Introduction

If you're looking for ways to boost your Candidate Experience and Greenhouse is your Applicant Tracking System (ATS), you've come to the right place! This article will guide you on how to leverage your existing Greenhouse setup to elevate your candidate journey and drive hiring success using the no-code Starred integration.

Understanding Candidate Experience

But first, let's establish what we mean by Candidate Experience and how it relates to the candidate journey. When job seekers apply for a job at an organization, their perception of the company as an employer is greatly impacted by how they are treated during the hiring process. This affects the company's Employer Brand and influences the likelihood of the applicant accepting a job offer or continuing to use the company's services.  

In short, how candidates feel during their hiring journey with a company determines their Candidate Experience. This encompasses every touchpoint they have with the company: from their first visit on the career page, through filling in their application and interviewing, to exiting the process entirely (whether due to rejection, withdrawal or getting hired).

Recommended Article: What's the Business Impact of Negative Candidate Experience?

Why is Nailing the Candidate Journey Important?

When it comes to great Candidate Experience, Greenhouse users are in good hands. With a heavy focus on candidate-centricity and a user-friendly UI/UX, building the candidate journey with Greenhouse is a breeze.

A well-planned and consistent candidate journey will:

1. Establish Order: A structured journey ensures a smooth recruitment process for the candidate and the organization, representing company values, maintaining internal order and promoting hiring efficiency.
2. Provide Reassurance: A well-organized process reassures candidates that they are in capable hands, boosting their confidence in your company.
3. Boost Credibility: A positive Candidate Experience enhances your company’s credibility, showing that your organization operates efficiently and professionally.
4. Improve Brand Reputation: Candidate Experience can make or break your Employer Brand. In today's review-based culture, a positive experience leads to favorable recommendations, while a negative one can harm your reputation. Read more about how it can impact your Glassdoor reviews.
5. Attract and Retain Talent: As finding qualified candidates becomes harder, a positive experience reduces drop-off rates and encourages job seekers to reapply in the future.
6. Influence the Overall Experience: Since most talent won’t complete the entire journey (after all, you're most likely going to hire only 1 out of hundreds of applicants), making every step count is crucial. Ensuring a positive Candidate Experience and collecting feedback at each stage helps improve the process continuously.

Failing to measure and improve the process can lead to higher drop-off rates, negative reviews, and difficulty in filling positions, ultimately costing your company time and resources.

Using Greenhouse to Measure Candidate Experience

Greenhouse, being one of Starred's integration partners, stands out for its candidate-centric approach, offering an intuitive and straightforward system that ensures a consistent and seamless experience for applicants.

It's Easy to Get Started

Greenhouse users have all they need to start measuring their Candidate Experience. Using the built-in Greenhouse candidate surveys is the first step to gaining a deeper understanding of your hiring efforts and evaluating your applicant base.

The Greenhouse survey allows users to create a questionnaire and use it to measure and share Candidate Experience insights within the organization. Their survey includes 9 default survey questions designed to understand how satisfied your applicants are when applying for a new job at your company.

An important feature of their survey solution is the ability to personalize them, allowing users to edit or add questions, choose sending frequency and provide space for qualitative comments.

These insights are enough to get your started and get an overall feel for your Candidate Experience. However, for those who wish to gain a more in-depth overview, easily identify ways to turn your recruitment process into a talent magnet and improve your team's internal alignment, integrating your Greenhouse setup with the Starred Candidate Experience Analytics platform will get you closer to achieving hiring excellence.

Greenhouse Candidate Survey vs Starred: Get more out of your ATS

Starred is Greenhouse's preferred partner in measuring Candidate Experience, and for a good reason. With our simple native integration, it's even easier to build on top of your existing Greenhouse setup, enrich your current datapoints with custom insights that matter to you and make data driven decisions more easily.

Find the Starred integration in the Greenhouse Marketplace.

Get In-Depth Feedback Every Step of the Way with Starred

The Starred Analytics Platform automatically collects feedback from applicants every step of the way, regardless how close they get to getting hired. While Greenhouse enables users to survey candidates who made it to an interview, Starred uncovers insights from applicants as early as the career page and as late as during their onboarding.

For best results and a clear overview of your entire recruitment efforts, collect insights from candidates in the following stages:

1. Career page
2. Application stage
3. Phone/screening interview
4. Interview
5. Assessment
6. Offer accepted
7. Onboarding

Just like with Greenhouse's solution, the surveys are triggered automatically and only when the applicant leaves the process. With the Starred career page widget, you can collect feedback from potential applicants even before they click "apply" and see if there's anything impacting the application conversion rate negatively.

Additionally, you can see how the feedback differs for candidates who left the process for different reasons: rejection, withdrawal or getting hired. This way, you can understand the factors behind your withdrawal rate, anticipate what candidates will say about you after being rejected or evaluate how the recruitment process impacts the likelihood of candidates accepting your job offers.

Send Personalized Surveys for Every Stage

Despite the job market slowly shifting to favoring candidate-centric practices, job seekers are no strangers to impersonalized communication. Robot-like messages that don't offer them any concrete feedback or relevant information get opened and deleted, leaving a bad taste in the applicant's mouth.

To increase survey response rates, personalizing candidate surveys and making them specific to the stage they were in is key. While Greenhouse allows users to edit their survey questions and add new ones, there is currently no option to design questionnaires that are stage-specific or use a question format different than the "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" scale.

At Starred, every survey is built specifically for the corresponding step in the candidate journey. For example, applicants who are rejected after a phone screening will get asked about the length of the phone call or the recruiter who screened them. Those who withdraw their application after completing an assessment will answer questions about how they found the assessment itself and why they decided to withdraw their application.

When measuring Candidate Experience, there are no one-size-fits-all questions; the more personal you get, the more relevant the data you collect and the easier it is to identify ways to improve. That's why Starred offers 8 different question types to choose from, all with the possibility of adding a comment to expand on their answer:

1. Net Promoter Score: Designed to measure the Candidate Net Promoter Score with the question "How likely are you to recommend applying for a job at [Company] to your friends or family?"
2. Star rating: For example, to measure how satisfied they were with the length of the process.
3. Grades: A 1-10 scale allowing candidates to rate aspects of the hiring process, for example the Hiring Managers they came into contact with.
4. Customer Effort Score 1.0 and 2.0: Understanding how much effort an aspect of the recruitment process took.
5. Yes/No: For example, to understand if the applicant received an outline of the process in the application confirmation email.
6. Multiple choice: For example, to ask candidates about what they value the most in a smooth recruitment process.
7. Open-ended question: A space for candidates to write a comment, for example around things that would have made their experience better.

Make the Survey an Extension of Your Brand

Designing an effective hiring process will bring job seekers closer to your Employer Brand, and making every touchpoint feel "on-brand" will help you reinforce it. This includes your candidate surveys.

While Greenhouse offers some survey customization, including the survey invitation email, Starred takes branding one step further. Create your own or pick a survey from our tried and tested template gallery. Customize your branding and tone of voice, add up to 30 languages and even choose to send the surveys from your own email domain.

With Starred, there is no doubt every survey and invitation feels 100% on-brand.

Analyze your data at a glance

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

While Greenhouse allows users to download their candidate survey data or see it in an aggregated view, Starred consolidates all 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. Sentiment analysis: Going through hundreds of qualitative comments can be a tedious task. With our custom comment sentiment analysis algorithm, categorize your qualitative data into categories and find key information in the blink of an eye.
4. Exporting: Easily export your data into Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, or integrate with other data tools like PowerBI.
5. Stakeholder Access: Grant different stakeholders access to see their specific feedback, promoting transparency and accountability.

Filter and benchmark results to create an action plan

Filtering and benchmarking is what will help you turn numbers into action. At Starred, we collect candidate insights for hundreds of organizations globally, spanning various industries and company sizes. Unlike Greenhouse, Starred is ATS-agnostic, allowing us to build the world's largest candidate insight benchmark dataset for you to compare against.

Download the 2023 Candidate Experience Benchmark Report to compare your performance.

In addition to benchmarking, our native Greenhouse integration allows users to filter their data according to existing custom variables in their existing setup. Whether it's by department, recruiter, demographic data, job opening... you name it, the filter is there (or can be made for you, so you can make the most of the data and focus on what's important for you to achieve your goals).

Going Beyond Measuring Candidate Experience? We've Got You:

1. Recruiter and Hiring Manager Satisfaction
2. Quality of Hire
3. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

Not Convinced? Hear from Some of Our Greenhouse Customers Already Using Starred:

1. Learn how Twilio overcame the challenge of hiring at scale and successfully integrated their company values into the hiring process.
2. Read about Elastic's journey to automating their recruitment process and achieving a 10% increase in NPS from rejected candidates within six months.
3. Find out how Deliveroo's time-in-interview process was reduced by 30% in the space of one year.

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