TL;DR scroll down to our solution, including a demo
Every day we are all flooded with spam, from ‘buy this’ to ‘click this link to sort a problem’. We can usually just ignore it and move on, but for a recruiter, letting this spam data into your CRM is a data integrity nightmare.
We often run data cleansing scripts to find spam candidates and applications for customers, cleaning their Bullhorn of spam accounts. Our scripts work great, but as they say, prevention is better than cure.
So how do we prevent spam candidate entries in Bullhorn?
Firstly, we need to ascertain how spam candidates are entering your Bullhorn. Usually this is via a job application on your own website or job board portal. Spam bots trawl the web for contact forms, such as an application form. once found, they auto fill the form with data and submit.
There are lots of anti spam systems available, from Google reCAPTCHA (click this box to prove you are human, or select all boxes that contain a bicycle) to solve the puzzle. This does work for lots of spam bots, however many can easily get around this these days.
Prevent spam through Email Validation
A much more robust solution is to have the user validate their email address. Within the contact form, we ask for their email, a code is then sent to the email for the user to approve before they can submit the form.
Have a play with the demo form on the right, we don’t store your email don’t worry nor will we send an email to you (except the code), it’s just a demo.
Spam bots aren’t able to read the code and hence cannot submit the form.
Have a play with our demo
Try to submit the form without verifying your email, you can’t. Now verify and then submit, voila, legit email contact.
Isn’t it extra work for the candidate?
Yes, but only a little. The validation process takes just a few seconds but all but guarantees you a legit contact.
Email verification can be used on any website form, the test above is working on a Gravity Form. We use the system on our own contact forms across our various websites, we also monitor form completion rates. How many users started a form vs how many submitted a form over a period of a few months.
Here’s the stats from our own websites;
Number of bots starting the form: 793
Number of bots submitted the form successfully: 0
Number of humans starting the form: 208
Number of humans submitting the form: 204
We lost 4 contacts during those months we were monitoring. However, all four entered false details, meaning effectively they were also spam.
If you’d like to know more, complete our contact form.
