We live in a world where you can track everything, so how do you hone in on the metrics you should be tracking in Candidate Experience? How can you ensure you’re on track to becoming a data-driven Talent Acquisition department?

What should you focus on when measuring Candidate Experience?

You’re already likely tracking the common metrics, such as time to hire, time to accept, and all of the other metrics many departments routinely measure when it comes to recruiting talent. But how many of those metrics delve into how your candidate actually feels about their experience within your recruitment process? 

This is where having a well-structured Candidate Experience survey comes in. A well-rounded and comprehensive survey covers a range of sections and gives candidates the opportunity to be heard by your recruiters and hiring managers in various areas.

What are the most important elements of Candidate Experience?

Since Candidate Experience is so broad, deciding on what metrics you would like to measure can be daunting. One key metric you want to keep in mind is Candidate NPS, or Net Promoter Score. It details how your candidates feel about your company, and whether they would share their positive experience with family and friends. cNPS is a good barometer for your overall Candidate Experience, but to truly understand how your candidates feel, you’ll need to dive into a variety of topics.

However, there are also many other areas where you should measure and understand Candidate Experience. We’ve used our expertise to prepare a comprehensive list of good question categories, based off of the most common questions we see being used in measuring Candidate Experience data.

We’ve also prepared an example library of survey templates, each of which makes an excellent starting point in measuring different facets of Candidate Experience, Hiring Manager Satisfaction, or Applicant Experience. These surveys are created using best practices and should be very useful as a source of inspiration for questions, layout, or anything else that you need to properly measure Candidate Experience.

What templates can you find in the Starred Survey Library?

Don't worry, there is something for every stage.

For Rejected Candidates

1. Rejected After Interview
2. Rejected After Assessment
3. Rejected After Phone Screen
4. Rejected After Application

For Withdrawn Candidates

1. Withdrawn After Offer
2. Withdrawn After Interview

For Hired Candidates

1. Hired Candidate

For Hiring Team Excellence

1. Applicant Research
2. Hiring Manager Satisfaction
3. Internal Partnership: Recruiter
4. Internal Partnership: Hiring Manager
5. Onboarding Feedback
   

You can also find our full library here:

Why should you ask these questions?

As you might have noticed, metrics give you a measure of an issue but do not tell you the full story. To solve this, our surveys won’t just provide the initial quantitative metrics we discussed, but also give candidates the opportunity to elaborate on their answers by writing explanatory comments with their scores. These give candidates the opportunity to supplement their quantitative answers with qualitative data.

Parsing these comments by hand can be challenging, which is why we’ve used machine learning technology to create a Comment Analysis algorithm, which automatically analyzes the topics and sentiments expresses by candidates in their qualitative comments. 

Measuring your Candidate Experience and giving your candidates a voice is a crucial part of upping your recruitment game. In the next chapter, we’ll dive into some details on why you absolutely need an automated Candidate Experience solution if you truly want to revolutionize your hiring process.