When it comes to recruiting the best professionals, candidates aren’t the only ones who need to hear constructive criticism and honest feedback.
Collecting feedback should be an essential part of your whole recruitment process as it enables you to improve the candidate experience next time around and streamline any unnecessary elements.
However, trying to actually persuade candidates to take the time to do this is about as effective as a chocolate tea kettle!
Here’s everything you need to know about the importance of candidate feedback, what quantifies as good/or useful feedback and the types of methods required to attain this information easily.
What are the benefits of getting candidate feedback?
If you’re not convinced that asking for feedback from candidates is useful, perhaps a couple of compelling stats might do it for you.
According to Forbes, nearly 60% of job seekers have had a poor candidate experience and 72% of them have shared their experience.
While Glassdoor’s research revealed that if candidates are given a chance to air their grievances about an employer’s recruitment process, it might just make the difference between feeling slightly disgruntled and wanting to go on a full-blown rant.
Sure, you can easily wave goodbye to unsuccessful candidates and let them vent their frustrations elsewhere – but what does that do to your brand’s reputation?
It only takes a handful of unhappy candidates before people start thinking twice about applying for openings or even doing business with you.
Maintaining or improving the candidate experience will:
- Boost candidate engagement and cut back on ‘no-shows’
- Increase the number of job referrals
- Send your Glassdoor rating through the roof
- Help you find the very best talent
What does good feedback look like?
Constructive feedback can come in a number of ways, but as a general rule, it should include:
- How the hiring manager, senior manager or other people involved came across during the interviews, screening process etc.?
- The quality and frequency of communication between each stage of the recruitment process.
- Did the employer go above and beyond to accommodate the candidate?
- Was it easy for candidates to find the job opening?
- Were there any frustrating elements involved when applying (i.e. lengthy tasks set)?
To help attain some answers to these types of questions, you have to think about how you can successfully ask these questions.
Create a survey for candidates and employees
Making a survey with relevant questions is the easiest and most direct way for candidates to give you feedback. However, you must keep it relatively short and painless, otherwise, it will feel like a chore to complete.
Nextiva.com provides 60 questions on how to adapt your purposes in categories like marketing, user experience and customer service which you can adapt.
Or if you want to take a more personalised approach, you should always remember to:
- Vary the types of questions and response options – i.e. customer satisfaction (CSAT) where candidates have to rate their satisfaction levels using a scale and simple yes/no ones.
- Keep the questions short, simple and clear.
- Ask a couple of specific questions if there’s an area which you personally feel might need improving.
- Avoid giving multiple choice questions as this doesn’t promote an honest and neutral choice.
Once you have a basis for your recruitment feedback process, you can start customising it to make a few separate versions – i.e. one for unsuccessful candidates, successful candidates and current employees (who have been there for less than 12 months).
The latter can give you a very different type of feedback as they will know whether their day-to-day job is the same as the job advert which initially attracted them to apply.
Pro recruiter top tip
Need some help coming up with some questions to ask? Well, according to Workable, you should include questions that assess:
- The clarity of your job descriptions – did your initial chats coincide with the content in the job ad?
- Candidates’ first impressions – was the receptionist or first member of staff you saw friendly and warm when you arrived?
- Your recruiter-candidate communication – was the hiring manager or recruiter clear on how the hiring process works?
- Likelihood of referral – how likely (out of 0-10) would you refer other candidates to our business? / would you consider reapplying yourself?
Incentivise it
Asking candidates or employers to complete surveys is one thing, but actually getting them to take the time to do it is a completely different kettle of fish.
For rejected candidates, incentivising this process could be as simple as setting up a feedback call where you can both share your honest opinions.
To most top professionals, hearing this type of feedback is important as they want to improve themselves or know what they have to do in order to take a different approach next time around.
Especially when research reveals that over 70% of companies don’t give any regular feedback at all!
Current employees shouldn’t need much persuading, as your company is the one paying their wages every month!
However, if you’re feeling particularly generous, maybe run a competition for everyone who enters and award the winner with a bottle of bubbly.
Final thoughts
While feedback might seem like another process you have to squeeze into your busy day, it’s an integral element which can help your business attract candidates more quickly next time, improve job satisfaction, maintain/improve brand reputation and reduce interview ‘no-shows’.
Incentivise the feedback stage and you’ll soon be able to gather more valuable tips on how to improve your recruitment process.
For more tips on attracting staff, check out the rest of our blog here.
