Offering a great candidate experience is a vital part of the hiring and recruitment process. If job candidates have a poor experience with you at this stage, it sets the tone for their entire relationship with your company. In some cases, a poor experience during your recruitment process may even result in your preferred candidate turning down an offered job.
This means that it is vital to gather feedback, evaluate your hiring processes, and continuously strive to improve your candidate experience.
Read on to learn six great ways to gather this feedback and put it into use.
Create a feedback form for all candidates
After each interview, contact all candidates with a feedback form about your recruitment and interview process. You can use tools such as Google Forms, Typeform, or SurveyMonkey to do this.
Ask a mixture of closed, open-ended, and rating scale questions to get as much usable feedback as you can. Closed questions might include things like “Based on your experience, would you recommend Company A to a friend?” Open-ended questions might include things like “What worked well for you in our hiring process?” Rating scale questions might include things like “On a scale of 1-10 and based on the recruitment and interview experience, how likely would you be to accept a job at Company A if one were offered?”
Always include a section for candidates to add any extra comments they may have, too.
When you make an offer, ask the candidate for their feedback
When you are ready to make an offer to a candidate, contact them by phone to let them know the good news. You can then use this conversation to ask them for any feedback on both the positive and negative aspects of their candidate experience.
When you are rejecting a candidate for a job, it is not the right time to ask them for feedback as they may be processing their immediate disappointment. Instead, follow up with them by email two to four weeks later to ask them if they would be willing to offer their feedback on the candidate experience.
Ask current employees about their experience of your recruitment process
All your employees will have gone through your recruitment and interview process at some point. Whether this was recently or many years ago, they likely remember at least some things about the experience, either positive or negative.
Therefore, take the time to speak to your existing employees about their candidate experience when they joined your organisation. Ask them what they remember, what stood out, and what the positive and negative aspects of the process were.
Create a focus group and/or working group
A focus group is a small group of individuals brought together to give feedback and offer insights. You can create a focus group from recently hired employees, recently interviewed candidates, or a mixture of both. Invite these people to give you their honest views on your hiring and interview processes and offer suggestions for things that could improve the candidate experience.
You can incentivise people to take part in your focus group by offering a token of your thanks for their time, such as a small payment or a gift card.
A working group is a small group of people who come together to deliver a goal or put a plan into action. Putting together a working group of current employees involved in your recruitment processes can be a great way to improve the candidate experience and act on the feedback you have received.
When you ask for employees to join your working group, make sure that the scope and their role is clear. You may also need to factor in time away from their regular work duties to take part in the group.
Identify themes and areas for improvement
As you gather feedback, you will likely notice the same themes cropping up again and again. Do candidates often say that communication is poor, that the interview location was hard to find, or that they were kept waiting too long for the outcome of their application? If so, this tells you that you have an issue warranting attention.
As you identify these themes and common issues, you can put together a list of areas for improvement and prioritise them appropriately. Some will be quick and easy to fix, others will require a greater investment of time and resources to adequately address. Remember that the goal is to make meaningful incremental improvements, not to perfect your entire hiring process overnight.
Acting on the feedback you receive
Gathering feedback is pointless unless you act on it. You may not be able to immediately rectify every problem, communication issue, or inefficiency, but by understanding any weak points in your hiring process you can begin to address them.
Communicate with your team regularly about ways that you are striving to improve the candidate experience, and use your feedback surveys and candidate insights to evaluate your progress over time. Ideally, you will see a slow but steady and consistent improvement.
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