Survale CEO, Jason Moreau, and Chief Research Officer for Lighthouse Research, Ben Eubanks, recently sat down for a live interview and explored how to improve candidate experience using data.
Eubanks’ live streaming show HRTechTalks is a half hour program started in 2020 where Eubanks explores HR Tech issues with HR Tech vendors. Moreau and Eubanks got a full 30 minutes into the topic which was“The Measurable Link Between Candidate Experience and Recruiting Performance.”
Most organizations know they need to improve candidate experience. The question is how. Both Eubanks and Moreau dug into that question. Eubanks is steeped in research about talent acquisition and understands the impact positive candidate experience has on recruiting outcomes.
Moreau is co-founder and CEO of Survale, a talent feedback platform that allows organizations to gather feedback at each step of the talent journey. As Moreau says “from hello to hire and from hire to retire.” Both people are up to the task and the conversation is enlightening.
Survale’s clients focus largely on recruiting optimization and use Survale to gather and analyze candidate candidate feedback at each step of the recruiting process. Moreau peppers the conversation with real life examples showing how simply asking candidates how they feel about the process pays dividends on so many levels.
Fail to Improve Candidate Experience at Your Own Risk
Moreau points out that Survale’s capabilities are similar to customer feedback platforms and notes that recruiters and customer service professionals have at least one thing in common: If you fail a customer or a candidate, expect those failures to show up on social media, review sites and more. And in both cases, opening a line of communication reduces the odds of this happening.
Organizations that gather and analyze feedback can optimize their people, processes and technologies to reduce or eliminate the kinds of issues that end up on Glassdoor, as Moreau points out.
So he advises organizations to gather candidate feedback at some key stages in the process:
Career sites
Moreau points out that most candidates research companies on their career sites. And most companies invest heavily in both their employer brand and their career sites capabilities. Understanding how useful candidates find your navigation and how compelling your messaging is can unlock game changing insights, from insights about clumsy navigation to ineffective messaging to learning who is visiting your career sites and what motivates them.
Applications
Asking candidates what worked and what didn’t with the application process can also yield significant dividends. Moreau shared a client story where candidates indicated that it was taking them multiple sessions to complete an application. That’s an easy fix that makes a significant difference in converting curious job seekers into job applicants.
Interviews / Phone Screens
Analyzing candidate feedback at this stage allows recruiting leaders to lift the veil and understand what’s happening in hiring manager interviews. Moreau agrees that Survale takes candidate feedback and combines it with operational data from the ATS. So unlike simple candidate experience surveys, Survale can pinpoint exactly where the problems lie, down to the hiring manager or any other variable, so organizations can easily make changes that improve candidate experience.
Pinpointing Problems is Key
Moreau also points out that the current pressures to hire scarce resources are driving organizations to invest in technologies designed to solve specific problems – before they know what their biggest problems are. He sees organizations searching for new applicant tracking systems, new candidate relationship management systems, new career sites – the list is endless.
Of course we all think we know what our biggest problems are, but without data to back it up, many organizations are investing in technologies, people and processes that are increasing costs and complexity without proper feedback-based analytics to substantiate what their biggest problems are.
And of course, there is no way to measure improvement without the baseline benchmarks that are provided by continuously monitoring candidate experiences.
We invite you to join Ben and Jason above for an enlightening discussion about how to improve candidate experience using real time data.
