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How to Measure Candidate Experience

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Candidate experience is how people react to each stage in a company’s hiring process. Whether you’re posting jobs or onboarding new hires, you want job seekers to feel good about their interactions with hiring managers, HR staff and other employees. Here’s how to measure candidate experience and use the information to create a more positive experience.

Read more: What Is Candidate Experience?

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Why is it important to measure candidate experience?

When candidates have a positive experience with your company and hiring process, the effects can go beyond simply whether or not they accept a position in your company. Even if someone doesn’t accept your offer, they may share their positive experience with others, making it easier to attract quality applicants.

In contrast, a candidate who has a poor experience may be less likely to accept a job offer. They may write negative reviews of your company or share their experiences with friends and family, damaging your reputation. After a bad experience, some candidates may even stop buying from companies they previously supported.

Candidate experience isn’t just something to think about during the hiring and onboarding process. You also have to consider how the initial experience is likely to affect employee satisfaction later on. If you don’t represent a job accurately at the candidate stage, a new hire may feel disillusioned, causing them to leave the company much sooner than anticipated.

Related: How to Create a Positive Candidate Experience with Indeed

How to measure candidate experience: Start with mapping the candidate journey

The candidate journey consists of all the touch points in your hiring process. Generally, a candidate’s journey has seven stages, all of which have touch points of their own.

  1. Awareness
  2. Consideration
  3. Interest
  4. Application
  5. Selection
  6. Hiring
  7. Onboarding

What happens at each stage of the candidate journey?

Before you learn how to measure candidate experience, you need to understand what happens at each stage of this journey.

Awareness: During the awareness stage, a potential candidate becomes aware that you have a job opening. Awareness may come from visiting your company’s website, speaking with a recruiter at a job fair or seeing one of your job posts.

Consideration and interest: Once a potential candidate is aware of the opening, they move into the consideration and interest stages. This is when they learn more about your company and try to get a feel for what you do. Consideration helps the potential candidate determine if they have an interest in working for the company in a specific role.

Application and selection: The application stage is somewhat self-explanatory. If the potential candidate is interested in the job, they fill out an application. Suitable applicants move to the selection stage, which involves participating in interviews and completing job assessments.

Hiring and onboarding: At the hiring stage, you extend an offer for the candidate to review. If they accept, they move into the onboarding stage, when they officially become an employee.

Identifying major touch points

Now that you understand the stages in the candidate journey, you can identify every touch point in your company’s recruiting, hiring and onboarding processes. Here are just a few examples of common touch points:

  • Seeing a job posting on your company careers portal
  • Filling out an online application
  • Participating in a phone screen with a recruiter
  • Interviewing with a hiring manager or a panel of interviewers
  • Completing a writing or computer skills assessment
  • Receiving an offer letter
  • Negotiating salary and other employment terms with an HR representative
  • Attending employee orientation

If a candidate rejects your offer or doesn’t receive an offer after the selection stage, they may encounter additional touch points, such as an enquiry about the job refusal or a rejection letter.

Surveying candidates at each stage of the journey

If you don’t know how to measure candidate experience effectively, it’s natural to think that all you have to do is send a one-time survey. The truth is that you should be surveying candidates at each stage of the journey. If you only survey candidates who become employees, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to collect valuable feedback.

Here are a few ways to assess the candidate experience at different stages.

Application stage

After someone submits an application, send them a survey with a few questions about the process. This can help you determine if you need to redesign the form, remove some of the questions or address any technical issues. For example, if candidates start reporting 404 errors, you can have your company’s IT team correct the problem. Consider asking these questions:

  • On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 representing poor and 5 representing excellent, how would you rate the overall application experience?
  • Did you encounter any technical issues while completing your application?
  • Do you think the application had too many questions, not enough questions or just the right number of questions?
  • Do you have any suggestions for improving our job application?

Selection stage

Some candidates drop out of the hiring process because they’re dissatisfied with the selection stage. For example, they may feel that the interviewing process is tool long or that you’re asking too much from your preemployment testing. Ask these questions to measure candidate experience at the selection stage:

  • On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 representing poor and 5 representing excellent, how would you rate the overall interview experience?
  • Did you have any trouble scheduling your interview?
  • Was your interview too long, too short or just the right length of time?
  • Would you like to share any concerns about our interviewing process?
  • If you took a preemployment assessment, do you have any feedback you’d like to share?

Hiring stage

Measuring the candidate experience helps determine if you need to do a better job communicating with candidates. If someone turns down a job offer after taking the time to interview, complete a hiring assessment and undergo preemployment screening, there’s probably a good reason. Ask these questions to help determine if you’re losing good candidates due to negative candidate experience:

  • Did you turn down our offer for one of these reasons? (Salary too low, accepted another offer before you heard back from us, decided not to work for the company after meeting with the hiring manager or prospective colleagues)
  • In your opinion, did it take too much time or just the right amount of time to receive our job offer?

Tailoring your surveys

When you measure candidate experience, it’s tempting to send the same survey to every candidate. That would save you a lot of time, but it wouldn’t yield the most useful results.For example, you probably don’t use the same hiring process for an accountant as you do for a machine repair technician.

If you send them the same survey, they may find the questions irrelevant, prompting them to ignore it or answer just a small percentage of the questions. To collect as much useful feedback as possible, tailor each survey to the candidate’s job title or employment type.

Using automated tools

Collecting and reviewing feedback is time-consuming, especially if you’re relying on manual processes. To increase efficiency, don’t be afraid to use automated tools. For example, many survey tools automatically tabulate the responses to each question.

They may even produce charts or graphs to help you better understand the data. These tools make it possible to process a large volume of results without taking time away from your other responsibilities.

Benchmarking candidate experience data

By itself, candidate experience data isn’t all that useful. You need to be able to compare it to something, which is why benchmarking is so important. Benchmarking is when you compare something to an established standard.

If your overall candidate experience score is 4.1, that could be a positive development or a negative one. Compared to a benchmark of 3.8, it’s great. If the industry average is 4.6, you’ll need to take a closer look at each touch point in the candidate journey. You can purchase benchmarking data from consulting firms, industry associations and other organizations.

Read More:What Is Benchmarking? A Guide for Employers

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Indeed’s Employer Resource Library helps businesses grow and manage their workforce. With over 15,000 articles in 6 languages, we offer tactical advice, how-tos and best practices to help businesses hire and retain great employees.