Immutable was recently awarded the LinkedIn No.1 top startup in the Australia award. In August this year, they won the “Best Tech Stack” award at the Australian Internal Talent Awards, and are also part of the Circle Back Initiative, a collection of companies who commit to respond to every job applicant.
Candidate Experience Champions
Together Pea Lord-Doyle, Global Head of Talent, and Annie Sindel, Senior Talent Intelligence Partner, have fired up a passion within Immutable for Candidate Experience. Together they have created many processes that make the Candidate Experience continuously improve at Immutable and encouraged this attitude throughout the recruitment team and organization.
Recruitment Challenge
Unstructured Candidate Experience data with limited insights
Immutable wanted to better understand their Candidate Experience data so that they could make candidate-led improvements to their processes, based entirely on the data, so they can continue to hire the best global talent.
They also wanted one source of truth for Candidate Experience data and Hiring Manager data, instead of multiple spreadsheets, to paint a clear picture from both sides.
Manual processes that were time-consuming and prone to error
The manual process of measuring Candidate Experience was taking 1.5 days a month to send surveys, gather responses and synthesize all data. It took time away from the team to focus on making the changes to Candidate Experience.
Their previous candidate experience survey was very manual and resulted in a 9% response rate from candidates, providing them with limited insights.
They needed a solution that allowed them to automate this and improve the response rate.
Human-centric processes
Immutable strongly upholds the values of human-centric recruitment, and they wanted this to filter down into their processes and be shown to candidates. Without clearly measuring this, they didn’t know for sure if this was how the candidates felt.
Wanted to make Recruitment Experience Analytics a strategic element of the business
Immutable has ambitious growth goals, and to meet those, they understand they need to be hiring the best people with a thought-out strategy. This includes Candidate Experience data to highlight where they are strong and which areas could need improvement, as well as Hiring Manager satisfaction for internal alignment.
Solution and Results
A clear picture of the candidate's journey
By measuring their Candidate Experience at each round of Interviews with Starred, Immutable was able to clearly identify whether certain stages of the process were scoring lower on the same questions. For example, they ask a question on “engagement” at each stage. If one round of interviews consistently scored lower on engagement compared to others, they would dig deeper and iterate the process quickly.They could clearly see which particular stage needed extra work, allowing them to take action where needed.
“All of the insights are used in one way or another. Whether at a board level, in executive meetings or our stands up as a talent team.” –Pea Lord-Doyle
Pea and Annie also utilize the firefight notifications for any negative experiences, so they can follow-up with the candidate and identify where the problem is and solve it quickly.
Withdrawal and Offer Decline reasons
By surveying withdrawn candidates and those who decline offers, Immutable have been able to build a clear picture of why this is. Immutable always wants to hire top talent, and by ensuring that they understand the reasons why a candidate wouldn’t choose them, they can implement any internal changes necessary.
In doing this, Immutable has been able to ensure they don't lose first choice talent due to reasons that could have been mitigated. This is reflected in their 85-90% offer acceptance rates.
“With Starred, we can be data-led in our decisions.” –Pea Lord-Doyle
Internal buy-in
Immutable uses Starred data internally in many ways, especially to recognize the people who work for them. By sharing Starred data internally, Immutable have:
- Improved Behavior in the TA team: Exceptional feedback is shared with the whole team and the wider business, celebrating those who have provided exceptional service. This positive reinforcement encourages healthy competition within the team and rewards those who have gone above and beyond.
- Better processes around negative feedback: Each negative feedback is addressed privately with the recruiter and/or hiring manager to explore ways on how they can improve in the future
- Tangible SLAs for Candidate Experience: If a poor survey response comes in, Immutable respond to it within 48 hours
- Used the data for internal promotions: The data is used to assess the service given to candidates
In addition, Immutable has created a quarterly TA award ceremony where they recognise those who consistently receive high NPS scores in surveys to reinforce the importance of providing good Candidate Experience.
“We have a quarterly reward ceremony in TA where the TA wins an award and a $250 voucher for the best Candidate Experience.” –Pea Lord-Doyle
Bolstered Employer Branding efforts
Immutable’s Employer Brand Manager, Ella Cullen, recognizes that Candidate Experience is an extension of their Employer Brand and uses the data within Starred to identify any risks to this.
“One bad experience could destroy our employer brand.” –Ella Cullen
But as well as protecting their Employer Brand, Ella recognizes that providing a good Candidate Experience significantly boosts their brand, as candidates who have had a good experience with Immutable will share this with their peers.
“ Exceptional candidate experience elevates our Immutable brand.” –Ella Cullen
Reduction in manual operations
By utilizing Starred, Immutable has been able to automate many tasks relating to measuring and analyzing Candidate Experience. This allows them to access insights and data quickly and efficiently, and the dashboards mean they can clearly see where they currently are simply.
“Before Starred, we weren't able to pull actionable insights when we had an issue. We were spending too much time filtering through spreadsheets to find the answer.” –Annie Sindel
By using Starred, Annie saves over 1.5 days a month, freeing up time to focus on other areas which can help implement any changes that will improve the Candidate Experience.
“I love how automated Starred is; it’s a massive time saver, we are huge on efficiency and productivity, it saves us hours a week." ––Annie Sindel
Improved recruitment processes
The data that Immutable have gathered has allowed them to refine their processes, with a new real focus on “Super high touch and human-centric” recruitment.
Some of the processes that they implemented to improve Candidate Experience are:
- If candidates have physically spoken to someone, they need a personal callback with the outcome
- Each recruiter has a limited number of roles to ensure they can focus on providing a world-class Candidate Experience
“We take positive and negative feedback from the Starred surveys, and we call it out every week and in 1:1s. We use Starred surveys as one of the reasons to promote those who actually have zero negative feedback. We use it to influence how we can reward the team.” –Pea Lord-Doyle
Hiring Manager Feedback
Immutable now has input from their Hiring Managers to ensure that they are fully aligned across the entire recruitment journey by involving recruiters, hiring managers and candidates. Immutable also uses this data to retrain hiring managers and incorporate what they learn from the data into their core manager training skills.
“We previously didn't have a way of monitoring performance internally with our hiring managers. That was very important and the reason why we ended up with Starred. In terms of the role that Starred plays in our tech stack, Starred provides a feedback loop with hiring managers and presentable data on Candidate Experience." –Annie Sindel
“Every quarter, I present the talent teams and hiring managers' performance and trends we have identified to the senior leadership team using Starred data. It helps us optimise decision-making and continually iterates and improves the interview process and our ways of working together.” –Pea Lord-Doyle