A poor candidate experience can wreak havoc on your recruitment goals, causing candidates to reject offers, ghost your recruiters, and tell others to steer clear of your opportunities. However, an excellent recruitment experience can do the opposite, giving you more access to top talent and cementing your employer’s brand.
The issue is that, without feedback from candidates, you may not know how your candidate experience comes across. As a result, you need to seize opportunities to connect with job seekers who’ve navigated your recruitment process, allowing you to find out more about what it’s like from their perspective. If you aren’t sure where to begin, here are some tips that can help.
Be Forward About Your Desire for Feedback
In many cases, simply sending out a post-recruitment survey and hoping candidates will take part isn’t a wise move. Unexpected emails are often ignored, particularly if it isn’t clear to the recipient what the message is supposed to accomplish.
If you want to collect data about the candidate’s experience, you need to make sure that job seekers know a survey is coming. Be forward about your desire for feedback and let them know precisely what opportunities to provide it are on the horizon. That ensures that they’re expecting your message when it arrives, increasing the odds that they’ll offer you some insights.
Accept Feedback in Any Way It’s Given
Usually, companies would prefer that candidate’s complete surveys when they’re providing feedback. It’s the most convenient option for the business and makes analyzing and comparing data far easier.
However, not all candidates are going to prefer that delivery mechanism. While you could attempt to steer them toward the survey, there’s a decent chance that they’ll ignore that request, as it makes it seem like they’re being put off.
Instead of sending candidates elsewhere to provide feedback, accept it anyway it’s given. Whether that’s in a normal email, text message, or phone call, capture as much of what they share as possible. While you can certainly ask that they complete the survey as well, using this approach ensures critical details aren’t lost, and that makes a difference.
Make Sure the Process is Simple… And Anonymous
For open, honest feedback, candidates need to feel safe and protected. Make sure that they can submit feedback anonymously. Otherwise, some job seekers will choose not to participate or may give incomplete information out of fear of reprisal.
Additionally, make sure providing feedback is easy. Limit the number of questions, ensuring the candidate can wrap up the survey in a mere five minutes or less. Make sure that open-ended questions are balanced with multiple choice options, ensuring the process doesn’t feel too cumbersome.
Offer Feedback When It’s Requested
Few things will get under a candidate’s skin, like being asked to provide feedback but being rebuked or ignored when they request some in return. If you’d like job seekers to comment on their experience, then be ready to provide insights to those candidates about how they came across during the hiring process. That creates a feedback cycle, essentially setting up for a win-win should the candidate request feedback in return.
Contact the Team at TekCom Today!
Ultimately, the tips above can make getting more feedback from candidates far easier to achieve. If you’d like to learn more about how you can improve your recruitment process, the team at TekCom wants to hear from you. Contact us today.