At its core, recruiting is a people-focused industry. Recruiters spend all day dealing with other people, and a lack of engagement and motivation can easily make itself felt. Low engagement can result in reduced productivity, a dropping quality of hire, and can have serious repercussions on your Candidate Experience. In addition, a poor Recruiter Experience can also lead to shorter tenure as unengaged employees leave their jobs in search of greener pastures.

A well-functioning talent acquisition department requires all stakeholders to be engaged and productive to achieve the best outcomes. In addition to recruiters, this also involves coordinators, management, Recruitment Operations, sourcers, administrative staff, and any additional staff that contributes to the department’s success. Engaged recruiters will also cooperate more smoothly with hiring managers, leading to an efficient partnership and better recruiting outcomes. 

The first step of improving your Recruiter Experience is measuring it. Once you have an established baseline, you can understand what can be improved, and what issues team members are having when it comes to their levels of engagement.  

The best way to measure Recruiter Experience is through a recruiter experience survey. By surveying all personnel involved in your recruitment team on a regular basis, you’ll be able to identify any areas of dissatisfaction and address them quickly. 

What is Recruiter Experience?

Recruiter Experience describes how all employees in recruitment feel about their work. It encompasses everything from their relationship with their manager to their satisfaction with their compensation. A Recruiter Experience survey is similar to an employee engagement survey, but tailored specifically for recruiters and other talent acquisition professionals. It’s intended to gather unique data points that would not be asked through a generic employee engagement survey. 

Recruiter Experience focuses on topics surrounding both the general environment within a company, but also the specific priorities that each specialization within the department requires in order to function effectively in their position.

Why Measure Recruiter Experience?

There are many reasons why you should measure recruiter engagement, keeping tabs on Recruiter Experience. First and foremost, engaged recruiters are more productive than disengaged recruiters. A satisfied employee is a more productive employee, and this is just as true for recruiters. 

Second, a recruiter being disengaged means that they are dissatisfied with their job, and they are more likely to look for new opportunities elsewhere. On the other hand, an engaged recruiter is someone who loves their job and is committed to making a positive, long-term impact at their company.

Measuring Recruiter Experience is a crucial element in understanding what must be done to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire department. A gut feeling isn’t enough, and properly anonymized data is required in order to receive a complete understanding of the situation.

Employees are not always entirely honest in 1-to-1 feedback rounds, and may not raise every issue they’ve encountered. They might also not be fully transparent about their opinion of their direct managers. Having an anonymized source of feedback gives employees the chance to make their grievances heard, and deliver both quantitative and qualitative data to leadership describing the friction within their department.

Once this data is collected, it can then be used to guide decision making and inform relevant stakeholders of the actions they need to take in order to ensure that all employees are properly engaged and that the Recruiter Experience remains high. 

Measuring Recruiter Experience with a Recruiter Experience Survey

The best way to measure recruiter engagement is through Recruiter Experience surveys. These surveys can be created using a free tool, such as Google Forms or SurveyMonkey, which have no barrier to entry and are often a solid choice for small-scale data collection. However, this data has to be analyzed by hand, and is often a very time consuming process.

Alternatively, there are premium solutions that offer various benefits. Among others, these are automatic survey sending, automated data collection, analysis, and visualization, industry benchmarking, expert-tested survey templates, and a dedicated Customer Success Manager.

The main differences between a free and paid solution have to do with efficiency and the amount of time saved. In general, manual tools are slower, have more limited insights, and require more time, but are, of course, free.

One thing that should be kept in mind is the need for data anonymization. Recruitment staff is likely to hesitate in answering surveys truthfully if they believe that they can be identified. It is very important to keep the data fully anonymized in order to motivate employees to give authentic answers about their Recruiter Experience. 

Recruiter Experience Survey Template

Deciding which type of survey solution to opt for is up to the company in question, but there are a number of topics that should be included in any Recruiter Experience survey. You can find these below.

Working Conditions‍

1. Workload
2. Recruitment Technology & Tools
3. Career Opportunities 
4. Development & Training Opportunities
5. Recruitment Operations & Processes

Management

1. Personal Growth and Coaching 
2. Manager Feedback & Recognition
3. Manager Expectations
4. Management Style
5. Performance Evaluation 

Team Evaluation‍

1. Recruiter Collaboration 
2. Hiring Manager Alignment

‍Team Culture

1. Diversity & Inclusion
2. Atmosphere 

Benefits & Rewards

1. Benefits
2. Bonuses

Visualizing Recruiter Experience Data

Once data has been collected, it then has to be properly analyzed and visualized in order to provide you with real value. Just like with the recruiter experience surveys, this process can be done manually, using a tool like Google Sheets or Excel, or as part of a premium solution..

The main benefit of the latter is that the data is automatically visualized in an easily digestible dashboard or matrix, and can be filtered in multiple different ways. You can see an example of such a dashboard down below:

In addition to helping companies measure their Recruiter Experience, we also specialize in providing insights on Hiring Manager Satisfaction and Hiring Team Experience, which uses multiple data points from recruiters and hiring managers to measure the strength of their partnership and the smoothness of their cooperation. You can read more about it on our Hiring Team Experience page. 

Closing Recruiter Experience Thoughts

Measuring recruiter engagement is essential for any company that wants to attract and retain top talent. By surveying your recruiters on a regular basis using a recruiter experience survey, you’ll be able to identify any areas of dissatisfaction and address them quickly. 

Happier recruiters will provide you with better outcomes, and are more likely to attract and retain top talent to your organization. Overall, having a well-oiled Recruiter Experience measurement in place will help to boost your recruitment strategy and put your TA team on the right track to achieving higher productivity, increased employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention. Plus, motivated recruiters will be more likely to supply an excellent Candidate Experience, and make your organization stand out from the crowd.