Introduction
Are you beginning to measure Candidate Experience with Microsoft Forms, Google Forms or other free survey tools and now you're wondering if there’s a more effective approach? To answer your question: yes, there is. Keep reading if you're ready to bring some efficiency to your recruitment analytics.
Free survey tools make it easy to gather feedback, but do they offer the in-depth data analysis you need need to truly understand and improve your hiring process? Gathering responses is just the first step, and you will need actionable insights to identify problem areas and effectively justify your decisions to stakeholders.
In this article, we’ll break down how these popular options compare Starred, a specialized Candidate Analytics tool, highlighting what you might be missing.
Why Measure Candidate Experience?
How candidates feel about their Hiring Experience matters. From that first glance at your initial job posting to the final communication, every step shapes your organization's Employer Brand. Candidate Experience isn’t just about filling a role – it’s every step in the job application process, including the job description, application, interview process, communication and how they feel after the decision, regardless of the outcome.
A positive Candidate Experience can turn even the rejected candidates into brand ambassadors. If the applicants feel respected and informed throughout the entire recruitment process, they’re more likely to talk positively about your company and even recommend future talent. On the flip side, poor experiences – like delayed responses or confusing interviews – can lead to candidates sharing their frustrations on social media or Glassdoor, leaving long-lasting consequences for your Employer Brand. As a matter of fact, 69% of job seekers would reject a job offer from a company with a bad reputation even if they are unemployed.
Dive deeper into Candidate Experience with these articles:
- How to measure Candidate Experience
- How to use Candidate Net Promoter Score (cNPS)
- When to send to send a Candidate Experience survey
Can You Measure Candidate Experience with Microsoft or Google Forms?
When it comes to collecting Candidate Experience metrics, many people consider using free survey tools for their convenience and straightforward setup, but what might be the hidden costs of using these tools?
Both Microsoft and Google Forms are popular choices for creating surveys due to their simplicity, ease of use, and integrations with other tools in their suite. Although not specifically designed for recruitment, these forms can be customized to collect feedback from candidates at various stages of the hiring journey.
But here’s the catch: while these are handy for gathering survey answers, they might not give you the full picture. Think of them as a starting point—helpful but limited. They lack the advanced features needed for making informed decisions and might leave you feeling like you’re missing out on crucial details. You won’t get the actionable insights, analytics or seamless automation that Candidate Experience measurement tools offer.
So, while measuring Candidate Experience yourself is a good start, it might not be the magic solution you’re looking for if you want to get honest feedback and truly enhance your recruiting process.
Starred vs. Do-It-Yourself
To understand the difference between a specialized candidate analytics tool and creating a Candidate Experience survey yourself with free tools, like Microsoft or Google Forms, we have made a comparison with Starred. This comparison focuses solely on how free survey tool features can be used to benefit you in collecting candidate feedback, gaining valuable insights and analyzing the results.
Purpose
DIY: Free survey tools are made for creating simple forms, quizzes, and surveys for various purposes, including measuring Candidate Experience and the hiring process. However, since these platforms aren’t specifically built for recruitment, customization is often needed to tailor them to your needs.
Starred, designed with candidates in mind, provides Talent Acquisition teams with everything they need to improve the quality and efficiency of their recruitment process and candidate satisfaction. The platform offers surveys, analytics and all the relevant metrics to make data-driven decisions.
Survey Features
DIY tools allow you to create candidate surveys with different question types, including multiple-choice, text answer, checkboxes, rating scales, and skip logic, allowing for flexible feedback collection. Users can customize the survey design with colors, fonts and images to match their brand. Essentially, you can find all the standard features you’d expect from a typical survey platform.
Starred's solution offers all the above-mentioned, plus recruiter-specific features. One of them is the survey question and template library, which has been carefully curated for different stages of the candidate journey. This ensures that you ask all the relevant questions and collect the most valuable Candidate Experience metrics, including the Candidate Net Promoter Score. You can craft customized invitations for every candidate, effortlessly incorporate your brand's identity into the survey's appearance, and even create interactive thank-you pages—such as guiding candidates to your Glassdoor profile if they rate you highly. Plus, the Firefight Response feature notifies your team when a candidate has had a poor Candidate Experience, allowing for quick damage control.
Data Analytics
DIY platforms offer data analytics features that let you view response summaries and visualize data through charts and graphs, helping you track response rates and identify feedback trends over time. You can also use Sheets or Excel for a more detailed analysis. But, while it's possible to conduct in-depth quantitative and qualitative data analysis with free tools, it can be very time-consuming and often requires a certain level of expertise to do so effectively.
Starred: The solution offers advanced analytics specifically tailored to TA needs: Candidate Experience, Quality of Hire, Hiring Team Performance, and Diversity & Inclusion. Starred has created a Priority Matrix to help you identify pain points and key drivers behind the NPS score, helping you focus on what matters the most.
Benchmarks
DIY solutions, when it comes to setting effective benchmarks, require a lot of know-how and manual effort, which can detract from focusing on improving the Candidate Experience itself. Without access to reliable industry data, you'll need to gather and analyze your own data, which may lead to limited insights. Creating internal benchmarks is possible, but it can be difficult to know if they truly reflect broader industry standards or trends.
Starred platform makes it easy to compare your performance with industry benchmarks and even set your own internal benchmarks. Starred collects candidate insights for hundreds of organizations globally, spanning various industries and company sizes, making sure you won’t have to depend on generic public benchmark lists and tailor your comparisons to relevant data.
Reporting & Dashboards
DIY: With these platforms, you can expect visual representations of your survey responses through graphs and charts, giving you an initial overview of the data. However, beyond these summaries, it’s up to you to take the next steps: filtering, segmenting, and analyzing the survey data to extract meaningful insights. This process can involve manually organizing responses, identifying patterns, and creating custom reports for different stakeholders.
Starred: When comparing to the DIY tools, the biggest advantage is that the reports are already made for you and highly customizable. You can segment data, for example, by role, department, country or hiring manager, making the sharing between different stakeholders and teams easy. The suite provides you real-time data and detailed insights that enable you to quickly identify trends and address issues within your recruitment process.
Price
DIY: As already mentioned throughout this article, it’s no surprise that the primary advantage of these platforms is their free-of-charge service.
Starred is positioned as a premium tool with pricing that reflects its ability to deliver a high ROI through improved Quality of Hire and more efficient recruitment processes. Pricing may vary based on the number of candidates surveyed and the depth of features required.
Integrations
DIY: Microsoft and Google Forms integrate with tools in their own respective suite, which has benefits for easy data transfer for a deeper insight analysis. However, these platforms lack recruitment-specific integrations, for example, with your Applicant Tracking System (ATS), making the feedback collection a manual process through a separate communication channel.
Starred integrates seamlessly with ATSs, allowing your Candidate Experience data to be collected and analyzed automatically without disrupting the recruitment workflow. By embedding surveys directly into the hiring process, you create an environment that encourages candidates to provide feedback, making it a natural part of their recruitment experience.
Automation
DIY: When creating a survey yourself, you’re also responsible for distributing it to job seekers. It can quickly become overwhelming—especially when trying to time it correctly for each stage of the application process for hundreds of candidates. Manually sending out surveys and gathering feedback can end up ultimately costing you more in effort than investing in a tool that automates the process for you.
Starred surveys are automatically triggered based on specific candidate interactions within the ATS, ensuring that feedback is timely and relevant. This not only saves you time and effort but also minimizes the need for manual intervention.
Support
DIY solutions come with an user-friendly interface and extensive support resources, including tutorials, FAQs, and general customer service for platform-specific questions. However, when it comes to more personalized support, such as identifying the best candidate survey questions or determining key metrics, you’ll need to seek guidance elsewhere, as these platforms lack recruitment-specific expertise and insights.
Starred's Customer Success team is committed to offering every customer personalized onboarding and ongoing support. They ensure that Talent Acquisition teams can quickly set up and optimize their candidate feedback surveys as efficiently as possible. Their focus is on providing the necessary resources and feedback whether you're interpreting dashboard analytics, analyzing benchmark results or refining your feedback strategy
Immutable's Team Saves 1.5 Days with Starred
Starred's customer case with Immutable is a good example of how switching from a DIY solution can lead to significant success for hiring teams. They faced a challenge with a time-consuming and manual survey process, resulting in only a 9% response rate from candidates, which provided limited insights.
By implementing Starred, Immutable saved over 1.5 days each month, allowing them to refine their processes and focus more on human-centric recruitment. They leverage the insights to make improvements, such as using the Firefight Response to notify them of negative feedback. This enables them to follow up quickly, identify the issues, and resolve them efficiently.
Conclusion
While free survey tools are a quick and easy way to gather feedback, they don’t always capture all the critical aspects of the recruitment process. Having the right tools makes all the difference, allowing organizations to collect meaningful insights and understand the candidate's journey better. By investing in Starred, you can attract and retain the high-quality candidates you truly deserve!
