An organization eyeing tremendous growth and market domination has to focus on hiring the best candidates and boosting employee retention.
In order to hire the best talent in the market, you will have to put all your attention into making the candidate experience extremely professional and worthwhile.
How do you plan to boost candidate experience at your organization? This is where candidate experience surveys come into the picture.
You will have to prepare surveys and questions that best reflect the motivations and intentions of candidates, which will help you make the candidate experience better.
In this post, we will discuss everything there is to know about candidate experience surveys. Let’s get started!
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What is a candidate experience survey?
A candidate experience survey is essentially an assessment organizations deploy to figure out the efficiency and effectiveness of their recruitment process.
However, the responses received in the survey are from the perspectives of job applicants.
With the responses, the organization will find itself well-equipped to improve the application procedure, communication, interview process, and the overall candidate experience at the organization.
With the strengths and weaknesses of the hiring process identified, it then becomes super simple to improve candidate satisfaction and attract the best talent the market has to offer.
Candidate satisfaction is a critical metric that must be measured in order to ensure ease of application and fair and respectful recruitment practices. This even helps in developing a better employee recognition program.
When to send a candidate experience survey?
If you have a candidate experience survey ready, then you must figure out the right time to send it.
What’s the ideal time to send a candidate experience survey?
Well, the sooner you share the survey, the better. This is because you want to receive reliable responses from the candidates.
Sending the survey too late might result in inaccurate responses because candidates might have forgotten the intricacies of the experience.
So, if you share the survey the moment the candidate has undergone the entire job application process, it is going to bring in the best results.
What if the candidate is rejected?
In this case, you should wait for the rejection to sink in and then share the survey, typically a week later.
Which questions to ask in candidate experience surveys?
Which types of questions should an organization ask a candidate? Here are the key set of questions you must ask in candidate experience surveys —
1. Open-ended questions
- Please tell us what you found most impressive and positive about our recruitment process.
- Could you please tell us how we can improve the interview process?
- Which parts of the interview process you found tiring and frustrating?
- How would you rank your skills in your field?
2. Likert scale questions
- Please rate the clarity of the job description on a scale of 1-5.
- Please share your level of satisfaction with the recruitment team on a scale of 1-5.
- Please rate your overall candidate experience on a scale of 1-5.
- Please tell us how likely you are to recommend your network to apply at our company on a scale of 1-5.
3. Yes/No questions
- Did you find the application process easy to complete?
- Were the instructions related to the interview provided clearly?
- Was your candidate experience similar to what you expected?
4. Multiple-choice questions
- Which of the following parts of the recruitment process made the most sense to you?
- How long do you think the recruitment process was?
- Which of the following resources did you use for interview preparation?
How do you measure candidate experience?
Once you have the candidate survey experience survey ready, you will have to identify the best way to quantitatively measure the responses and put the insights into action.
How can you measure the candidate experience through candidate experience surveys?
One of the best ways to do it is by using Net Promoter Score or NPS score.
In this, you will be measuring the candidate’s overall satisfaction with your organization’s job application process.
You may even call it Candidate Net Promoter Score or cNPS.
Here’s the question you will have to ask the candidates —
“How likely are you to suggest your friends and others to apply to [company name]?”
Candidates, upon reading the question, can rate your company on a scale of 0-10, or from very unlikely to very likely.
How to use candidate experience surveys?
Now that you are well-acquainted with candidate experience surveys, here are the steps you can use to boost candidate experience —
1. Define objectives
You need to know what you want out of the survey.
Clearly define which part of the job application process you want to improve and how it will lead to candidate satisfaction.
2. Design the candidate experience survey
Once you have finalized the questions, you will have to design the survey.
Make sure it has different types of questions that help with quantitative and qualitative data analysis.
3. Choose a survey platform
Sending candidate experience surveys manually can be quite overwhelming, especially if you interview many candidates a day.
We suggest you invest in a user-friendly survey platform that allows for easy distribution and analysis.
4. Determine the target audience
Who do you want to target with your candidate experience survey?
As mentioned earlier, you can target the candidates who have been hired and the ones who have been rejected.
5. Time the survey
We have already discussed the right time to send the surveys.
You should try to send the surveys as soon as possible if the job application is a success, otherwise, wait for a week as you want the rejected candidate to think about the rejection and make sense of it.
6. Communicate the purpose
When sending the surveys, make sure the candidates know the intention and purpose behind the exercise.
This will help them provide candid responses.
Communicating the purpose will help keep both parties in sync.
7. Ensure anonymity and confidentiality
While communicating the same, you should assure the candidates that the responses will be confidential and anonymous.
Such statements will encourage reliable responses.
8. Analyze the results
This is the most important step of all.
The results from the survey have to be collected properly and stored to ensure proper analysis in the future.
9. Take action
Once you have accrued the responses, you will have to develop an action plan to make use of the survey results.
Use the insights to identify issues in the recruitment process.
Final thoughts!
It’s time to level up your candidate experience surveys.
Now that you have understood what it takes to build a solid candidate experience survey, you can deploy your strategy and generate insights.
The idea is to keep sending the surveys and accrue responses, which will help generate reliable insights and build better long-term strategies.
This is an excellent way to embed candidate surveys in your existing business and performance review processes.
Not only will it provide you with a data-driven approach to candidate experience enhancement, but also support a growth mindset across your organization.
There you have it. We have shared everything you need to know about using candidate experience surveys. Did you find this post helpful? Stay tuned to read more informative posts in the future.