How to Use Feedback for Better Performance Management

The quality of your recruiting experience is highly dependent on the performance of your team. The reality is, no matter how much recruiters do their best to deliver a seamless hiring process, one mistake is all it takes for the candidate to get a negative impression. In fact, a survey of 4,000 respondents shows that 73% consider a bad recruitment experience to harm their relationship with a business. This is why proactively capturing your clients’ and candidates’ feedback is important—your business success and brand reputation are on the line. 

Candidate and client feedback is an effective means to continually improve your performance management. It gives insight into what’s working and what’s not with your hiring process and within your team. Understanding how things are happening at every candidate and client touchpoint can help you implement better recruitment practices and ensure people think highly of your employer brand. Ultimately, you can make the most out of a negative recruiting experience by turning their reviews into your competitive advantage. 

Here are five tips on how to use feedback to boost your team’s performance and improve your business reputation.  

1. Keep everyone’s accountability in perspective

Your recruiters can hold themselves accountable better if they know where they stand against expectations and goals. From the job description to the evaluation process, each decision and action that recruiters make will directly impact the candidate experience. They are responsible for your company’s hiring performance, and there’s no better way for recruiters to know the quality of the work they’ve done than through the eyes of the people they serve—your candidates and clients.    

Data-driven feedback will allow them to stay on track in meeting goals, delivering quality candidate experience, and even course-correcting previous mistakes. In essence, awareness begets responsibility. So, giving them a clear understanding of their performance will provide them with a clear path for progress. Creating a culture of accountability can make a difference in developing top-notch recruiters and elevating your team to higher performance levels. 

2. Align team goals to drive business results 

Feedback aligns recruitment teams toward a common goal, making it a powerful tool in driving results. Every recruiter should have a clear picture of the kind of candidate experience that your business wants to deliver and the brand reputation that you want to build versus what’s actually happening. This is especially important because the hiring process may be the first interaction candidates will have with your brand and your only chance to make a lasting impression. 

With enough data and insights, businesses can use feedback to provide direction on what needs to be done to optimize the work process, make adjustments, and establish a better recruitment process. This makes sure that your recruiters’ decisions and procedures in place directly support your company’s mission and contribute to key business results.   

3. A transparent way to address recurring mistakes

Feedback is one of the best avenues to learn about your recruitment process’s strengths and weaknesses based on jobseekers’ first-hand experiences. More often than not, common recruitment mistakes are ones that your team might not even be aware that they are doing. Sharing the information gathered from previous candidates and clients to the rest of the recruitment team will help align goals and correct faulty recruitment practices that otherwise would have been left unnoticed. 

When businesses incorporate feedback into redefining recruitment strategies, they can identify unique opportunities for better hiring practices and avoid mistakes. The key is keeping communication open and frequent within the team. HR leaders who make it a point to incorporate transparency in their communication with their recruiters minimize miscommunication, decrease room for errors, and keep the team sharp. 

4. Help boost individual performance

Because actual candidate and client feedback is essentially a review of the recruiters’ role execution, it can contribute to boosting individual performance. This is especially true for roles that have direct links to human connections like interviews and communication. The key is to make sure that your recruiters know the tasks they have done well, practices that need to be worked on, and their specific actions to improve. This helps them learn ways to do their job better and smarter because it helps them identify skill gaps and gives them a clear insight into the skills they need to develop. HR managers who regularly incorporate candidate and client feedback into performance reviews are taking a step closer to ensuring that their team members are progressively growing and continuously delivering top-notch recruitment practices. 

5. Keep your recruiters motivated

Incorporating positive feedback when delivering constructive criticisms can have a significant impact on boosting morale. When your recruiters receive recognition, it reinforces the right behaviors and mindset that led to a good candidate experience. Crafting discerning and well-thought-out feedback that balances the positive and negative comments encourages your recruiters to continually elevate their performance. As you remind them of the things they can improve on, balance it by recognizing the things they did right. 

Make them understand that feedback is meant to grow them and not just to criticize. This approach is most effective with repetition, so schedule follow up sessions to evaluate their progress against their goals and demonstrate that constructive feedback isn’t a one-time event but a continuous learning process. As you do this, you show that the ultimate goal is their career development as much as it is your business growth.  

Use candidate and client feedback to your advantage. 

Great Recruiters is a reputation management platform that automates soliciting candidate and client reviews and provides the insights you need to better understand the quality of your hiring practices and recruiter performance.

Want to find out how our platform can help you utilize feedback to your advantage and build a more competitive recruitment team?

Request a demo today.