As we welcome 2018, we get treated once again to one of the most compelling research programs in talent acquisition: the Talent Board’s 2017 Candidate Experience Report. This annual candidate experience report started in 2011 and has served to quantify both the value of good candidate experience as well as the cost of bad experiences. Survale is proud to be a Global Underwriter of the program.
The program relies on participating companies allowing Talent Board to survey their candidates about their experience trying to get a job. Beginning this year, Survale has partnered with the Talent Board to provide our platform to both gather candidate feedback as well as analyze the data. The 2017 results are available to all participating recruiting organizations to view and absorb their results using Survale’s analytics dashboard.
In its seventh year, the 2017 Candidate Experience Report now maps the trajectory of candidate experience in aggregate over that seven year period since its inception. Each year is a report card detailing how recruiting organizations have improved or devolved, as well as how candidate reactions to their experiences have changed.
Of course every year the cycle ends with the top performing recruiting organizations earning the highly coveted “CandE Award.”
Candidate Satisfaction Still a Huge Recruiting Advantage According to Candidate Experience Report
According the Talent Board’s 2017 Candidate Experience Report, CandE Award winning companies do several things better than those who don’t fare quite as well. Winning organizations.
- Listen more and communicate often.
- Set better expectations about the recruiting process from pre-application to onboarding (for candidates).
- Hold themselves more accountable for candidate experience and talent acquisition performance while measuring it regularly and consistently.
- Are perceived by candidates as having a “fairer” process – candidates believe they have been able to share why their knowledge, skills and experience deserves consideration for the jobs to which they have applied.
On the flip side, this year’s report found that “the majority of candidates who participated – 85 percent overall – are those who were rejected, hadn’t heard back on next steps wherever they were in the recruiting process, or did not know of any offer at the time they completed our survey.” There is still much work to be done. The Talent Board has found that these candidates have a greater aggregate impact on the business and the brand than those who are hired.
That’s a fact that Survale clients understand quite well. In other words, most companies focus their candidate satisfaction efforts on those candidates who get hired. The reality is that those candidates that reach interview stage have a greater effect on overall recruitment brand affinity and candidate satisfaction than the feedback of those who are hired.
Taken a step further, those candidates that research your career site have an even greater effect on brand affinity and candidate satisfaction because the numbers are so huge. In fact, only about 1% of candidates who interact with your career site ever apply. This is a phenomenon Survale reported on here.
Why is that important? Well, check out the Talent Board’s 2017 Candidate Experience Report. It shows year in and year out that the number one place candidates go to research your company is your career site.
If you’re not gathering feedback and analytics on candidate’s as they research your jobs and company, then you are missing out on an opportunity to optimize a huge source of additional candidates. The better your career site and ATS are at converting visitors to applicants, the more candidates you’ll have at the end of the day. If you could increase that 1% applicant rate by one half of one percent, you’d increase your candidates per open job by 50%.
Feedback Through the Talent Lifecycle
Just as the Talent Board has shed light on the importance of candidate satisfaction for recruiting success, Survale enables taking that feedback further by increasing the frequency and extending the feedback throughout the organization during the entire talent lifecycle.
Just as customer service organizations measure and optimize customer interactions through feedback gathered from the customer lifecycle, so to can recruiting organizations boost satisfaction, increase recruiting results and measure success.
Survale clients set up automated feedback programs that touch the candidate:
- As they research jobs
- As they complete an application
- As they complete hiring stages within the ATS (phone screen, interview, offer, rejection, etc)
- As they reach 1st year retention and quality of hire milestones
- And beyond
Survale clients also can compare their candidate feedback metrics against the top four Talent Board benchmarks so they can continuously understand where their practices stack up against the top performers in their industry.
Show Candidates You Care
We invite you to download a free copy of the Talent Board’s 2017 Candidate Experience Report. If you haven’t already, support the Talent Board’s research by entering the upcoming Candidate Experience Award program. It’s a great way to show candidates you care. That, along with a commitment to measuring and improving candidate satisfaction year ‘round goes a long way toward boosting your employer brand and building affinity with all the passive candidates out there who wonder whether your organization is worth taking the risk of applying for your jobs.
