Introduction

How candidates perceive your hiring process can impact your company’s reputation, influence the talent you attract, and even affect your business success. Even though it can impact all of these things, companies still don't prioritize candidate insights. However, one of the most effective ways to understand the recruitment process is through a Candidate Experience survey.

SurveyMonkey, a popular online survey tool, offers a versatile solution for gathering feedback. But how does it stack up against a specialized Candidate Experience Analytics solution like Starred? In this article, we'll explore how SurveyMonkey can be used to measure Candidate Experience and compare it to Starred, a platform specifically designed for this purpose.

Why Measure Candidate Experience?

Candidate Experience shapes how job seekers perceive your company. A positive experience can enhance your reputation and attract top talent, while a negative one can deter potential candidates and harm your brand. It impacts how candidates talk about your company within their networks, influencing future recruitment efforts. In fact, our research shows that at least 34% of candidates are likely to share their negative hiring experience online. In contrast, a streamlined process can reduce drop-off rates and improve the quality of hires. Understanding Candidate Experience helps identify gaps and areas for improvement, making your hiring process more efficient and effective.

Recommended reading: Ultimate Guide to Candidate Experience.

Tips for Measuring Candidate Experience

Measuring Candidate Experience can seem as easy as just sending out a survey after the interview process, but is that really it? In reality, to get to the bottom of how to provide better candidate experiences you have to do more than that. Here are some tips that can help you get started:

Map out your Candidate Journey: Your recruitment funnel will have several stages where your candidate interacts with you, your brand, or encounters your automated processes. Start by identifying these touchpoints in your candidate's journey. These can include – but are not limited to – application, phone screen, assessment stage, interview, and withdrawn or hired.

Create a survey for each touchpoint. This way you can to build short, engaging and specific surveys and get feedback from all of your candidates, whether hired, rejected, or withdrawn. If you need some inspiration for your surveys, have a look at our Candidate Experience Survey Templates.

Don't forget about rejected candidates. These are your most valuable source of insights. They'll give it to you straight, they are in bigger numbers, and not clouded by positive thoughts since they just found a new job. We highly recommend you send a Candidate Experience survey to rejected candidates at each stage of the hiring journey: rejected after application, candidates rejected after a phone screen and so on.

Personalize and segment. Understand that different roles and regions may have different candidate experiences. Use segmentation to dive deeper into the data, ensuring your improvements are targeted and effective. After all, the experience of a salesperson from Silicon Valley is completely different than the one of a software developer from Eastern Europe.

Analyze and Act on Feedback. Don’t just collect data—analyze it to identify patterns and areas for improvement. Our number one tip is to include the Candidate NPS in every survey. This metric tells you how candidates experience your recruitment process and if they would recommend applying to your company to friends and family. The cNPS will help you improve your recruitment, strengthen your Employer Brand, and identify candidates who are detractors and promoters.

We have written a lot of articles diving deeper into Candidate Experience if you want to learn more about it!

Measure Candidate Experience with Survey Monkey

SurveyMonkey is a popular online survey tool known for its simplicity and flexibility. It is most commonly used for conducting market research, gathering customer feedback, or measuring employee engagement. SurveyMonkey provides the tools to create, distribute, and analyze surveys across a variety of domains.

The platform offers a wide range of customizable templates and sample questions, making it suitable for collecting candidate feedback as well. Users can design surveys to match their specific needs to make informed decisions about their organizations' recruitment process. One of the primary advantages is its ease of use; even those with minimal technical expertise can create professional surveys quickly.

But is using SurveyMonkey as your Candidate Experience survey tool the best solution for you?

In our years of working with TA professionals we have seen that these types of DIY platforms can be a good starting point to learn and understand your company's Candidate Experience, but lack in-depth data segmentation and analysis to get the full picture of your recruitment journey. Having this 360 view is what will ultimately lead to actionable and data-driven insights for improvement.

That's why we've put SurveyMonkey and Starred, a Hiring Analytics platform, head-to-head in a comparison to help you decide which platform best suits your needs.

SurveyMonkey vs. Starred

This comparison focuses solely on how SurveyMonkey's features can be used for candidate feedback, highlighting the most important aspects and how they compare to Starred.

Purpose

SurveyMonkey: A general-purpose survey tool that can be adapted to various use cases, including Candidate Experience. It’s highly versatile but not tailored specifically to talent recruitment.

Starred: A specialized suite designed with Candidate Experience in mind. Starred focuses on the quality of the hiring process, offering features, analytics and insights that are directly relevant to TA teams, focusing on metrics like cNPS, time to hire, quality and source of hire and more.

Survey Features

SurveyMonkey: Offers a broad set of features including customizable templates and design, question types, and advanced survey logic. The platform supports various question types, including multiple-choice, open-ended, and Likert scale questions, enabling comprehensive data collection. Survey Monkey also offers logic features, such as skip logic and question branching, to create more dynamic and relevant questionnaires.

Starred's solution offers all the above-mentioned survey features of SurveyMonkey, plus recruiter-specific advantages. One of them is the survey question and template library, which has been carefully curated to ensure you’re asking the most relevant questions. You can also create personalized invitations for each candidate, seamlessly integrate your brand’s identity into the survey’s look and feel, and even design dynamic thank-you pages—like directing candidates to your Glassdoor profile, if they give you a high score. Additionally, a Firefight Response feature quickly alerts your team when a candidate has a negative experience, ensuring quick damage control.

Data Analytics

SurveyMonkey provides basic data analytics, allowing users to view responses, create summaries, and perform simple data analysis. It also offers some advanced analytics options in higher-tier plans. Suitable for general insights, with the ability to export data for more detailed analysis in external tools like Excel or Google Sheets.

Starred: The solution offers advanced analytics specifically tailored to TA needs, delivering insights beyond just Candidate Experience. It provides valuable data on the Quality of Hire, Hiring Team Performance, and Diversity & Inclusion. One of the features being the Starred Priority Matrix, which identifies the key drivers behind candidate feedback, helping you focus on what matters most. Additionally, the platform allows you to compare your performance directly against industry benchmarks and create your own internal benchmarks. This eliminates the need to rely on generic public benchmark lists, ensuring that your comparisons are directly relevant to the specific questions you ask.

Reporting & Dashboards

SurveyMonkey users are equipped with basic reporting capabilities. It allows you to generate summary reports that include graphs, charts, and data tables based on the survey responses. These reports can be customized to some extent, with options to filter and cross-tabulate data. The platform's dashboards show an overview of survey results, with options to drill down into specific responses.

Starred offers advanced reporting into various aspects of the candidate journey. Reports in Starred are highly customizable, allowing you to segment data by different criteria such as role, department, country, hiring managers and others, making the sharing between different stakeholders easy. The main focus of the suite is being interactive, providing real-time data and granular insights that enable you to quickly identify trends and address issues that will boost your competitive advantage.

Price

SurveyMonkey offers a range of pricing options, from a free basic version with limited features to advanced plans with more comprehensive analytics and customization options. This can be cost-effective for organizations that need a general survey tool for multiple purposes.

Starred is positioned as a premium tool with pricing that reflects its specialized features. Pricing may vary based on the number of candidates surveyed and the depth of features required. While potentially more expensive, it’s designed to deliver a high ROI through improved quality of hire and more efficient recruitment processes.

Integrations

SurveyMonkey integrates with a broad range of platforms including CRM, marketing tools, and other survey platforms, but lacks deep integrations with partners related to the hiring process, like Applicant Tracking Systems.

Starred integrates seamlessly with ATS's, allowing Candidate Experience data to be collected and analyzed without disrupting the recruitment workflow. By embedding surveys directly into the hiring process, rather than sending them through a separate communication channel, it ensures higher response rates from candidates, as the feedback feels like a natural part of their recruitment journey.

Automation

SurveyMonkey offers basic automation features, such as scheduled survey distribution and follow-up reminders. However, these are not specifically tailored to recruitment workflows, and manual customization is needed to align with the hiring process and interview stages.

Starred excels in automating the feedback collection process within the candidate journey. Surveys are automatically triggered based on candidate interactions within the ATS, ensuring timely and relevant feedback with minimal manual intervention.

Support

SurveyMonkey: Offers user-friendly interface and broad support resources, including tutorials, FAQs, and customer service through email and phone for premium users. However, support is generalized and not specialized in hiring experience.

Starred's Customer Success team provides personalized onboarding and ongoing support for every customer. This ensures that Talent Acquisition teams can quickly set up and optimize their candidate feedback surveys as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the choice between SurveyMonkey and Starred depends on your organization’s needs. If you require a multipurpose survey tool that can handle a variety of feedback scenarios, SurveyMonkey is the option. However, if your focus is on enhancing Candidate Experience through tailored insights automation and data-driven decisions, you and your Talent Acquisition team need Starred in your life.

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