Recruiting metrics are an essential part of data-driven hiring and recruitment. We’re quick to measure time to hire, cost to hire, and pipeline health. But, for example, hiring manager satisfaction surveys aren’t generally recorded as part of everyday operations.
This post will look at the best practices when collecting data on candidate and hiring manager experience. We’ll also briefly touch on how to improve the experience and positively influence the results for both groups.
Ranked as the 3rd most crucial hiring metric, hiring manager satisfaction is used by 43% of organisations to measure the quality of hires. As recruiters, hiring managers are our customers, and their happiness indicates a successful recruiting process. When the hiring manager is satisfied, the candidate will likely perform well and fit well into the team.
Similarly, candidate experience shouldn’t be overlooked. Candidate experience is how job seekers perceive an employer’s recruitment and onboarding process.
Keep in mind that you can measure candidate experience in different stages of the recruitment process. And don’t rule out unsuccessful candidates. Instead, you should measure them along with the ones you’ve ended up hiring to get a more accurate picture of the state of your candidate experience.
Both candidate and hiring manager experience is defined by their overall experience with you, the time spent with you, and how likely they are to refer you.
The most quantifiable way to measure hiring manager and candidate experience is with a scoring system, but don’t rule out qualitative feedback.
Let’s get into the quantitative stuff first, i.e. the NPS (net promoter score) surveys, before tackling other feedback forms.
In the simplest terms, an NPS score is a number on a scale from one to ten that indicates how likely a candidate or hiring manager is to recommend your service. It often looks and sounds like this:
“On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?”
The score is calculated by subtracting the % of detractors (those who respond with a six or lower) from the % of promoters (those who respond with a 9 or 10). Alternatively, you can minus the detractors from the promoters and divide by the total number of responses before multiplying by 100. Ratings of 7-8 are called neutrals, meaning that the experience was good overall, but they are unlikely to refer you.
You can measure almost anything using NPS. So not only is it helpful in understanding the overall NPS for your company, but you can apply it across many different departments and facets of your business.
According to ClearlyRated, global NPS standards for staffing industry categorise +50 NPS as “excellent” and +70 NPS as “world-class”. The Current Staffing Industry NPS Benchmarks are +28 (when rated by clients) and +18 (when rated by placed talent). But service leaders (winners of 2020 Best of Staffing award) averaged NPS scores of +74 from their clients and +68 from their talent this year.
Getting anyone to give feedback is the biggest challenge. More often than not, people will click away from your feedback request for one of the following reasons:
Firstly, if there’s no obvious way for candidates or hiring managers to leave a rating or give feedback, they won’t go searching for it (unless they’re disgruntled, in which case, monitor your Glassdoor account).
You need to ask for it. Either make a submission form easy to find or ask personally via email.
Ask yourself why you won’t leave a rating when prompted. It’s because the button might open in another window, ask you to log in, or drive you for more than just the initial information? Keep collecting feedback short and sweet. Any level of friction is going to deter submissions.
Keep it relevant and ensure people know why they’re providing this information. This ties into the motivation, how it helps us, and how it helps them in the future. If possible, eliminate the things that make rating optional.
Because of the nature of recruitment, people get rejected, and there might be concern over what they say about the experience. Rejected candidates are less likely to sing your praises, but their opinions still matter. Just because a candidate wasn’t right for a role doesn’t mean they won’t be suitable for the company.
Now on to what you’re going to measure and how.
Time to talk strategy. What are you going to measure, and how? Here’s what you need to consider:
Keep it simple, as opposed to a three-page survey. Just a score is still valuable. Any feedback is better than no feedback. Ease of access is the most critical factor. Easy to fill in forms or scores are the way to go.
Open-ended questions are an option, as well as multiple-choice and longer-form questions if you feel they would add value. Depending on what you’re using to collect responses, you might even consider implementing conditional questions, i.e. a logic jump/branch/If X, then X…
Automate things where you can and set reminders to send at the relevant times.
There’s a bit of debate on when to send feedback requests. Sending them out before rejection could skew the answers, and sending them right after when a candidate is still feeling a bit dejected could also lead to a downward trend.
Allow for a cooling-off period before sending the feedback request. For candidates, automate an email to go out a few days after they’ve exited the process.
Now that you’ve got all of this feedback, where do you put it? At Move, we use Monday.com to track nearly everything, including candidate and hiring manager experience. Use what you’re familiar with. These kinds of setups can easily translate into other management software.
For each role, we populate a Monday board. Then, copy everything over for new clients so you have a form to work with. Organising it this way also makes it easy for you to look at the data.
When you’re reviewing the feedback, it gives you an overall view of the process from a unique point of view.
If you’re not happy with your scores, you’ll need to dig deeper and get more qualitative feedback from hiring managers and candidates to find out where to improve the process. Hiring managers might need more senior-level support or check-ins, while candidates typically value very clear lines of communication. Dig deeper if you’re getting consistently average or poor scores.
Keep it simple. The goal is to provide the best experience possible, which plays into the feedback. A simple NPS request through direct conversation is an excellent place to start, and as you scale, your processes can scale with added automation. And don’t forget about third-party review sites! Track those reviews to get a rounded view of your candidates’ and hiring managers’ impressions.
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