Introduction

If you're using SmartRecruiters as your Applicant Tracking System (ATS), you're in good hands. This user-friendly ATS provides valuable insights into key metrics such as time to hire, drop-off rates, and source quality. However, while these metrics offer valuable operational insights, they don’t reveal what candidates think about the recruitment process or explain why they feel that way.

This raises an important question: if you're not including the Candidate Experience angle in your data collection, can you truly claim your recruitment processes are fully data-driven? How can you feel confident that your candidates are happy and that you have the best, most efficient hiring process?

In this article, we’ll explore how to enrich the wealth of data offered by SmartRecruiters by focusing on Candidate Experience through Starred's Candidate Experience Analytics tool.

Why Is It Important to Track the Candidate Journey?

The candidate journey covers every interaction a candidate has with your company throughout the hiring process. It starts from their first job application, through interviews and assessments, all the way to the final hiring decision and onboarding process.

With so many touch points, you have a valuable opportunity to see how things look from the applicants' perspective. By understanding their preferences and acting on this data, you can pinpoint areas for change. After all, how are you going to improve Candidate Experience, if you don't ask the candidates for feedback?

What Are the Benefits of a Positive Candidate Experience?

1. A structured candidate journey can be used to reflect your company values and maintain internal order.
2. A well-organized process reassures candidates, boosting their confidence in your company.
3. It enhances credibility and demonstrates professionalism.
4. Candidate Experience influences Employer Brand and your reputation. In fact, 60% of job seekers say they would not apply for a job at a company with a 1-star Glassdoor rating.
5. A positive journey attracts and retains talent, reducing drop-off rates.

On the other hand, failing to measure and improve Candidate Experience can lead to higher drop-off rates, negative reviews, and difficulty in filling positions, ultimately costing your company time and resources.

Need more reasons to see the importance of Candidate Experience? Here's a chapter of our Ultimate Guide to Candidate Experience, all about why Candidate Experience is so important.

SmartRecruiters: Is Your Current Setup Boosting Your Candidate Experience?

Highlighting the effect of good hiring experience, SmartRecruiters offers access to a wide range of solutions that foster candidate-centric focus in recruitment. Their platform encourages customers to showcase their Employer Brand through content-rich career sites, branded elements, and personalized templates. By embracing the needs of job seekers worldwide, they have implemented a 1-click apply feature and automatic candidate status updates.

In terms of Candidate Experience statistics, SmartRecruiters provides access to real-time dashboards of your recruiting performance. It is possible to create custom reports, access historical data and see patterns of your hiring process. To measure hiring success their solution tracks some of the most important recruitment KPIs in talent acquisition: quality of hire, cost per hire and time to fill.

Knowing all of this is a good start in paving your way to talent acquisition success. However, these insights can be enriched with more information coming directly from the candidates. It’s one thing knowing how long your recruitment process takes, but it’s another knowing: do your candidates think it's too much? And is it impacting their willingness to apply?

That's why considering an integration with a Candidate Experience Analytics platform, like Starred, is beneficial to take full advantage of the rich data already provided by SmartRecruiters.

Why Implement Candidate Experience Surveys for SmartRecruiters?

Get In-Depth Feedback Every Step of the Way

Discover who your candidates are—country, office, department—and the roles they apply for. Compare feedback across different functions. Imagine you can compare what product managers from different offices say about your recruitment and training process, or how a sales representative perceives your interview process compared to a developer? Gain information about which recruiters give their candidates extraordinary experience or which hiring manager might be underperforming.

Send surveys to your rejected, withdrawn and hired candidates, at any stage of the application process. You decide what to ask and when. Create your own or pick a survey from our template gallery. Customize your branding and tone of voice, add up to 30 languages, and receive real-time feedback at an average response rate of 30%

Hiring Manager and Recruiter Experience

The three ingredients of a successful recruitment team are happy candidates, satisfied hiring managers, and engaged recruiters. Gain a 360-degree view by collecting feedback from all involved parties:

1. We already covered candidates. Yay!
2. Recruiters – Use Starred to find out if your recruiters are set up for success. Do they have all the tools and support they need to find you the most qualified candidates or to collaborate with your hiring managers?
3. Hiring Managers – Gather insights about how you can improve their experience. Are they happy with everything from scheduling and communication with the recruiters to the quality of the candidates?

Dashboards and Data

When it comes to improving your team's performance, you need straightforward answers, not overwhelming data sheets. Starred dashboards are designed to translate incoming feedback into clear expectations and prioritized next steps, ensuring you can maximize impact.

Starred consolidates all your insights in a single, user-friendly platform. Key features include:

1. Reporting: Generate detailed reports to understand performance metrics.
2. Segmentation: Create custom variables that fit your business needs, we’ll tell you the drivers of your Candidate Experience filtered on each recruiter, hiring manager, department, and more.
3. Exporting: Easily export your data into Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, or integrate with other tools like PowerBI.
4. Stakeholder Access: Grant different stakeholders access to see their specific feedback, promoting transparency and accountability.

And if you think that there is a filter that would segment the findings even deeper, Starred's team can make it happen, all custom-made, just for you. Our integration is not limited to the standard SmartRecruiters filters and allows you to report on what matters most to you, making it easy to use the platform directly for internal reporting.

Benchmarks

Get insights from businesses across the globe with our Benchmark Data. We gathered figures from organizations worldwide that use Starred as their feedback platform, so you can compare your performance effectively. With our benchmarked question library, based on a proven driver framework, you can measure your results against industry standards.

These industry benchmarks aren't just numbers; they're actionable insights that allow you to benchmark your performance against peers. Use Candidate NPS as your primary metric, and benchmark your results against others in your industry, location, or company size. It's all about gaining perspective and leveraging data-driven strategies to drive your success forward.

Support from our Candidate Experience Experts

Our team of Candidate Experience experts is here to support you throughout all stages of your journey with Starred. Whether you're interpreting dashboard analytics, analyzing benchmark results, doing research or refining your feedback strategy, our goal is to ensure you get maximum value from your insights.

You gain more than just a platform—you gain a trusted partner committed to helping you achieve excellence in Candidate Experience.

No Code Integration

Our single-click integration, Starred Connect, ensures that everything is seamlessly connected to your SmartRecruiters setup without the need for any coding skills. The integration preserves all your important information while adding new functionalities. You can keep all your existing data intact and maintain the same categories, reporting, dashboards and KPIs. Starred Connect is designed to make the integration process straightforward and efficient, allowing you to focus on what matters most – leveraging your findings for better insights and decisions.

Do You Want to Measure More Than Candidate Experience?

Measuring Candidate Experience goes beyond candidate insights. For a true 360 overview of your hiring process, try to include more stakeholders and metrics in the mix. Find out how Starred can also help you with:

1. Recruiter and Hiring Manager Satisfaction
2. Quality of Hire
3. Ensure inclusive practices with our DE&I module

Tracking Recruitment KPIs with SmartRecruiters and Starred

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in recruitment give Talent Acquisition teams the information necessary to make strategic recruiting decisions in the future. By tracking certain data points, they can understand and demonstrate how their hard work contributes to creating a well-functioning recruitment strategy.

Here are some KPIs we recommend measuring:

• Candidate Experience: the best metric to keep track of the recruitment process itself and how it is perceived by the candidates from the outside. Keeping tabs on this metric is often what can differentiate your company from another.  

• Candidate Net Promoter Score (cNPS): is a good way to understand how the recruitment process is affecting your Employer Brand and the overall reputation of the business. We measure it by asking: How likely are you to recommend applying to [company] to your friends and family?

• Time to fill: the time it takes to fill a position from the time of application to the offer accepted.
• Cost per hire: all costs that went into filling the position (proportionally including tech stack, recruiter salaries, providing equipment for the new hire, advertising)
• Source of hire: helps you understand which sources are the most effective (e.g. the quality of candidates that come from LinkedIn vs a job board) to know how to allocate your budget well.
• Quality of hire: difficult to put into numbers, but it’s the ultimate measure of the effectiveness of the entire employee experience. A high-quality candidate will demonstrate a good cultural and professional fit, they will be satisfied in the role and motivated to stay at the company for a long time. Read more about how you can measure quality of hire with Starred.

Hear From Your Fellow SmartRecruiters Users Already Using Starred:

1. Learn how Jysk Uses the Candidate Portal to deliver personal Candidate Experience.
2. Find out how Wolt maintained good Candidate Experience while hiring at scale, growing from 500 to 5000 employees in 18 months.
3. Explore how Adevinta uses Starred to drive tangible changes and make data-driven decisions.

In Short

Integrating Starred Candidate Experience insights with the comprehensive data provided by SmartRecruiters can transform your recruitment strategy. While SmartRecruiters offers in-depth recruiting metrics, incorporating direct feedback from candidates can help you take the first step towards a more candidate-centric approach in talent acquisition.

This integration efficiently delivers a full picture of the candidate journey, while helping you strengthen your Employer Brand and attract top talent.