Saving on the analysis of candidate feedback leads to a lack of perspective for the employer brand. That’s a risk you shouldn’t take in the midst of a talent war. 23% of candidates refuse to reapply to a company after a bad experience, according to Trustcruit. 

Why measure your candidate experience? How should you measure candidate experience? That’s what we will explore in this article.

1. Why measuring candidate experience is essential

The candidate experience is the sum of the feelings accumulated by the new recruit among all the points of contact with the company, from reading the job listing, to the interview, all the way to the company’s final decision.

While the employee experience is being increasingly evaluated, the candidate experience could benefit from the same treatment. Effectively, we can only control what we measure. Without measurable data, it’s impossible to see an evolution or progression.

Analyzing your candidate experience allows you to take into account candidate feedback and to address any points of friction, which may be invisible, in your hiring process.

Acting rapidly when it comes to candidate experience 

A candidate is like a customer. They can opt to recommend your company to their community (or not). Just as with customers, a satisfied candidate is more likely to talk to 3 people, while a dissatisfied customer will talk to 9. 

According to a CareerArc study from 2016, 60% of job seekers have had a bad experience and 72% have shared that experience, whether on rating sites like Glassdoor, or to friends or colleagues.

Basically, even if expectations are unique to each job-seeking individual, there’s still a set of factors that can negatively impact a candidate’s perception of a company long before signing a contract. We frequently observe the following issues:

• A recruitment process that doesn’t match the supposed values of the company: a lack of respect, speculative promises, or unfriendly behavior can quickly cool the motivation of even the most enthusiastic candidates.
• Hiring processes that are too long: The length of the process becomes an issue if the different steps aren’t clearly explained in the job listing or if there are multiple, redundant interviews. According to a Robert Half report, when faced with a long hiring process, 39% percent of survey respondents lose interest and pursue other roles.‍
• Slow or missing responses: Here, where a candidate expects a timely response within a few days, standards are often between 15 days and a month, or even longer. According to CareerBuilder, 66% of job seekers would wait only two weeks for a callback before moving on to other opportunities.
• A non-intuitive career page: A lack of information about available jobs and the company culture, an absence of specific rubrics…When essential information is missing on the official company website, the candidate can quickly feel lost.

Based on an Expérience Candidat study, 66% of job seekers abandoned the application process after a negative candidate experience, without giving a reason.To improve your employer brand

To improve your employer brand

According to a Career Builder study from 2017, 4 out of 5 candidates claim that the candidate experience is an important indicator of how the company values individuals.

As such, measuring candidate experience allows you to work on your employer brand as a whole. 

In the short and medium term it allows you to:

• To be more in tune with candidate expectations and to hire more quickly and easily.
• To prevent candidates from abandoning the hiring process: no shows and ghosting are increasingly posing problems for HR professionals.
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In the long term it allows you to:

• To attract the best talent: the attention granted to candidates yields positive word of mouth and therefore, lowers the cost of acquiring new talent
• To maintain the link with candidates who don’t get hired and to show that their opinions matter to the company. A good impression facilitates the reactivation of your talent pool.‍
• To send a strong signal to candidates: that your company knows how to implement participatory management and doesn’t hesitate to challenge itself.

2. HR tools to measure your candidate experience

Without candidate feedback, it’s impossible to evaluate the efficiency of your candidate experience. You risk collecting only the most extreme feedback, positive or negative. There are two complementary methods for measuring your candidate experience.

Satisfaction survey

The satisfaction survey allows you to collect candidates’ feelings about their experience, whether or not they get hired. If proposed regularly, the survey helps you better understand candidate expectations. It’s generally shared after interviews or at the onboarding phase.

To propose a satisfaction survey that can bring actionable solutions, here are several best practices:

• Offer a short format: no more than 10 questions
• Vary the theme of the questions: about the simplicity of the process, transparency , reactivity, intention to recommend to the company or reapply in the future…
• Vary the type of the questions: open  questions where they can freely justify a response, and closed questions to help target and harmonize data

Examples of open questions:

• Did the job description help you understand the available position?
• Was there essential information missing in the job description? 
• In what capacity did the job listing reflect the role you discussed with our recruitment team?
• What pleased or displeased you in the interview process?
• How would you qualify your email or phone communication with our recruitment team?
• What was the main problem you were confronted with in the recruitment process?

Examples of closed questions:

• Were the communications via email and telephone quick and efficient during the hiring process?
• Was your interview scheduled within a reasonable delay?
• Would you apply to a future opening in our company?
• Would you encourage a friend to apply to our company?

Key indicators

Key performance indicators (KPIs) allow you to measure efficiency and to improve the candidate journey. They’re indispensable tools to efficiently drive your HR marketing actions.

Candidate Net Promoter Score

The Candidate Net Promoter Score (CNPS) is a cousin of the eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score). It allows you to take into account the feelings of all candidates, even those who don’t get hired.

Candidates respond to the following questions: How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague? And they are asked to respond on a scale from 1 to 10 (10 being the best score).

• Detractor candidates, score of 0 – 6: It is very unlikely that they will recommend your company to their network
• Passive candidates, score of  7 – 8: they’re not looking to harm or promote your image. Though they can be become promoters if change is delivered.
• Promoter candidates, score of 9 – 10: they are solid ambassadors for your employer brand.

Once the categorization of your candidates is complete, the sum of your responses is converted into a score ranging from -100 to +100.

CNPS = (# promoter candidates - # detractor candidates) / # total respondents) x 100 

Good to know: The response brought to a candidate, even if not hired, strongly impacts the NPS. According to Trustcruit, a rapid notification of a rejection can help contain the drop of a CNPS to -22, versus -45 to a late or missing notification of a rejection.

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Time-to-hire

Time-to-hire is the measurement of the delay from the candidate’s entry point into your pipeline (through an application or through scouting) and the delivery of the final response from the company (of an offer or rejection).

This should not be confused with the time-to-fill, which measure the necessary delay of filling a post, which is one of the most deceptive KPIs for the measurement of recruitment efficiency. It measures the speed of the process but not its quality!

To measure time-to-hire, you can break down your hiring process into the following key steps:

• The delay of publishing the listing
• The delay of sourcing
• The delay before the first interview
• The delay of checking references
• The delay of validating the offer
• The delay of sending the offer

Click rates on your job listing

This allows you to measure the level of interest and engagement your audience has in your job listing.

Click rate = (# of views / # of unique clicks) x 100

A high click rate (3-5%) confirms the pertinence of your listing and the channel you used. On the other hand, a low rate means that you need to readjust your use of certain channels or rethink the content and wording used.

Candidate conversion rate

This allows you to measure candidate engagement, or the number of candidates who send a resume after looking at your job offer. This helps you assess the attractiveness of the offer, or the need to adjust.

Conversion rate = (# of applications / # of clicks) x 100

Acceptance rate of hiring offer

This means the percentage of offers accepted by selected candidates. It serves as an indicator of the competitiveness of your organization and of your offer compared to your competition. It reveals the capacity of your teams to identify candidate priorities and needs and to prepare for obstacles.

Acceptance rate = (# of accepted offers - # of proposed offers) x 100

Rather than being calculated across the board, the acceptance rate can be calculated per manager or per department, to help identify the most effective offers among teams, managers or recruiters.

Recap: 

It’s not only your employee experience: Your candidate experience can also stand to gain from being measured. 23% of candidates refuse to reapply to the same company after a bad experience, according to Trustcruit.

Having quantifiable data allows you to ensure a positive candidate experience, or if needed, to identify any weak spots and to rapidly reinforce your employer brand.

Good management of the candidate experience allows you to offer a recruitment process that’s more in line with candidate expectations, and also to strengthen your talent pool in the long run.