Candidates are talking – are you listening?

Here’s a fun game. Go to Google. Type in ‘recruiters are’, cover the eyes of any nearby children, and then look at the autofill suggestions that load up. Heartwarming, aren’t they?

Candidates talk. We all know this. What’s more, there’s an inverse correlation that means that this talk becomes louder and more frequent as their experience becomes worse and worse. And with a little utility called the World Wide Web allowing any person’s opinion to reach the eyes of anyone with a smartphone, this chat has the potential to be more damaging than it ever has before.

But despite job seekers actively leaving a wealth of negative recruiter feedback online, employers and recruiters are still choosing to largely ignore it. A Workplace Trends survey found that 70% of employers admit that they never search online for feedback, and 78% of job seekers say that they’ve never been asked to give feedback on their candidate experience. In fact, only 25% of employers regularly request feedback directly from candidates on their experience. Candidates are talking—ignoring them won’t make the problems go away.

Why should you care about getting feedback? Simple—it allows you to improve. Sure, criticism can be hard to hear, but if it’s constructive it’s also the only thing that will allow you to get better. Generally speaking, your candidates aren’t complaining for the sake of complaining—more than 70% of people who leave negative reviews do so in the hope that they’ll help companies to improve their products or services (Bazaarvoice).

If you can react quickly and meaningfully to these suggestions you can actually convert the complainant to an enthusiastic and loyal candidate. A Harris survey found that 33% of people who got a response to a negative comment posted a positive review afterwards, and 34% actually deleted the original negative review. As we outlined in our previous article “5 Surefire Ways to Create a Great Candidate Experience”, responding effectively to candidates is crucial to your ongoing success. When you validate your candidates’ concerns by listening and responding directly to them, you are moving beyond a transactional relationship to one of personal connection.

How do you go about collecting this feedback? There are a few ways. Google Alerts can be created which notify you of business mentions online, allowing you to get a sense of public opinion and to respond where appropriate. Better yet, you could construct a survey for your candidates—this allows you to source recruiter feedback and ask pointed questions which quickly get to the crux of how these people feel about your company’s efforts.

And then there’s Great Recruiters®, a platform designed for exactly this purpose—to source the recruiter feedback, good or bad, that will allow your business to improve. If you’re part of the 70% of employers and recruiters that are deaf to your candidates’ calls, Great Recruiters helps you take control of what’s being said.

There’s only one way we in the recruiting industry will improve upon the Google autofill situation. The candidates are talking; we just need to be brave enough to ask and listen.