Candidate experience
March 29, 2023

Candidate experience survey: how to do it?

I hope you enjoy reading this blog post.

If you want to find out how to recruit faster book a demo.

We’re happy to share a guest post prepared by SurveyLab – a tool to lead surveys. You’ll learn how to research your candidates’ experiences. Use this data in improving your recruitment processes!

What is Candidate Experience

The easiest way to describe candidate experience is as a set of all candidate’s experiences after finishing the recruitment process. It is worth adding that this process begins with the decision to send the application and ends when the recruitment is closed, regardless of whether the person has been hired or not. The experience includes not only contact with the recruiter, but also the emails that the candidate receives, the content of the job advertisement, the graphics contained in it, and even this (especially this!), how we behave towards him after the recruitment process is completed. Measuring the level of candidate experience seems to be an obvious way to improve HR-related processes. But let’s juxtapose the image with reality:

According to the eRecruiter Candidate Experience report, every third company in Poland in 2019 saw no reason to deal with candidate experience, and every fourth declared that it could not afford such research.

There were various reasons for this:

  • Fear of criticism and low assessments of the recruitment process.
  • Belief that candidate experience surveys have to be expensive.
  • Conviction about the lack of HR resources to conduct a research project.
  • Belief in the low value of candidate experience research.

Summing up the most frequently mentioned fears, it is worth asking the question:

How much does my company pay to repeat mistakes and lose potential candidates over and over again?

Experience survey – start with your employees

We recommend that you start by finding the eNPS level in your organization.

Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a variant of the NPS (Net Promoter Score) and is used to measure employee loyalty and satisfaction. eNPS will tell you how the company is perceived by employees and whether they would be willing to recommend work in your organization to others. How to calculate the eNPS? It’s easy. First, you have to ask one very important question:

“Would you recommend work in company X to your friends?”, to which the employee responds using the 10-point scale.

Based on the provided answers, people participating in the survey are divided into 3 groups:

  • Promoters – people who chose a value of 9 or 10.
  • Passives – people who chose a value of 7 or 8.
  • Detractors – individuals who chose a value of 6 or lower.

eNPS is calculated as the difference between the percentage of promoters and detractors.

eNPS = % Promoters – % Detractors

Why you should measure eNPS?

Because it is cost-effective, fast, and efficient.

  • TIME. eNPS survey takes minutes and has a low entry-level.
  • SIMPLE. Due to the fact that the eNPS operates on a 10-point scale, its results are easy to interpret.
  • FRESH. eNPS survey can be conducted more often than annual or quarterly assessments.
  • EFFICIENT. Easily points out what needs to be changed.
  • LOW COST. Due to the simple structure of the survey, its cost is low and its results can be interpreted by HR.

How to do the eNPS survey?

Get started by creating a survey. You can use ready-to-use templates or create a survey entirely by yourself.

Here, you can find ideas on how to do it best.

Candidate experience survey – how to get started?

The truth is, that not many people like to take surveys. But there’s a second, even more important one – the vast majority of us like to help and share our experiences. What is the conclusion of this? You will make an excellent candidate experience survey if you properly encourage candidates to do so.

Remember a few important rules:

  • Nobody likes long surveys -> invest in factual questions.
  • Everyone wants nice things -> take care of the visual setting of the survey.
  • People prefer to read interesting stories -> make the candidate interested in yours.

See just how good candidate experience surveys can look by trying SurveyLab’s free trial.

Remember the numbers:

68% of candidates who have negative experiences in the recruitment process will not apply to the company again, and 55% of them will share their negative opinion with others.

(Source: eRecruiter report “Employer Branding 2019”)

How can surveys help measure the candidate’s experience at various stages of recruitment?

The eNPS is a good starting point for a broad analysis of the candidate satisfaction level. Ask the candidates (regardless of the level of the recruitment process at which their journey ended) whether they would recommend applying to company X. The easiest way to conduct the eNPS survey is by email or by sending survey invitations with SMS.

The eNPS survey should be supplemented with open-ended questions.

This means that you have to ask the candidates a question: what is driving your satisfaction level with the recruitment process? We come with answers. Do you remember the groups that emerge after the eNPS survey? Ask them a second question (a different one for each group):

DETRACTORS: Where should we start the changes in our recruiting process?

NEUTRALS: Which elements of contact with us do you think need improvement?

PROMOTERS: What did you like the most about the recruitment process?

The answers to these questions will lead you to changes – the only sure and constant thing in any organization.

Author: Natalia Soszyńska

Try TRAFFIT on your own for free for 14 days
See TRAFFIT in action for yourself. Get to know with our features, run recruitment with exemplary data, and take time to make your decision.

In TRAFFIT, we share knowledge on HR topics, introduce trends and improve HR world.

Do you want to speed up your recruitment process?
Tell us about your challenges, and we’ll show you the most interesting options. From getting more candidates to boosting candidate experience – what do you want to know?