Interview experience survey questions are all about the experience of being interviewed. And they happen after the interview so this is not about grilling a candidate about their past work experience. These questions are designed to tell your talent acquisition team everything it needs to know about how candidates are being treated during interviews.
Why are interview experience survey questions so important? Because talent acquisition teams need to know what is happening in those interviews. Whether these interviews are live and in person at the office, or done via video conferencing or video interviewing platforms, interviews are where the rubber meets the road for great candidate experiences.
Or terrible ones. Take your pick because each one of those outcomes will be crucial in determining what percentage of candidates accept your offers, how quickly you’ll be able to fill positions, how much you ultimately have to pay a new hire to accept a job and much more.
And I didn’t even mention the negative effect of an inconsiderate interviewer on an organization’s employer brand.
And if your talent acquisition doesn’t know exactly what’s going on in interviews, then they can’t effectively manage the hiring process. Most organizations have little to no visibility into how well candidates are treated in interviews, how well the hiring manager performs in these interviews, or what could be done to make the interviews better, the candidates happier, and the employer brand stronger.
Optimizing Candidate Experience With Interview Experience Survey Questions
So if you don’t know what’s going on in interviews, I’ve provided seven survey questions for you to use. It is a best practice to send a survey to every candidate after every interview and to keep the number of questions to a minimum. If you have a survey platform that can integrate with your ATS, the responses to these questions can identify and link interview problems to individual departments, hiring managers, job families and much more.
So here are the questions.
1). Were your interviewers prepared? Choose one: Yes or No
This question can uncover problems like lateness, cancellations, or other issues that show a lack of respect for the candidate.
2). How knowledgeable were your interviewers about the role? Sliding scale: Not at all -> Extremely knowledgeable
Many Survale clients have used this question to uncover deficiencies in the alignment of recruiters and hiring managers in terms of understanding the qualifications needed for the position and the types of candidates sourced.
3). Do you feel your time was valued during the interview process? Choose one: Yes or No
According to the Talent Board, disrespecting a candidate’s time has the largest negative impact on candidate experience. This question goes to the heart of that issue.
4). Have all of your questions about the role and/or the company been answered up to this point in the process? Open text box
This question can help identify gaps in the candidate’s understanding of the company and the role and point to ways in which recruiting teams can work with hiring managers to ensure appropriate knowledge transfer is indeed happening during the hiring process. You don’t want candidates with big question marks after an in person interview.
5). Did you leave the interview with a clear understanding of next steps in the process? Choose one: Yes or No
This is one of the most important factors in managing a candidate’s expectations (and anxiety). The more transparent the steps in the process are, the more secure a candidate feels in the process. This makes them more confident and less likely to abandon the company/role mid-process.
6) Based on your experience SO FAR, how likely are you to recommend to others to apply at COMPANY? Net Promoter Score: Not likely (0) -> Extremely likely (10)
This question is a great gauge of your overall interview experience. The Net Promoter Score sorts your respondents into promoters and detractors and provides a benchmarkable score that tells you exactly how satisfied your candidates are at this stage of the process. NPS questions like this should be asked at each step of the hiring process, from career site visit to application to phone screen to interview to offer and beyond.
7). Do you have any additional feedback you’d like to share about your interview experience? Open text box
This is another must-have question for every candidate survey. This is where candidates tell you why they are either satisfied or dissatisfied with your interview process. When done well, these open ended replies become an instruction manual for how to fix any problems. By the same token, these replies can help reinforce great performances by outstanding interviewers so you can leverage their tactics throughout the organization.
These interview experience survey questions should give you everything you need to deliver world class experiences. The key is conduct these surveys continuously and USE the resulting findings to optimize the people, processes and technologies used to interview candidates.
