Measuring Candidate Experience is crucial for optimizing recruitment operations and building a positive employer brand. This article outlines steps and tools to efficiently measure Candidate Experience and maximize insights collected to improve recruitment processes. It highlights the importance of collecting feedback at every stage, categorizing and mapping data, analyzing and looking for patterns, and being ready to act on candidate feedback.
This article is part of Talenthub's Ultimate Guide to Candidate Experience.
Measuring Candidate Experience is essential for any organization striving to optimize and streamline their recruitment operations, all the while attracting and winning the right people to fill their open positions.
Over 78% of applicants believe that Candidate Experience is a reflection of a company’s values and their attitude towards their employees.
Consequently, embedding a candidate-centric culture in your hiring strategy will directly contribute to establishing a positive Employer Brand that draws candidates to click the “apply” button.
Yet, many Talent Acquisition teams are unsure about how to start prioritizing better Candidate Experience in their recruitment process, let alone how to measure and act on it accordingly.
In this article, we will outline the steps and tools necessary to ensure you are measuring Candidate Experience efficiently and maximizing the insights collected to build cutting-edge recruitment processes.
Contents
- Step 1: Start Collecting Candidate Feedback
- Understand What Your Candidates are Thinking
- Get an Accurate Overview by Collecting Feedback at Every Stage
- Talenthub Makes it Easy to Collect Valuable Candidate Feedback
- Step 2: Filter, Categorize and Map All Candidate Feedback
- Step 3: Start Analyzing and Looking for Patterns
- Identify Low Performing Areas to Start Improving Candidate Experience
- Ask Candidates for a cNPS Rating
- Be Ready to Act on Candidate Feedback and Make a Change
- In Short
Step 1: Start Collecting Candidate Feedback
The first – and most important – step is to set up a framework for collecting candidate feedback. Actively opening up for feedback from real-life candidates going through your recruitment process is the only way to get an accurate overview of its performance, all the while positioning the company as a people-first organization.
Applicants are the people whose voices should be heard when seeking to optimize any recruitment process. Not only can they bring valuable insights on how accessible or informative each stage has been for them, collecting direct candidate feedback is an effective way to understand how your operational approach to talent acquisition is affecting key recruitment metrics, such as time to hire or quality of hire.
Understand What Your Candidates are Thinking
Getting a holistic view of candidates’ perception of your company and recruitment process requires some effort. Apart from directly asking candidates for feedback throughout the recruitment process, you can:
- Search Social Media. 59% of candidates use social media to research the companies they’re applying to, it’s in your best interest to keep an eye on those.
- Communicate online. Online review sites such as Glassdoor can be a good place to start improving your Employer Brand and Candidate Experience.
- Review available data. Use any data available through your ATS to spot candidate patterns and behaviors that can improve your overall hiring operations.
Get an Accurate Overview by Collecting Feedback at Every Stage
Using candidate feedback to measure Candidate Experience might seem obvious, yet there are many companies who still don’t collect enough of it, don’t measure at the right stages of the process or don’t collect any data at all.
In fact, a 2019 LinkedIn study reported 75% of candidates never get the chance to share feedback after applying for a role, while 68% of them would be willing to do so.
Evidently candidates are eager to submit feedback when given the opportunity, so establishing an efficient feedback collecting framework and tapping into the black box of Candidate Experience can do wonders for your hiring efforts and Employer Branding.
But only if you’re measuring the right way and including all the key touchpoints in your analysis.
Candidate feedback should be collected during all the stages of the process, even as early as the career page, after a rejection and as far into the process as pre- and onboarding.
Only then will you be able to identify specific stages in the recruitment process that might be negatively impacting your Candidate Experience and turning applicants into detractors, harming your Employer Branding in the process.
Talenthub Makes it Easy to Collect Valuable Candidate Feedback
Implementing candidate centricity into your recruitment strategy with Talenthub takes 2 minutes. All it takes is simply embedding a personalized survey link into existing candidate communication, adding a script to your career site or directly integrating your ATS with Talenthub’s Candidate Experience Analytics Platform.
We recommend including a survey after rejection to show candidates that their opinion matters to you even though they were unsuccessful. Since 72% of candidates report having shared a bad recruitment experience online, it is in your company’s best interest to be the first (and only) ones to read about it. And act accordingly to change it for the next candidate.
Step 2: Filter, Categorize and Map All Candidate Feedback
Once you’ve collected the feedback, it is essential that you map it to relevant stages in the recruitment process, categorize per location, position, hiring manager, department and any other segment that might be relevant for you in the analysis.
On average, a job opening will attract approximately 50 applications and those will yield several survey responses per candidate, depending on how far they get in the process. This means that, unless your feedback collection framework is automated and systematized, the process of preparing your data for analysis could be long and tedious.
If the data you collect is not in order, visualizing trends and spotting areas for improvement is virtually impossible.
Equipping the Talent Acquisition team with a platform that can collect and organize all candidate feedback will make this process more efficient. Read about how Delivery Hero used Talenthub to organize all candidate data to empower their recruitment and start providing great Candidate Experience to all candidates.
Step 3: Start Analyzing and Looking for Patterns
The last key step to measuring Candidate Experience is to digest all the data collected and give it meaning in the context of your recruitment process. Having it visualized and organized in segments (see previous step) is vital in making this stage efficient.
A dedicated platform – such as Talenthub – will provide significant value to this process by analyzing all collected data automatically, comparing your performance over time and referencing global and industry-specific benchmarks for each stage.
This way, you will be able to see where you stand in the market, how your process evolves and how much the recruitment process is actually contributing to attracting the right talent.
Identify Low Performing Areas to Start Improving Candidate Experience
Once you have a good understanding of your data, you will be able to identify stages, staff members, departments or geographical areas that are underperforming and, potentially, negatively affecting your Employer Branding.
The Talenthub Candidate Experience Analytics Platform uses feedback to give users performance scores and visualize trends in the data, using quantitative and qualitative input from candidates.
Low scores are highlighted as poor experience that needs further evaluation, backed up by qualitative data from direct candidate comments that allow you to understand the problem more thoroughly.
This way, you will be able to identify an actionable plan to improve the score in the future.
Ask Candidates for a cNPS Rating
A cNPS (Candidate Net Promoter Score) rating is a useful metric to track in your efforts to improve Candidate Experience. Asking candidates how likely they are to recommend recruiting for your organization to a friend or a family member is a strong indicator of their perception of your company as a workplace and the Candidate Experience they’ve had throughout the process.
It is a score that you can track over time to get a general feeling for your performance; when you notice the score dropping, it probably means something isn’t working the way it should be.
Be Ready to Act on Candidate Feedback and Make a Change
Embarking on the journey towards stellar Candidate Experience means that you are able to accept and act on the feedback you receive.
Measuring Candidate Experience indicates that your company is prioritizing applicant engagement. It also means that you are willing to implement changes to the recruitment process based on their input.
In Short
Collecting candidate feedback and measuring Candidate Experience is the first step towards showing job seekers that your organization values their opinion.
Measuring Candidate Experience has several advantages:
- Improving Employer Branding and brand perception
- Improving the quality of your recruitment process
- Comparing your performance with others globally and within the same industry, identifying ways to hire faster and better than your competition
- Attracting and hiring the right candidates by showing your people-first approach
To measure candidate experience efficiently, companies should collect feedback from all stages of the process and implement the right structure.
Talenthub’s Candidate Experience Analytics Platform makes feedback collection easy and allows companies to add surveys to their existing communication with candidates.
Once collected, feedback should be categorized and analyzed to make sense of the data. Professional platforms like Talenthub, make analyzing data easy, even for beginners, by automatically comparing it with previous data and other companies' results. The platform also provides scores and shows trends in the data, indicating where changes are required in the recruitment process.
Finally, companies should be prepared to implement changes based on the feedback received, as applicant engagement is a priority.