Guest PostBusinesses are built and scaled by talented employees, but finding and hiring them is a challenge. According to the Korn Ferry report, by 2030, there will be a global talent shortage of 85 million people, resulting in over $8.5 trillion in losses.
Candidate experience plays a crucial role in the talent acquisition process and can determine whether you win or lose the best candidates. A positive or negative candidate experience can change a talent’s mind about a role or company, with 80–90% of candidates saying it can influence their decision.
So, a positive candidate experience becomes vital in building your brand, understanding their motivations and taking the first step towards it is to measure your organization’s candidate experience.
This article will discuss how to measure your candidate experience, which will enable you to work towards enhancing it.
Top 5 ways to measure candidate experience
Candidate experience is the perception the job seeker develops about an organization and their job application process based on their interactions throughout the hiring process.
Measuring candidate experience is tricky since it’s hard to determine during which stage of the hiring process you won or lost a candidate.
So, here are the top five ways to measure the candidate experience so that you can improve the entire process, enabling you to hire some great talent.
Ask candidates to take surveys
Surveys are one of the most straightforward ways to measure your candidate experience, as you’ll be getting feedback directly from the candidates. When composed with the right set of questions, a candidate experience survey can measure every touchpoint an applicant encounters.
Since 67% of job seekers have reported at least one negative experience in the hiring process, these surveys will help you spot them and enable you to improve.
An e-agreement management company, DocuSign, introduced a standardized candidate experience survey that asked questions about the recruiting process and recruiters and saw their candidate Net Promoter Score(NPS) increase to 55%.
Get feedback from new hires
A major drawback of conducting surveys is that you are likely to receive harsh feedback from the candidates who got rejected. This can hinder the organization’s ability to judge its actual shortcomings.
Thus, obtaining feedback from new hires will give you a more precise idea about the areas you need to improve when you get similar feedback from both candidates. This can sometimes be counterintuitive, as new hires are unlikely to have anything negative to say about the company. However, it’s still possible to get vital information by asking new hires to suggest how the hiring process can be enhanced.
Keep an eye on your drop-off rate
The drop-off rate is the percentage of candidates who started filling out your application forms but did not end up as your applicants. If you have a higher drop-off rate, then you need to figure out why this is happening and work towards minimizing it.
You can start by optimizing the job description by making it more precise. Also, reduce the length of your application process so that applicants don’t have to fill out hours-long forms. If the process takes too long, applicants will lose interest and leave.
In fact, 60% of job seekers abandon online job applications in the middle due to their length or complexity. If you still feel that your application process is complicated, create resources to help your candidates understand the process better.
DigitalOcean’s recruiting team has created a central hub of resources for candidates to prioritize transparency at every hiring stage. In addition to saving their recruiters time, this also demonstrated to their candidates that DigitalOcean cares about their experience.
Monitor feedback on review sites
Even though many companies ignore this, online reviews on platforms like Glassdoor, Indeed, and Trustpilot can be great to get feedback on your candidate experience.
You can also request your candidates to leave a review on these platforms. The best way to do this is to choose one platform and include a link to it in your “Thank you” email.
As these websites have their own in-built data analytic systems, you can also measure your candidate experience metrics as shown below:
Leverage social media
Platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter are not only the go-to places for recruiters to find talent, they’re also where candidates openly share their experiences. According to a Careerarc report, 72% of the candidates have reported sharing their bad hiring experience online.
You can track these posts online using monitoring tools such as Brand24, Google Alerts, and Hootsuite to understand what your candidates are talking about your brand. Further, you can take corrective measures wherever necessary.
Conclusion
Many companies neglect to measure candidate experience, failing to see that a good candidate experience is vital to building a consistent talent pool and stronger employer brand. Moreover, measuring candidate experience can be tricky as there are so many touchpoints and variables, making companies completely ignore it.
However, using the methods mentioned in this article, you can understand how effective your candidate experience is–enabling you to work towards providing a positive candidate experience.
About the Author
Alex Garcia is a content editor and writer at Writers Per Hour. She enjoys writing (and reading) about small business marketing, entrepreneurship, and design. When she’s not writing, she’s probably learning a new skill.
