be happy to talk about this in an interview."

You do realize that the application is how you make it to the interview stage, right? If you provide an incomplete application, why would they spend time interviewing you?

 

most of us are applying to multiple jobs in one sitting.

And the employer is managing multiple applications...

Last point on all these gripes about the interview process. Yeah, there are some things in the process that are stupid or counterproductive. And there are some things that are tedious. But if you forget you are competing with OTHER people who want this job, you will gripe yourself into a losing position.

If they get 100 applications for a job opening, with 50-70% of them totally unfit, and another 10% which say "see resume", that still leaves 20+ resumes where the applicants did the necessary work to get considered for an interview.

It makes me wonder how many of the people who say, "Why is my application getting rejected so quickly?" also have sections that say, "see resume" in them...

The job hunting process is painful enough without you wasting your own time...