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You can’t manage what you can’t measure. But measurement doesn’t have to be difficult.
There’s a lot been said about “Candidate Experience” lately. There are even awards now for leading companies who succeed in this area. Many of us in the business of hiring have been making a mammoth effort to deliver a humane, respectful and less frustrating experience for jobseekers.
A good place for any improvement project to start is by doing audience research and tracking stuff. In the science of hiring, this means finding a simple way for the users of the recruiting service to play back their feedback.
What’s wrong with the candidate experience?
"Manners maketh the man" is the advice my dear mother gave me, and yet, many companies only really care about the experience that the “gold medalists” have. In talent acquisition phraseology, that means the people who actually get hired. Everyone else is just cannon fodder, and their hopes, dreams, and expectations fall by the wayside as they become collateral damage through the selection process. All this in the interests of serving only the lucky victors who make it through your talent assessment.
But it’s not only bad manners. Its' wrong that this happens. Everyone who enters into a recruiting process should be dealt with in a way that makes them feel good about the experience, regardless of the outcome. In a previous job I had, over at WPP’s GroupM, we learned by asking 9,000 people, that 36% of them would discuss a job application experience with their friends and family offline, and 12% would discuss it online.
In a world where popular opinion is expressed in public places like Tripadvisor and Glassdoor, you cannot afford to underestimate the damage of mistreating candidates for your brand and reputation.
In this post, I won’t talk about how to change things, but I will share a simple tip to track how you (or your recruiters) are actually doing.
It starts with a wonderful app I’ve been using for the last year called Typeform. Typeform exists to “Give respondents a seamless and beautiful interface for answering your question”.
How easy is it?
This is super easy and the entire process will take you under 5 minutes. Simply set up a questionnaire with a landing page with a picture of the recruiter. Here’s what ours looks like at your left.
From here, create a star rating, 1–5 with 5 being most satisfied.
If you don’t like stars, you can easily replace them with other pleasing icons, such as clouds, pencils or hearts.
Once done, you provide a short instruction and context to the person you are asking to complete the survey.
After that’s done, set up a thank-you page, and an (optional) box to provide additional comments with no character limit.
From here, you quickly customise with your brand colours, and create a link to share. Your link will look something like this: https://mobidextrous.typeform.com/to/a71BKd
This link is obviously less than perfect, so head over to Bit.ly to create a custom URL. For Shishir, featured in the picture, we used: http://bit.ly/rate-your-recruiter-SV which gives the reader a much better idea of why the link exists.
From here, simply ask your recruiting team to stick the link above their signature with a simple call to action. I recommend “Rate your Experience with me” or “Let me know how I’m doing by clicking here” but you can let your own imagination run wild.
Give the recruiters an option to send the link to anyone they might be dealing with, regardless where that particular talent is in the process.
This gives you a very quick and easy way to start to measure applicant / candidate satisfaction with your recruiting process, specifically their satisfaction with the individual recruiter.
Once this has been running for a month or so, you can start to look at the lovely data in the Typeform analytics.
You’re way too advanced for me!
So for many of you accomplished in survey design or from the F&B industry, the above won't seem like rocket science. If you want to get really advanced, and you have a big team of recruiters to measure, you can use Zapier to create a Zap to move the data from multiple ratings into a single Google Sheet and then review the data later.
In my experience, recruiters and talent sourcers are quietly competitive, and love data. So for bonus points, you may wish to visualise their rating info in real time in a dashboard, in exactly the way that Fitbit manages leaderboards on challenges. That way you can gamify performance and theoretically improve candidate satisfaction. I recommend visualising the data in Canva or Piktochart.
Notes on score management
A few pointers about gathering and reviewing data for rankings, courtesy of Tony Nga over at Grab, who is a rating systems genius and our VP of Customer Experience.
if the response sample is too small, then the rating becomes statistically insignificant, I would recommend that for the scores to be meaningful, one has to have a minimum of 10 surveys / month
you may consider the ratings to be invalid (N/A) if the sample size falls below 10
in addition to the scores, it would be crucial to focus on the feedback that comes with the scores (especially so if the sample size is small)
last but not the least, the scores over a period of time are more meaningful than a one off scores, so that gives you the most improved Recruiter, for example.
Drive on, driver!
Over a period of a year, having on-boarded all our Talent Acquisition Business Partners across 10 countries, the Talent Acquisition team at Grab had more than 600 candidates share their experiences of our recruiting process from their personal standpoint via Typeform, regardless of where they were in the process or whether they had been hired. This enabled us to tweak and optimise specific touch-points where we had been told we could do better. Even more fulfilling was the opportunity this data provided to coach individuals one-on-one, sharing areas for improvement, and providing praise for a job well done.
How are you measuring candidate experience? It's simply bad manners not to! Toodle-Pip!