As we covered in part one and part two of this series, every process has gaps. And when we work with prospective clients who tell us that they are gathering feedback from candidates at each step of the hiring process, we probe a little further and we find, you guessed it, gaps. Big gaps. The first being a lack of automation (imagine doing this manually!), the second being reporting gaps, and today’s gap, candidate feedback confidentiality.
Recruiting Gaps and Candidate Feedback Confidentiality
So you’ve got your ATS and you have your broad-based survey tool and you have your candidate email addresses and you’re doing what it takes to get feedback at various stages of the process (i.e. application, phone screen, interview, etc).
You’re gathering experiential data to help you optimize your process. To do so effectively, in most cases, you need to assure candidates that the process is anonymous so they will be candid in their feedback. To do this right, you want to be working with candidates as they are in the midst of competing for a job at your company. This is when they are most engaged and most incented to help you with their valuable feedback. It’s also a time when they can feel most vulnerable to retaliation or disqualification if you as an employer don’t like their feedback.
This article is part three of a four part series
So collecting most feedback anonymously will ensure the data you gather is honest, relevant useful and respectful of candidate feedback confidentiality. The problem is, maintaining that anonymity while retaining the ability to tie feedback to specific factors or stages in the recruiting process, while moving data from several systems that are not talking to each other is nearly impossible.In most cases the trade off is either anonymous feedback that is very broad and general, or feedback that is specific to a process or stage in a process, but is non anonymous.
Recruiting Gaps and Privacy
The other aspect of feedback confidentiality is the privacy of the employees who are receiving feedback. For example, gathering interview feedback gives you a birds eye view of what’s really happening in those all important candidate/hiring manager interactions. Most Survale clients find tremendous value in this feedback.
But without an automated, purpose built system that is designed to collect and present this data in a structured way, it is nearly impossible to segment this feedback by manager. This means it is very difficult to share or present this data to a hiring manager without exposing private feedback about other hiring managers.
Whether it’s candidate feedback about recruiters and hiring managers, or it’s hiring manager feedback about recruiters or vice-versa, the ability to maintain this data with user permissions that enforce privacy between employees is simply a requirement of any feedback program. Employee feedback privacy is just as important as candidate feedback confidentiality.
And make no mistake, this feedback is a game changer in its ability to identify problems, facilitate training and ensure continued alignment among key stakeholders in the recruiting process.
I’ll say it again, if your organization is gathering and analyzing feedback at each stage of the recruiting process, you are way ahead of the pack. But using a system designed to deliver your feedback and analytics in real time in an integrated way will give you truly transformational capabilities at a fraction of the time and effort.
With an integrated, purpose built, real-time feedback platform, you’ll find you have relevant, secure, and consistent data to optimize your operations and strategies in ways that are simply not possible otherwise. And importantly, you’ll do it with data that protects candidate feedback confidentiality and employee feedback privacy.
Stay tuned for part four, the final installment of this recruiting gaps article: Scalability. In the meantime, check out all the installments here.
