Strengthening your recruitment brand reputation entails strengthening your recruitment processes to ensure your candidates won’t have a bad experience, which can be detrimental to your business. In fact, 50% of candidates who went through a bad recruitment experience are most likely to reject job offers and drop out altogether. A stark contrast to the 95% of candidates who would apply again after a positive candidate experience.
One mistake can even ripple through the rest of the candidate market through online reviews. With 72% of candidates sharing negative experiences online, this is reputational damage you can’t afford to have. That’s why recruiters need to ask for candidate feedback and understand how they perceive your recruitment dynamics and processes.
Through candidate feedback, you can collect valuable information straight from your applicants. The more data you have, the easier it is for you to assess the health of your recruitment services. This will ensure that you’re able to identify inefficiencies in every stage of your recruitment process, lapses in communication, mistakes in recruiter practices, and resolve potential problems before they turn to issues.
How to Ask for Candidate Feedback
Capturing candidate feedback doesn’t have to be complicated at all. When you ask for candidate feedback, you want to know what they think in the simplest and most straightforward way possible. So, the key is simplicity and efficiency.
Here are five tips to keep in mind when asking for candidate feedback:
1. Proactively let them know you’re interested in what they have to say about their candidate experience.
The last thing you want to happen is for your message to be ignored. So, giving candidates a heads up and informing them that you’ll be asking for feedback would actually help.
Increase your chances of getting responses by making sure they are prepared to receive your survey and understand what it is for. One technique you can do is making them aware of the value their feedback has on your team. Communicate that despite the result of their applications, you’re still taking measures to make sure they are taken care of and heard.
This approach will help reap double rewards because while you boost their candidate experience, you also make them feel valued. This is especially important for rejected candidates, so you can eventually turn a rejection into a relationship.
2. Allow anonymity to encourage full honesty.
The key to effectively ask for candidate feedback is making them feel protected. Giving them the option to leave a review anonymously can help you get the information that you need in the rawest, unfiltered form possible.
When giving feedback about recruiters, candidates are most likely to be more candid if they feel no accountability. Creating an authentic and anonymous medium for expressing their thoughts will provide them the feeling of insulation that can make them feel secured toward any adverse repercussions of their opinions. Nobody wants to fear judgment or retaliation for simply trying to be honest, considering that they might still have an interview ahead or they might still be waiting for the final evaluation to be communicated.
3. Keep it simple and make sure it’s easy to fill out.
Convenience is a necessity when you ask for candidate feedback. A long list of questions generally puts people off, so opt for short surveys that are direct to the point and easy to answer. Show them you respect their time by not taking up too much of it. It makes a difference when they can complete your questionnaires in less than five minutes.
Remember that it’s not about how detailed or long the questions are. The effectiveness of your survey would depend on how insightful and strategic you craft your questions. You can either go for a Likert scale, closed and open-ended questions, multiple-choice format, or a combination of all three. Just always remember to keep it short and simple.
4. Give them more motivation by offering incentives.
Capitalize on human nature: when there’s something in it for us, we feel more motivated to act on something. Following this technique, when you offer candidates a small token in exchange for their response, they will be more willing to participate. It can be in the form of coupons or a complimentary meal.
As a staffing firm, you can also integrate this into your recruitment marketing strategy. It doesn’t always have to be monetary; you can offer them access to an exclusive career event or provide a complimentary 10-minute career coaching. This would encourage more responses and enrich their candidate experience even further as they get valuable insights from your expertise.
Create the Best Candidate and Client Experience with Great Recruiters
If you’re still on the fence on incentives, it’s okay, too. Crafting a personalized and compelling thank you message will also go a long way in encouraging them to respond.
5. Use a combination of closed and open-ended questions for optimal results.
Because open-ended questions are more descriptive and provide an excellent insight into a candidate’s perspective, they usually require more time and thinking to complete. On the other hand, closed-ended questions tend to be quicker and easier to answer but don’t necessarily provide the means to reflect the candidates’ exact thoughts accurately.
The balance? Take the best of both worlds and combine them.
By strategically picking out the most insightful open-ended questions and combining them with closed-ended questions, you can counterbalance the pros and cons of both questionnaire types. As mentioned earlier, what matters most is how you construct the questions. This is most important for open-ended questions because you only have limited questions you can add.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
- What was the most appealing part of your recruitment journey? What were the reasons it had such a positive impact on you?
- Is there a particular instance where your experience wasn’t at par with your expectations? Could you tell us more about it?
- Do you have any tips on how we can better serve you in the future?
Even if you use only two to three open-ended questions, you’re still likely to yield a valuable answer if you pick the right questions.
Use an Experience Management Platform Designed to Help You Ask for Candidate Feedback Effectively.
With an experienced management platform like Great Recruiters, you can automate feedback management, so you can capture candidate feedback efficiently and effectively. All you need is made available in one platform that can easily integrate into your existing system. You’ll get access to real-time reports that let you assess recruiter performance and evaluate your recruitment process, so you can leverage both negative and positive reviews to improve your recruitment strategies.
Want to elevate your feedback management and enrich your candidate experience?
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