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If anything is a constant in the recruiting industry, it’s the drive to innovate and improve the recruitment process itself. As the talent market is constantly changing, recruiters find themselves pushing to meet those changes quarter after quarter to achieve the best quality of hire and cost-effectiveness they can. In recent years, this has been particularly true in the pursuit of a better candidate experience.
A positive candidate experience improves the likelihood of applicants accepting a job offer at the end of the recruitment process. According to CareerPlug, 58% percent of job seekers reported declining job offers specifically due to a negative candidate experience. That means the effort and time put into recruiting these candidates have been ultimately wasted. What’s more, a negative candidate experience damages your employer brand, potentially causing more candidates to avoid applying with you in the future.
To this end, the candidate experience survey has become a remarkably important tool for recruiters looking to create and maintain a positive candidate experience. Surveying candidates, whether hired or not, provides valuable feedback to identify weaknesses in the hiring process. This information allows you to iterate your recruitment process with the candidate in mind, creating a better experience and a more effective hiring strategy at the same time.
When building your candidate survey, it’s important to remember this survey is intended for all candidates, not just the ones you hire in the end. What’s more, a recruitment questionnaire for candidates should encapsulate every stage of the hiring process in addition to gathering feedback on the process as a whole.
To help you get started, we’ve put together some common candidate experience survey questions you may want to consider for your own candidate survey.
Application Stage:
Early in your hiring process, start by asking applicants about their initial impressions. This should immediately follow their application, but before they interview to get a fresh perspective. These questions are designed to explore top-of-funnel issues that are preventing people from engaging in your hiring process.
Post Interview:
Once your applications have passed the interview stage, take time to evaluate their impression of the process. This gives you an opportunity to see the strengths and weaknesses of your interview process and improve it however possible.
Rejecting Candidates:
No doubt, there is a degree of disappointment when denied a job offer. However, rejected candidates offer a valuable resource for hiring insights. Include this survey alongside any rejection you send a candidate.
After Hiring:
The same can be said of candidates you do hire. These surveys are particularly important as these individuals have experienced your recruitment process in its entirety. Additionally, these surveys provide additional insight when contrasted with candidates who didn’t make the cut.
And these are only a few examples for each stage. You can customize your own survey to examine your process according to your organization’s unique concerns.
Remember, when designing candidate experience survey questions, it’s important to keep these brief. As candidates are unlikely to pursue a complicated hiring process, they’re less likely to respond to a long and complex survey. So, keep your questions direct. Allow candidates to maintain their anonymity. Craft survey questions according to the hiring stage.
And most importantly, provide candidates incentives to take the survey so they are more likely to give feedback. This can be as simple as a small prize or gift card.
Now, sending and receiving surveys are only the starting point. You need to understand how to measure candidate experience with information.
Start by mapping your candidate’s journey throughout your hiring process. Start from the application and work your way towards making that job offer. Pay particular attention to the candidate’s touch points throughout. That’s to say, where are you and your candidates directly interacting with each other and the process itself?
To this end, your primary touchpoints will be the stages we just covered: application, interviewing, rejecting, and the job offer.
Whereas it may be tempting to create a single, comprehensive survey, this method won’t produce the insights you need for each touchpoint. That’s why it’s so important to understand these touch points and tailor your surveys accordingly.
What’s more, it’s important that these surveys are not just rating the process on a sliding scale. It must include open questions that candidates can respond to. Otherwise, you’ll fail to see why they score your process the way they do. Remember we’re looking for insights, not rankings.
Additionally, measure candidate experience in terms of specifics such as ease of access and satisfaction regarding each phase.
In short, create surveys for each stage, automate survey sending, analyze the driving factors of candidate experience, and benchmark those scores to understand quality.
A key metric you should measure with these surveys is your average time-to-hire. What phases are your applicants spending the most time on and why?
Time-to-hire specifically refers to the time between when a candidate applies for a position to when they accept a job offer. According to LinkedIn, this is the second most used metric to measure hiring success. In fact, research by Robert Half found that 56% of job seekers lose interest during a long hiring process. As such, a long time-to-hire leads to candidates dropping out of the process and reduces your chances of hiring your ideal candidate.
As such, it’s important to understand how long each candidate spends in each phase of your hiring process. This allows you to identify bottlenecks such as interview scheduling and how you may address them.
If you’re looking to improve time-to-hire in your own hiring process, consider on-demand interviews. This interviewing solution eliminates scheduling entirely and allows candidates to approach the hiring process at their convenience — consequently improving the candidate experience.
Schedule a demo with Qualifi today to see what on-demand phone interviews can do for your recruiting team.
