How to Measure Candidate Experience End to End

Executive Search Consultant

All great workplaces are talent power house. It is the people that make organizations great. Everything starts with hiring the best talent out there.

In this race of acquiring the best talent, there is one thing that matters most to modern day recruiters, it is the candidate experience. If the experience of a candidate was not good, you would miss out on the referrals, you would also miss out on the re application of the same candidate. Plus when these candidates with poor experience will go out in the outer world, they would talk on how unorganized, or how inefficient was the hiring process at your organization. They will speak about it on social media, on sites like Glassdoor.
So in order to improve the candidate experience, first the organizations need to measure it. Though it is not as simple as measuring the cost per hire, or may be finding out the ratio of job impressions to applications, but there are certain ways to gauge it. Of all things, measuring candidate experience is very subjective, and the responses can change or fade away over a period of time.

Application Drop Off

Hr consultants take a lot of pain while hiring a candidate, and the process can be sometimes cumbersome. Lots of panel discussions, then assignments, then technical rounds, all these processes can mount up to lead the candidate dropping off from the hiring process. The same applies in the website application process, as too many steps can lead the candidate to drop out from in between.
The idea is over here to recognize on where and why did the candidate dropped off. This is the first step where insights clubbed with actions can be implemented to make candidate experience better.

Time between Application to Offer

The shorter this time would be, the better the candidate experience is set to be. Every HR Consultant should have a timeframe ideally for any candidate on how long this time should be, and do everything in means to not exceed it. It often happens that because this time frame is large, many candidates resort to other organizations and other job opportunities.
This time period is inversely proportional to the good candidate experience. The lesser the time, better the experience will be, and more the time, worse the experience will be.

Interview to Offer Ratio

Remember every rejected candidate is your loss, as most of them will be going to say something, be it good or be it bad about the organization. Plus if this ratio is low in your organization then be assured that your ROI on hiring time is not optimum. The HR consultants of your organization need to work on bringing this ratio to the highest level, which could be ensured by setting up proper protocols in candidate screening.

Offer acceptance Rates

As an organization, or as a Recruitment Consultant, you should aim the offer acceptance rate of your organization to be above 90%. If it is below that then there is some problem in your candidate experience. There is some problem in meeting of the expectations of the candidate. Remember that hiring is a time taking process not just for the organization and also for the candidate.

Candidate Feedback

What could be better than listening from the horses mouth itself. Yes, the best way of gauging the Candidate Experience is to ask the candidates at every touch point about their experience. The key to having a successful feedback system in place, is the timing of it. Memory of humans fade away with time, so the key is to ask the questions at the right time which is just after the recruitment process. IF there are 5 steps in your hiring process, do not feel shy of sending the candidate a feedback for five times. Chances are that he or she will fill it least 3 times, which again is a success.

Try to keep the questions in a objective format, with a yes or no answers, or answers where you have to rate between 1 to 5, or 1 to 10. This will make it easy for both the candidate, to answer the questions, and also for the organization to derive insights from the feedback.

Now, what kind of questions should you be asking from the candidate. Here are some samples of it.

How was our application process on the website?

Did you found it easy to upload the CV on the website?

Was the information provided in the Job Description right and apt?

How was the speed of the interview process?

Were the panel members well prepared for the interview?

Did you enjoyed while appearing for the Hiring process?

Was the assignment given to you, in line with the role you were applying to?

Was the HR Consultant of this job approachable?

Remember that feedback is to be taken by the candidates even after the completion of the hiring process and the key is to take the feedback from both who got selected and those who got rejected as well. Another way of taking insights from the feedback is to refer to review rating websites like Glassdoor, or Ambition Box, or LinkedIn, or Indeed. These can be a great reference points to actually know how Candidate Experience is on the ground.

Referrals

By asking the candidates while filling out the application on your website, on how did they hear about this job, is a great way of assessing if candidates are referring your organization to their network or friends. This is where you will get to know if the candidate experience you are providing is good or not.
Another great way of knowing this is by sending out job email advert to all your previous applicants asking for referral. IF even 10% of them turn up to give you referrals then know that you are going on the right track.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This is another great way of knowing the ground reality of your candidate experience. NPS is actually the score on a scale of 1 to 10, about how likely is it that a candidate will refer you to one of their contacts. Its is calculated by subtracting the percentage of, detractors (ones who score 1-6) from the percentage of promoters (ones who score 9 or 10).

While every organization is unique, and their hiring process is set to differ, so will their means of calculating the candidate experience. OF all things, candidate experience is the most efficient way of actually improving your recruitment marketing and creating an employer brand. The more it gets its due attention, the better will be prospects of the organization.

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