SurveyMonkey is a silent enabler for average to below average candidate experience. Now don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with SurveyMonkey. It’s cheap. It lets you create surveys. And many organizations who truly care about candidate experience use it to gather feedback from candidates. So why is it a silent gateway to bad candidate experience?
Maybe “kill” is a strong word, but it lulls you into the false feeling that you are truly measuring candidate experience and gathering meaningful feedback. You’re not.
SurveyMonkey Candidate Experience Killer #1: Frequency
So you’ve got your SurveyMonkey candidate experience survey and it lets you create a survey to ask candidates for their feedback. You send it out and get great information. Fantastic!
Then the days pass. They turn into weeks. You’re busy trying to fill positions and meet your hiring goals and pretty soon weeks turn into months and years. Candidates with good and bad experiences come and go. They become less likely to respond to future surveys that may or may not come, depending on your ability and resolve to ramp up another survey campaign.
You really need a tool that will let you set a campaign and have it run constantly to each new candidate that moves through your process.
Killer #2: Timing
Let me guess…you probably send that SurveyMonkey candidate experience survey out to every candidate who made it to interview stage. You send it to the ones who make it to phone screen? Then you’re way ahead of the pack.
Truth is, you’re reaching less than one tenth of one percent of the candidates who interact with you via career sites, job boards, etc, with that once in a blue moon survey sent only to interviewees.
You need a solution that will embed in your career site and survey candidates as they absorb your brand and navigate your jobs online – measuring their clicks and gathering their feedback as they fill out your applications and opt in to your talent networks. One that lets you optimize your online candidate experiences and respond to them in real time so you can avoid those surprise negative Glassdoor reviews.
Killer #3 – Integration
Since you gather feedback every now and then and have “checked that box” for measuring candidate feedback with SurveyMonkey, chances are you don’t have an automated system that triggers feedback emails to go out at key stages of the candidate lifecycle.
This contentment with SurveyMonkey is blinding you to the wealth of actionable data that can be obtained by gathering feedback from candidates, recruiters and hiring managers at key stages of the hiring process.
What did the recruiter feel about the candidate at phone screen? Was the hiring manager satisfied with the candidates forwarded by the recruiter? What did the candidate think of the professionalism of the recruiter and hiring manager? How did the interview team rank each candidate? Why did the candidate accept or decline the offer?
You need a system that automatically sends out feedback requests to candidates, recruiters and hiring managers based on stages in your ATS.
Killer #4 – Trends and Analysis
Remember that SurveyMonkey candidate experience survey you sent out in Q1 2015? No? Then log into SurveyMonkey and dig around to find it. How will it compare to the one you ran in Q4 2016? Or the one you want to run next quarter? Who knows.
You need a solution that compiles all the data from the automated feedback campaigns that go out at every stage of the process to all stakeholders, and compiles them into a dashboard. One that shows trends over time and compares key metrics. One that let’s you create composite indexes of multiple questions and tracks NetPromoter scores for key functions.
You need a system that is purpose-driven for one thing and one thing only: Tracking candidate and employee feedback through each stage of the talent lifecycle.
Again nothing wrong with what SurveyMonkey does. It’s a great, low cost tool for one-off surveys.
“Always On” Candidate Experience Feedback
Of course there is a platform that fits the bill for comprehensive, ongoing candidate experience feedback.
Survale is designed to set up an automated system for gathering feedback 360 days a year, at each key stage of acquiring candidates and hiring employees.
And we haven’t even begun to explore how you can extend this capability to automatically use the data to measure quality of hire, employee engagement, customer and employee satisfaction and more.
These days, it’s clear that candidate experience is a crucial component for finding and hiring the best talent. So the question should be asked: Are SurveyMonkey candidate experience surveys really helping you leverage candidate experience into a competitive advantage for your recruiting organization?
