Candidate Experience, recruitment survey, candidate satisfaction – there are many ways to name the recruitment process research. The name doesn’t really matter much here. What is important then? The very fact of the research. And not only that, because developing the process of examining job candidates and skilfully drawing conclusions in them can bring you – an HR employee or recruitment expert – and the entire company, a lot of benefits.
83% of candidates claim that a negative impression from recruitment can change their way of thinking about the company – even if they had positive feelings about it before.
What are the benefits? This is what we will tell you in our article. In addition, you will also learn about:
- Candidate Experience study template,
- tips useful in creating the perfect recruitment survey,
- data and statistics on the impact of the recruitment process on, inter alia, employee satisfaction and brand image,
- suggestions for online surveys for HR related to recruitment, e.g. employee satisfaction surveys, commitment surveys, evaluation of benefits, along with ready-made templates.
Benefit 1: Reduction in recruitment costs
From posting a recruitment advertisement, through hiring a recruiter or involving the HR department in the process, to conducting tests and arranging an interview. The recruitment process consists of many stages, and each of them is associated with… costs. The recruitment survey will allow you to better plan the candidate selection process, and thus, among others:
- gain knowledge on which of the methods of publishing job advertisements are the most effective and invest in these media or funds,
- eliminate ineffective ways of contacting candidates based on responses from Candidate Experience surveys,
- gain knowledge about the work of recruiters or external recruitment companies and make more profitable choices in the future,
- discover the reasons for the resignation of candidates during recruitment and eliminating them, and thus – lower costs of acquiring a new employee.
Remember: you don’t have to prepare the recruitment process research yourself! The experts from Startquestion have prepared a ready recruitment survey template which you can freely modify, adjusting it to the requirements of a specific recruitment. Thanks to this, the test can be ready to be sent to candidates even in a few minutes.
Benefit 2: Streamlining the recruitment process
Good organization of the recruitment process is essential – both for HR teams and candidates. Recruiters want to source the most talented candidates at the lowest cost and effort, while candidates want to efficiently go through the entire process and be kept informed about its progress. An online survey can help in all of this, because thanks to it:
- you will quickly learn how individual recruitment stages are assessed and you will discover errors that make the process take too long or do not end with employment,
- you will speed up communication with candidates by replacing an interview with an online survey,
- you will automate the process of sending of responses to candidates after taking part in the survey,
Benefit 3: Ensuring a good start to the employees – the first stage of on-boarding
It turns out that a well-prepared recruitment questionnaire can help in the first stage of hiring a new person in the company, i.e. employee on-boarding. Why? Thanks to the collection and appropriate analysis of the results obtained in the survey, the recruiter and the entire HR department are able to provide new employees with a better start.
For this purpose, in the Candidate Experience survey, questions should be asked regarding such issues as, for example, the clarity of the job description, working conditions, office rules, etc. By equipping the candidate with such knowledge in the recruitment advertisement or during subsequent stages, e.g. during an interview, you will prevent the newly hired employee from feeling lost and insecure in the first days. He/she will get used to new duties faster, his/her stress will decrease and the sense of commitment will increase, thanks to which the company will gain a fully efficient employee faster. The recruitment survey (or rather the knowledge gathered on the basis of its results) can help you finish the on-boarding process of a new employee faster and provide him/her with useful information right from the start.
Benefit 4: Better match between the candidate and the company
The data obtained from the survey results will give you tips on what to include in the recruitment advertisement so as to encourage applicants whose experience, knowledge and skills best match the company’s needs. The knowledge gathered this way is also a powerful weapon in the hands of a recruiter – he/she will be able to better match the offer to the expectations of the best candidates and offer them exactly what they expect.
In addition, by creating a good recruitment process based on the opinions of candidates, you will be sure that the most talented candidates will have no problem applying. By eliminating recruitment errors, you reduce the candidate’s effort, and thus – the possibility of resignation during the recruitment and selection of a competitive company.
Benefit 5: Create better and more effective recruitment ads
We have already mentioned the matter related to ads in the previous points. However, it is worth emphasizing the importance of what is included in the recruitment advertisement and how it is formulated for the success of the recruitment. The advertisement is often the first point of contact between the candidate and the company, and usually the brand of the future employer, which is why it is a key tool of the employer’s communication not so much with the candidates themselves, but with the entire outside world.
In a well-formulated recruitment survey, you can ask about the issues related to the advertisement and on this basis create the perfect job offers. For example, Candidate Experience-related questions may be as follows:
- How do you rate the readability of the recruitment advertisement?
- Did you find all the necessary information about your applied job in the advertisement?
- What in your opinion was missing from the job advertisement?
- Have you used the ‘Apply in the ad’ feature? How would you rate it?
- Was the information contained in the job offer understandable to you? If not, what should be improved?
Benefit 6: Building a positive brand image
Did you know that dissatisfied candidates will share their experiences with others? What’s worse, it will not only contribute to the fact that the most talented candidates will start to avoid your company, but also to the fact of crating a bad image of the entire brand. Thanks to the Candidate Experience survey, you can quickly respond to negative feedback and get rid of errors that make recruitment negative. If in your case the candidate examination is not or cannot be anonymous, the results of the online survey can also be used when contacting the candidate who gave you negative feedback. An in-depth interview and conversation during which you show interest in the problems and understanding can change the negative image of the company in the candidate’s eyes.
Does your recruitment survey show that candidates are satisfied? Great! Positive feedback is something you can boast about. Publish the result of the report or information about the NPS indicator in your social media or in a newsletter sent to customers.
Benefit 7: Knowledge regarding the work of recruiters and external companies
Dissatisfaction with the recruitment process may have various causes. The recruiter is essential in this process – regardless of whether it is one of the members of the HR department employed in the company or someone from outside. Therefore, in the recruitment survey, in addition to questions about the recruitment process, contact or advertisement, there are also questions about the recruiter. They relate to both the behaviour and attitude, as well as competences, and may sound like this:
- How do you rate the manners of the recruiter?
- Has the recruiter read your CV?
- Was the information about the job presented by the recruiter clear to you?
- How would you evaluate the way the recruiter communicated with you during the entire recruitment process?
Although it is not obligatory, you can create recruiter rankings on the basis of such questions. This is a great way to objectively award bonuses to people from the HR department. For the recruiter, it is also an excellent source of knowledge about their competences and specific feedback on what is done well and what should be improved.
Benefit 8: Advantage over the competition
Candidates like to be asked for their opinion and appreciate when you are interested in their feedback. Thanks to this, you can easily gain an advantage over the competition – research shows that only 16.7% of enterprises have knowledge of the factors that motivate candidates to apply!
A good advertisement, easy application for a job, organized recruitment or keeping in touch with the candidate – all these aspects determine whether the candidates apply to your company in the first place, and not to the competition. You will examine all these factors in one survey – this is why the recruitment survey is an absolute must-have for any company that aspires to be a leader in its industry.
Benefit 9: Continuous monitoring of the recruitment process
The Candidate Experience survey enables continuous monitoring of the recruitment process assessment. Usually, the primary test specified in the study is the Net Promoter Score so if you notice that the NPS dropped rapidly, you can react quickly to problems and fix them before they affect more people and destroy your chances of recruiting the most talented candidates. In what situations can such monitoring be particularly useful? Imagine that you have provided incorrect data in the recruitment advertisement and the candidate cannot contact you, or that the place you are making an appointment with for an interview is very difficult to reach. Such small details will cause the process to be rated negatively, the NPS will drop, and you will be able to react quickly and correct mistakes.
Monitoring does not have to be just “here and now”. By conducting a recruitment survey using advanced tools such as Startquestion, you will collect all the results in one place. What’s more – these results can be analysed using the following tools:
- filtering the results (you can divide candidates into categories, e.g. by gender, age, department to which they apply),
- cross tables (use them for advanced cross-analysis, e.g. highlighting the results of candidates from a specific department who were not satisfied with the process),
- trends (you can observe the change in satisfaction with individual stages or aspects of recruitment over time),
- rankings (use them to compile a recruiter ranking – from best to worst rated or the departments that stand out with the most to the least satisfaction).
Benefit 10: Comparing independent recruitment processes in the company
We already talked about how you can monitor and analyse your results in one place. That’s not all – a regular survey of the recruitment process gives you the opportunity to compare the results not only over time, but also within the company. Use the division of results into departments or depending on the recruiter and get a clear and legible comparison of NPS, and thus – satisfaction with recruitment.
The statements created this way can be presented to decision-makers in the form of automatically generated reports through the Startquestion system, e.g. as legible PDFs with diagrams.
Take the first step – your own recruitment survey
Keep in mind that 72% of people having negative impressions of the recruitment process declare that they would share them on websites and portals devoted to job search,
Therefore, create your first recruitment survey based on a ready-made template today! When researching and analysing the results, you can use the knowledge gathered in the Startquestion Guide, from which you can find out how to conduct a recruitment survey using the capabilities of our tool.
