You have a candidate satisfaction Net Promoter score. Everyone does. It exists out there in the minds of your candidates and it is affecting your ability to hire everyday. Do you know what it is?
If you don’t, that’s a problem.
Net Promoter Scores
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a method of questioning consumers of goods and services to find out whether their perceptions are a help or hindrance to the success of the organization. The question is simple: “How likely are you to recommend (company, product, brand, service) to a friend or colleague.”
The theory behind NPS is that consumers who rate their likelihood to recommend at nine or ten on a 1-10 scale (called promoters) are raving fans that can and will spread the word about you and help you grow. Those whose likelihood to recommend is seven or eight out of ten are called “passives” they are satisfied, but vulnerable to switching to a competitor. With any ratings below seven out of ten (detractors) you have dissatisfied consumers whose perceptions can seriously threaten your success.
It makes sense. Seven out of ten will get you a C on an exam. But that’s not going to get you into grad school. Nor will will a rating of seven out of ten in a satisfaction survey.
Net Promoter score cuts through the clutter and focuses on metrics that can move the needle.
Candidate Satisfaction Net Promoter Score
The organization that has done more than any other to bring Net Promoter scores to candidate experience is The Talent Board, through their annual candidate experience research project and the associated CandE Awards program. The CandE winners for this year were announced last month.
And I’ll say it again, Survale serves as the feedback platform for the Talent Board’s research. Between serving as Talent Board’s research platform and the hundreds of organizations that use Survale, we have a little experience with candidate satisfaction Net Promoter scores as well.
Every year, the most important question asked by the Talent Board is “How likely are you to recommend (hiring organization) to your friends or colleagues. And every year, some employers are better than others. In any case, all employers who participate KNOW what their candidate satisfaction Net Promoter score is. And you should too.
Why is Candidate Satisfaction Net Promoter Score Important to Employers
Remember, even if you’ve never asked the question, make no mistake that you DO have a candidate satisfaction Net Promoter score. If it’s high, that’s great! Now you can use that knowledge to do two things that will greatly improve your ability to hire more effectively.
First, you can amplify that fact in your employer branding and messaging, and it will be effective because it rings true to potential candidates. Second, you can engage new hires and employees to testify to that fact in your job ads, career site pages and beyond. It also tells you that formal referral programs will likely be effective, gathering referrals from both employees and other candidates who love your company. Again, they’ve told you they’ll recommend so now you just need to make it easy for them.
If your Net Promoter score is lower, it’s better that you know that so you can establish a baseline for improving it. Measuring Net Promoter score as part of a complete balanced breakfast of candidate feedback will allow you to measure improvement while gathering data about what’s working and what’s not with your hiring process and your employer brand. Take it from someone who sees a lot of candidate experience feedback: Candidates will tell you exactly what you need to do.
They’ll tell you what you can do to improve your employer brand, your candidate satisfaction and your hiring outcomes as a whole.
Measuring Candidate Experience
A growing number of organizations are gathering candidate feedback at every step of the hiring process. For the first time, tools like Survale make this not only possible, but make it simple, automatic and provide real-time data on an ongoing basis so you can improve candidate satisfaction both in aggregate over the long term. With this data you can intervene in real-time situations to improve candidate experience outcomes as they happen, saving candidates from falling out of the process.
This kind of feedback, by the way, is invaluable in helping to keep bad candidate experiences “in-house” where you can fix them, instead of learning about them through bad reviews on Glassdoor.
And the best part? Candidate satisfaction Net Promoter scores are portable in that they can benchmarked against other organizations in an apples to apples fashion. Survale lets you benchmark YOUR candidate satisfaction Net Promoter scores against the Talent Board’s database of overall CandE participant scores and against the combined CandE award winners’ overall satisfaction scores. No need to guess how your candidate NPS stacks up.
To take part in next year’s CandE Award program, click here.
To learn how Survale can make it easy to gather and analyze candidate feedback from pre-applicant to interview to offer accepted through first year of employment and beyond, click here.
