In order to analyze and improve Candidate Experience, you have to be able to measure it in the first place. But how do you do that? The answer is simple: give a voice to your candidates. They’ll point you in the right direction.
The easiest way to measure Candidate Experience is done by collecting feedback through Candidate Experience Surveys. Solutions like Starred allow you to collect, measure, and analyze Candidate Experience at every stage of the recruitment process.
In order to get an unbiased picture of all of your candidates’ experiences, it’s important to send surveys to candidates once they have left the funnel. So you’ll get feedback from all your rejected candidates at different stages, your hired candidates, but also the candidates that withdraw their application.
You see, it’s important to measure the experience of rejected candidates. They are the vast majority, and pose the highest risk to your employer brand, as their experience tends to be more negative than hired candidates. You also want to measure the experience of candidates that withdraw their application to get to the bottom of their reason for it and understand why you are losing candidates. You want to understand what made hired candidates appreciate the recruitment process and why they accepted the offer.
Getting this done seems like a tedious task, but it’s the only way to really get deep insights into your Candidate Experience. Hence, there’s the need for an automated solution that integrates with your Applicant Tracking System. We explain how a solution like Starred does this in Chapter 6.
Next up is figuring out what questions to ask your candidates. Ultimately, deciding what you would like to ask, measure, and improve is up to the team in question, and depends on a multitude of factors. Every company is different, and nobody knows your organization better than those working within it. We get this, and that’s why we’re all about giving you the tools you need to optimize and improve your hiring process. With Starred you can fully customize your questions, and ask your candidates exactly what you would like to know. Need inspiration? Read Chapter 5, where we discuss what questions to ask, or you can view our free survey template page.
By creating a healthy dialog between candidates and recruitment teams we hope to give people a voice in improving their experience. We want to ensure that you and your company are able to continuously improve on your process and deliver stellar Candidate Experience.
Turning Candidates’ voices into data-driven improvements
Step 1 is done, and you are now giving a voice to all your candidates across the recruitment process. Step 2 is transforming these opinions into data-driven improvements. At Starred we believe you should measure Candidate Net Promoter Score (cNPS) at each stage described above. In brief, cNPS details how your candidates feel about your company, and whether they would share their positive experience with family and friends, act as passives, or be active detractors of your business to others.
We clearly see huge differences in scores between the different stages. You need to make sure you know what your score is at each stage in order to pinpoint weaknesses in your process. But how?
Just knowing your cNPS at each stage isn’t really telling you anything, besides your current performance. Opening up the blackbox of Candidate Experience means understanding the Why behind it. Starred measures what has the highest impact on your cNPS, and plots it in a Priority Matrix. Giving you a top list of priorities detailing what you have to do today, to deliver a better Candidate Experience tomorrow.
But that’s not all. Your organization is big, and candidates differ from each other. A candidate applying for a software development role, not only has a different hiring journey than a sales candidate, they are most likely different people as well. To be able to create a stellar recruitment process for everyone, you have to be able to segment your data on relevant fields. Starred pulls fields from your Applicant Tracking System and segments your data on fields such as department, country, recruiter, hiring manager, or even gender and race. That way you can make detailed action plans for different sections of the organization.
Moreover, you want to use Candidate Experience data to train your recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers. Linking the Candidate NPS score to your recruiters shows you who within the team is able to deliver good Candidate Experience, and who isn’t. A good recruiter not only has positive operational metrics, but also does it while bringing a smile to your candidates. Starred creates personalized score cards per recruiter and hiring manager to show what they should work on to deliver better results.
Alright, so know you have your Candidate Experience scores across the entire process. You’re able to segment your data on different levels and even link it to the right stakeholder. But how do you know what a good performance looks like? Starred enables you to compare your performance to the benchmark. Not only does this benchmark filter on companies of your size, or in the same location, but even within the same industry.
These are the instruments you need to effectively give a voice to your candidates, but also to use their opinions to make improvements. Next up, we’ll discuss what questions you should ask your candidates.