No matter what business process you manage, there are always gaps to be filled. Marketing data gaps, sales process gaps, recruitment feedback gaps, financial reporting gaps, etc. No matter how good your process or program, you are always trying to eliminate or minimize those gaps.
So you can say you’ve automated your recruiting process and that can be 100% true. But you know where the gaps are. Maybe your online applications are suppressing the number of candidates you get. Maybe you really should have multilingual job descriptions. Maybe your reporting data is suspect (garbage in/garbage out).
Again, always gaps to be eliminated or closed.
(This article is part one of a four part series)
Recruitment Feedback Gaps
I’ve seen some pretty sophisticated candidate feedback programs that are impressive and enviable. Theses organizations gather interview feedback, offer feedback, hiring manager feedback about their recruiting partners, recruiting partner feedback about hiring managers, first year new hire feedback and more.
Yet when we talk gaps, of course, there are plenty. Yes, many companies can claim they gather recruitment feedback, but there are a lot of devils in the details. Here are some common gaps.
Lack of Automation. In just about all cases, feedback is gathered in batches. Recruiting periodically batches up a bunch of candidate profiles, loads them into a generic survey tool and sends them out. Best practice companies will do this based on the stage the candidate reaches in the hiring process (i.e. applicant, phone screen, interview, rejection, offer, new hire).
While this kind of feedback is crucial, lack of automation reduces its usefulness in a number of ways.
First, a human is needed to carry out these manual data transfers and survey deliveries. Second, the data is often stale because it’s tough to prioritize this kind of program when you are doing battle everyday trying to solve your biggest challenge: Filling open positions in a brutal recruiting environment. Because of this, it’s easy to let it slide, or reduce frequency so you lose the ability to ACT on problems or triumphs in a timely manner.
Third, it’s virtually impossible to sync the replies back to the proper candidate, hiring manager or recruiter. So when you see feedback data that needs to be addressed, good luck figuring out how to address it. And because the process is manual, organizations oftentimes end up asking too many questions in each feedback request to minimize the manual steps, reducing the response rate. The more questions you ask, the less usable data you get
And finally, you end up with several data silos that don’t relate to each other any more. Each candidate is travelling through your process. Yet each view of the feedback data at each stage of your process, is an island with no way to relate the data to each other. What region is this data related to? Which hiring manager is this data related to? Which job is this data related to? Is this data related to a previous or subsequent hiring stage and how does that affect its importance? It’s virtually impossible to view the candidate journey as a cohesive thing.
Eliminate Gaps With Automation
Gaps! Those gaps can be closed by using a single, automated feedback system that integrates with your ATS. So when a recruiter or the system itself changes a candidate status, a feedback request goes out automatically. No human intervention needed. And with your feedback platform synced to your ATS, the data that comes back is directly connected to the candidate, the job requisition, the recruiter, the hiring manager, the location, etc. Any data that is in your ATS can be synced with your feedback data.
If you automate your feedback and sync it with your ATS, you get real time analytics. You catch problems or gaps continuously and you can track metrics and subjective data within the context of the candidate’s current journey.
Why go to all the trouble to automate recruitment feedback collection? Is the juice worth the squeeze, as they say?
In fact, it may be the most important initiative any modern recruiting organization pursues.
Because gathering this kind of process-based, real time feedback is the foundation for identifying gaps throughout your recruiting lifecycle.
You heard me. I said the gaps in your recruitment feedback collection process are preventing you from identifying and eliminating the gaps in the rest of your recruiting efforts.
Click here for all four parts of this recruiting gaps article.
