Survale CEO, Jason Moreau, was talking candidate experience blind spots recently at a Talent Board Candidate Experience workshop in Chicago. The message was clear: If you think your periodic candidate experience surveys are giving you insight into your candidate satisfaction, you’re most certainly wrong.
Moreau points out that huge blind spots exist for most companies.
Measuring Past Candidate Experience Blind Spots
The biggest, most pervasive blind spot is timing. Most organizations do periodic audit surveys to find out what candidates thought of their recruiting process. By definition, this data is old. So those slip ups that get surfaced in these surveys are artifacts of damage already done to your employer brand, your reputation and perhaps even your organization’s bottom line.
Think of it this way, the negative Glassdoor reviews are already written by the time you find out about it.
The 99% Blind Spot
Beyond the timing aspect of candidate experience, the next large blind spot is your career site. Ninety-nine percent of all candidates who interact with your jobs and your employer brand don’t apply. But they certainly have rich experiences – some good, some not so good. Perhaps there’s a problem with your application. Or maybe the candidate couldn’t find what they were looking for.
You really have no idea because there is little to no way for most candidates to tell you. Real time feedback on every page of your career site and application eliminates this blind spot AND gives you data you can use to turn that 1% of visitors who apply to your jobs into 1.5%. That’s a small increase but it means 50% more candidates for the same recruiting budget!
The Hiring Manager Blind Spot
Another common blind spot is the hiring manager. After you’ve screened potential candidates and arrived at a short list for hiring managers, there is often little to no feedback from candidates about their experiences with hiring managers. And often no consistent way for hiring managers to give recruiters feedback on the candidates they’ve submitted.
Real time feedback from candidates and hiring managers as they move through the hiring process can help fine tune the value recruiting brings to hiring managers. It can also surface issues like lack of preparedness, missed appointments, and misalignment of expectations for the position.
Of course, with each of these blind spots comes positive feedback! This positive and negative feedback helps you train managers for success and gives you hard data to backup your position.
The Expensive Declined Offer Candidate Experience Blind Spot
Moreau further discusses other blind spots faced by recruiting organizations like onboarding and declined offers. Survale clients have seen great success in using real-time feedback from declined offers to turn the candidate around and convert these expensive “first choice” candidates into hires.
As a Global Underwriting Sponsor and official data platform of the Talent Board’s Candidate Experience Research, Survale works closely with the Talent Board to power their research. To learn more about how Survale provides real-time candidate feedback for some of the world’s best employers, click here.
