Question 1: What key recruiting processes and candidate experience improvements have you identified and completed in the past 6-12 months? (Be as specific as possible with examples for each.)
EchoStar established a cross functional team (called CAT standing for Candidate Appreciation Team) across recruiting delivery, operations, branding, and management to focus on candidate experience this year. This team met in the “offseason” and read the book Candidate Experience: How to improve talent acquisition to drive business performance by Kevin Grossman and Adela Schoolderman.
As we read this book, we thought of ideas that we could implement over the course of the year that were focused on candidate experience. After receiving leadership approval on these improvement initiatives, we implemented them over the course of the year. These initiatives were the following:
- Launched an enterprise-wide interviewer certification training for all people leaders and active interviewers.
- Goal of this training is to provide a consistent behavioral based approach to interviewing and offer a positive and consistent candidate experience to our candidates
- Monthly Team Trainings on Candidate Experience Differentiators
- Presented out our live results in Survale for each of these meetings
- A lot of negative feedback we received in the past was a desire for transparency in the process. So, we implemented the following changes to increase transparency
- A “one pager” that is attached to our phone screen email templates that provides the context and reasoning behind the upcoming steps in the hiring process.
- Added the interview process to our career website
- Reworked all our communication templates to use standard language with an emphasis on clear expectation setting.
- Crafted new email templates in our ATS with the emphasis towards candidate experience in the process such as:
- Escalation templates for business partners taking extended time to provide candidate feedback
- Email to notify Hiring Managers of status updates
- Email to notify Hiring Managers of offers accepted to prompt them to connect with candidates in LinkedIn and inform them of the next steps for onboarding
- Added a certification tag in the ATS to identify which hiring managers have yet to go through our certification process
- Intake Meeting follow up email to summarize for the team and identify who was certified among interviewers selected for interview team
- Began utilizing video in job descriptions with our ATS’s in-house Video Studio
- We implemented a Scheduling Tool in our ATS to make it easier and faster for our candidates to schedule interviews with us.
Question 2: How did you build support and commitment within your team and your leadership to make these improvements? (Be as specific as possible with examples.)
To facilitate HR/ TA buy-in, we needed to first prove that there was actual momentum towards achieving this award. To do this, we took the data from 2024 to indicate where we ended for our YTD score, but when we showed the month over month trend for our scores it was clear that we were slowly starting to improve and had a real possibility of winning the award in 2025. Management was most interested in the realistic likelihood of the team improving candidate experience, and this is what allowed us the runway to build our Candidate Experience team.
Following this, the key to gaining the commitment to candidate experience from outside HR business management was to anchor everything back to the opportunity cost of a poor candidate experience. Business impact will sell this concept more than anything to our leadership.
Transparency was key in facilitating buy-in with leadership as well. We provided full access to comments provided in the surveys, as well as reviewing the Survale platform with the team monthly, giving live access to results.
Question 3: Which of these improvements do you think are the most unique and innovative and why? (Be as specific as possible with examples for each.)
Interviewer Certification is a training program that we launched in January of this year with the intention to standardize our interview format across all teams. We aligned on enterprise-wide behavioral competencies that the hiring manager selects for their role during intake, and all interviewers are trained on how to open interviews, ask appropriate questions, conduct themselves during the interviews, and close interviews appropriately. We have tracked their progress on these training courses over the year and are now mandating that all interviewers on requisitions are certified by Q4.
Question 4: How do you know that your changes are making a difference and what data or evidence validates the innovative improvements you made? (Be as specific as possible with examples for each based on your people, your processes, and your technologies, and include any candidate quotes that validate the improvements made.)
We gathered various data points that validate the improvements we have made over the year. The CandE Benchmarking survey provides us insight into the impact that our changes have on candidates; we monitor these scores closely and have seen our scores increase drastically from last year. In particular, we have been focusing on the NPS for the “Not yet hired” population in the CandE Survey, and have seen that increase from 11.9 at the beginning of the year to 43.2 in August at the end of the survey.
We currently survey our hiring managers and new hires as well regarding their satisfaction with our process and have seen those scores remain steady over the year, indicating no adverse impact on those populations.
We have seen our time to fill decrease steadily, anywhere from 4% to 18% over the course of the year since launching the certification program.
Our Glassdoor interview rating has increased 14% from the beginning of the year.
Question 5: Do you use any of your candidate experience benchmark data to quantify and demonstrate financial, referral, and/or employer branding business impacts and report to your leadership team, your recruiting team, and/or your hiring managers? If yes, how? (Be as specific as possible with examples.)
Yes, we found that the best way to “sell” the concept of candidate experience to the greater business is to anchor it to possible revenue loss. In our interviewer certification training, we make sure to emphasize this to learners and reveal the actual dollars of lost revenue (utilizing the resentment rate) we would see for one of our most popular product offerings.
This is commonly cited post training as the most valuable reason for us to provide a quality candidate experience, as many internal stakeholders were not aware of the possible lost revenue coming from a poor candidate experience as a concept.
