Depending on your issue there will be many ways to gather insight. Let's present some valuable Candidate Experience metrics for you to use.
But first of all, let's divide them into 3 categories. Firstly, you have metrics you can gather without interacting with the candidates. Secondly, you have cNPS: you ask your candidates how likely they are to recommend you to their network. Thirdly, there are surveys activated by your candidates' stage in the application or selection funnel.
Onto the metrics you can calculate by yourself, I will provide you with a list. Many of these metrics are very well illustrated in the article "Complete Guide to Tracking the Right Recruitment Metrics".
They are divided into three categories. That is to say: time-related, cost-related and quality-related. The two relevant categories for Candidate Experience are the time- and quality-related ones.
It is important to keep the application process short. A metric could thus be the application time. How long does it take for the candidate to apply? You can check it by trying to apply to a specific job vacancy.
Certainly, don't ask the candidates questions that the CV you made them upload already answers to.
Time to hire. This is a very common metric among recruiters. How long does the process take, from the start until the signature of the contract.
While being crucial, it is also a bit too broad. You can segment it further. To do so, divide it into groups of candidates. There are existing employees, employee referrals, candidates who applied online, and headhunter candidates. Are your recruiters investing their energies in a different way per different category?
Time to accept tells us how long it takes for a candidate to accept an offer, either verbally or in written form. You calculate it from the moment in which the contract has been approved by the business.
Out of all the selected candidates, how many accept the offer with close to no hesitation?
Bring clarity to the candidates before offering a contract to reduce this value.
Time to inform. This metric is particularly relevant for candidate experience. How much time goes by from the most recent step in the recruitment process to when the candidate is given an offer or sent away?
Beware - being too quick in telling a candidate off can be counter-productive. For instance, that is when you do it immediately after their interview. On the other hand, it is necessary to be quick in communicating your decisions to them. If you leave candidates in the dark for too long, chances are that they will find new jobs.
How much time it takes a candidate to move to the next step of the recruitment process, on average? You can find out by calculating time per stage.
This metric lets you see potential insufficiencies in your process.
As much as time is relevant, compromising on quality can be costly. As a consequence, finding candidates can be harder. Or perhaps, the quality of your pool of options won't match the vacancy.
To understand how popular the role is, you can look at the number of applicants per open position. This should give you a pulse of how interesting your vacancies are. If it's really bad, perhaps it would be time to alter your marketing efforts.
To be more specific, you could check your page conversion rate. Out of all the job vacancy's landing page visitors, how many applied for that position. It is easy to calculate and lets you understand how appealing your communication was. For a specific time frame, you apply the following formula.
A metric you could try and follow is the abandonment or completion rate. What is the percentage of candidates that started applying but didn't go through with it? Or, how many candidates finished applying?
Your contact rate tells you, out of all the applicants, how many you reached. It is important to make your candidates aware of the stage of the process they're in.
How engaged are your candidates, in your communication? To find out, you can calculate the candidate response rate. The formula is as follows:
Submission to acceptance rate helps us calculate the number of qualified candidates. This shows you how high is the quality of candidates attracted by your job posting. Out of all the candidates invited to an interview, how many were presented to the hiring manager? If the rate is low, you can make the vacancies more attractive to better-suited job-seekers.
How many candidates show up out of all the invited ones, in percentage? The present-to-interview metric lets you know how appealing your vacancy is.
To see how simple your process is, you can calculate the interview to hire ratio. A good benchmark would consist of 1-3 interviews per hired candidate.
Another useful metric can be the offer acceptance rate. If only a few people take the jobs when they're offered a contract, there must be something wrong with your offer. It could be a lack of fit in terms of salary, role or even company.
Remember that the more human the process feels, the higher the odds that they'll sign.
How many candidates work with you, after a certain amount of time? You can calculate retention to find out.
Is it too low? It could be due to poorly-selected candidates, bad onboarding or unsatisfactory working conditions. You can identify these reasons by gathering feedback. This can let you identify your Achilles’ heel. A great number of candidates leaving could be due to three issues. The first would be candidate selection. Then you have a poor onboarding, or bad work conditions quality.
cNPS or TPS let you gather crucial information about your candidates' experience. This is an adaptation of the very well-known NPS. The acronyms stand for Candidate Net Promoter Score and Talent Promoter Score.
This metric poses one risk. The answers might be biased depending on when you gather the feedback. For one, if you were to ask before the selection, the candidate might shy out of being truthful.
Net Promoter Score, thoroughly analyzed in "Trustmary's Complete Guide to NPS", is a management tool. It allows you to know how loyal your candidates. As a matter of fact, you would be asking them how likely they are to apply to your company or through your agency again.
In case you work for a talent acquisition team, there is an additional question you can ask. How likely are your rejected candidates to buy your company's products again?
These are the questions you can ask to measure the quality of your candidates' experience. We mentioned them in the 6th section of this article: "How do I gather Candidate Experience feedback in my recruitment processes?".
You can send a first survey right after the candidates applied. You could use it to ask them about their application experience. Then you could get a full-funnel view after the selection process.
After you communicate the rejection, you might want to wait 30 days. This would help you reduce your respondents' bias. In fact, their resentment for not having been offered the job might impact your results.
Now we've seen the 3 categories of CandE metrics. We've presented you with the fundamental ones for you to use. You now know how which tools to use to improve your Candidate Experience.
As you've seen, when you're measuring candidate experience, there isn't one metric that satisfies all your questions. You need to use a combination, instead.
In case you wanted to do a deeper study on the matter, we recommend you to read "What Kind of Metrics Should You Use to Improve Your Candidates' Experience?".
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to me via email!
