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Your candidate experience can significantly impact your company’s reputation and ability to hire the best candidates. But how do you know if your candidate experience is helping or hurting your recruitment efforts? The best way to find out is to simply ask your candidates.
Candidate experience surveys are an effective way to measure and improve your candidate experience. They provide valuable insights into how candidates perceive your hiring process, allowing you to identify areas for improvement and optimize your recruitment strategy.
In this blog post, we’ll guide you through the importance of candidate experience surveys, how to conduct them, and some survey questions to get you started.
What is a candidate experience survey?
A candidate experience survey is a structured feedback tool that collects insights from job seekers about their interactions with your company throughout the hiring process. These surveys can capture candidates’ perceptions, emotions, and experiences from their initial research and application through to interviews and the final hiring decision, whether they’re hired or not.
Unlike general feedback or casual conversations, candidate experience surveys provide systematic, measurable data that you can use to identify patterns, track improvements, and make data-driven decisions about your recruiting process. They typically cover various touchpoints in the candidate journey, including the job application process, communication with recruiters, interview experience, and the overall impression of your company’s hiring practices.
Why candidate experience surveys are important
Candidate experience surveys are a powerful tool to help you understand your talent brand and make informed decisions to improve it. A positive candidate experience can help you attract, engage, and hire the talent your company needs to succeed.
Uncover opportunities for improvement
Candidate experience surveys provide a direct line to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your hiring process.
Survey responses help you identify specific pain points candidates encounter, such as unclear job descriptions, lengthy application processes, or poor communication. This feedback helps you pinpoint areas that need improvement and implement targeted changes.
Regularly reviewing and acting on survey results ensures that you continually refine your recruitment process and promptly address emerging issues.
Get buy-in for candidate experience initiatives
Hiring is a team sport. You need buy-in to invest your team’s time and budget for candidate experience initiatives—and survey data can help you get it.
Use surveys to illustrate the state of the candidate experience at your organization and advocate for necessary improvements. For example, low job seeker satisfaction around your application process or recruiter communication could help you make a case for implementing a modern applicant tracking system.
You could also use survey data to help quantify how positive candidate experiences lead to better recruitment outcomes. Compare candidate satisfaction scores between teams or departments to demonstrate the difference between the highest and lowest rated teams.
For example, do the teams with higher satisfaction scores also have a higher offer acceptance rate and shorter time-to-fill compared to other teams? Demonstrating the benefits of a positive candidate experience within your own organization is a great way to get buy-in for initiatives that will help the rest of your team level-up.
Measure your progress
A positive candidate experience is a journey. Surveys help you measure progress over time so you know what’s working—and what’s not.
Track metrics such as candidate satisfaction scores, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and feedback trends to understand candidate perceptions over time. It’s particularly powerful to compare these metrics before and after implementing changes to see their impact.
For example, let’s say your candidate experience survey reveals that many candidates don’t find your interviewers to be well-prepared or professional. Address this feedback by implementing an interviewer training program, and continue to ask candidates for feedback about interviewers. Improved satisfaction shows you’re moving in the right direction and should continue to invest resources for interviewer training. Persistently low scores may indicate that you need to refine your training approach or consider additional measures, such as offering interview templates or changing up your interview team.
Best practices for conducting an effective candidate experience survey
It’s important to approach candidate experience surveys with a clear strategy to ensure the feedback you receive is insightful and actionable.
Here are some best practices to help you design effective surveys, encourage honest responses, and use the data to drive positive changes in your recruitment strategy.
1
Determine your goals
Before creating your candidate survey, define what you hope to achieve from it.
Are you looking to understand the candidate’s overall experience, identify specific pain points, or gather feedback on particular stages of the hiring process? Do you need to gather data that will help you get buy-in for your candidate experience initiatives?
Clear goals will help guide your audience selection and question development. Goals can change over time as you refine your candidate experience and the specific areas you want to measure. For instance, you may start off by focusing on your overall candidate experience to identify the biggest areas for improvement. Later surveys may then focus on a single area you’re working to improve, such as candidate communication.
2
Choose your audience and survey timing
Consider your survey goals as you select your audience and determine the right time to reach out to them. Ideally, you send the survey within a week of your last candidate touchpoint or event that you’re measuring.
For example:
Modern applicant tracking systems enable you to automate customized emails as candidates change stages so you can gather the right insights. Just make sure that you’re updating candidate stages in a timely manner so the experience is still fresh in the candidate’s mind. This can lead to more accurate, detailed, and valuable feedback.
It’s also important to be aware of survey fatigue: Your candidates aren’t likely to fill out a survey at each stage of the recruitment process. Prioritize your goals to ensure that your selected audience isn’t being bombarded with survey requests. For example, if you send an email asking for feedback from all candidates after the application process, you might not want to send another survey to candidates who are rejected after the resume screen.
3
Select a survey tool
There are many survey tools available, from basic options like Google Forms to more advanced platforms like SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics. Choose a tool that fits your needs and budget, ensuring it provides an easy-to-use interface for both you and your candidates. This includes a responsive design, as candidates may prefer to complete the survey on a phone or tablet.
A good survey user experience can help you attain higher completion rates and contribute to a positive candidate experience.
4
Craft effective questions
The quality of your survey results is directly linked to the questions you ask candidates. Survey questions should be clear, concise, and relevant to your goals. Ensure each question serves a purpose and avoid redundant or overly detailed questions.
Keep these tips in mind as you build out your survey:
Change your survey questions as needed to gain a new perspective or adapt to evolving survey goals. For example, your survey may initially ask candidates if they received feedback from the recruiter or hiring manager. As feedback becomes a more common practice on your team, you could change the question to ask if the candidate was satisfied with the quality of feedback they received.
5
Communicate about your survey with candidates
Send your candidate experience survey with a personalized email addressing your candidate by name and referencing their recent application or interview. A personalized survey invitation can make candidates feel valued and increase response rates.
Clearly explain the purpose of your survey and how feedback will be used to improve your recruitment process. Then share a little about what to expect from your survey, including how many questions there are and how long it might take.
Assure candidates that their responses are anonymous and won’t affect their hiring status. Anonymity encourages candidness and helps you get more accurate insights.
6
Analyze results and make improvements
Regularly analyze your survey responses, identify common themes, and take action to address any issues. Continuous improvement is crucial for making meaningful improvements to your recruitment process.
It’s useful to analyze results from a company-wide perspective, as well as to drill down by team. Learn what your teams with the highest candidate satisfaction rates are doing differently and implement those practices throughout your organization. Also pay attention to each team’s opportunities for improvement so you can deliver targeted resources to help them provide a better candidate experience.
Sample candidate experience survey questions
Your candidate experience survey questions should reflect your survey goals and audience. The right questions can help ensure that your survey provides your team with valuable insights while respecting your candidates’ time.
Here are some sample questions you can use to build your candidate experience surveys:
1
On a scale of 1-10, how much do you agree with this statement? I would recommend [Company] as a great place to work to a friend or colleague.
Gauge overall satisfaction and potential advocacy using a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey question. Candidates who rate your company 9–10 are considered promoters, while candidates who rate your company 0–6 are considered detractors.
2
How would you rate our team’s communication throughout the recruitment process?
Poor communication is a common complaint among candidates. Use this question to determine if it’s a problem on your team.
3
Did you feel that you were treated with respect and fairness?
It’s important to understand whether candidates feel valued and fairly treated during your recruitment process so you can promptly address issues.
4
Please rate the speed of our hiring process.
Lengthy recruitment processes can frustrate candidates and lead candidates to withdraw. Feedback on this question can help you identify delays and optimize your hiring timeline.
5
What could we improve to make the recruitment experience better for future candidates?
Open-ended questions like this allow candidates to provide detailed, constructive feedback to help your team improve hiring processes.
Additional ways to measure the candidate experience
While surveys offer tremendous insights, they shouldn’t be your only method of measuring and improving the candidate experience. Many candidates won’t complete them, and some may not offer candid feedback in fear of retaliation.
Here are complementary approaches that provide a more complete picture of your candidate experience:
Employer reviews
Monitor your company’s presence on employer review sites like Glassdoor, Indeed, and Comparably. While these reviews may be biased toward extremely positive or negative experiences, they can highlight recurring themes and provide competitive intelligence about how other companies handle their hiring processes.
Key performance indicators
Track key metrics automatically through your ATS. Key performance indicators that reflect on your candidate experience include withdrawal rate, time to stage, time to hire, and job offer acceptance rate.
These metrics can help you pinpoint opportunities for improvement, quantify the cost of a poor candidate experience, and measure improvement.
Exit interviews
Call candidates who withdraw from your recruitment process or decline your job offer to find out why. These conversations can reveal issues that surveys might miss, and allow you to ask follow-up questions to dig deeper into candidate feedback. Keep these conversations informal and focused on learning rather than persuading the candidate to reconsider.
Final thoughts on candidate experience surveys
Candidate experience surveys are more than just a feedback tool. They’re a strategic investment in your hiring process that can pay dividends in reduced recruiting costs, faster hiring cycles, and better quality hires.
Remember that the key to success with candidate experience surveys isn’t just collecting feedback—it’s acting on it. Make survey review and implementation of improvements a regular part of your recruiting team’s workflow. Start small with a basic survey covering the essential elements of your hiring process, then expand and refine based on what you learn.
Today’s job candidates have more choices than ever. By showing that you value their feedback and continuously work to improve their experience, you’ll build a stronger employer brand and more efficient hiring process that gives your company a competitive edge in attracting and securing top talent.
Want to learn how JobScore can help you elevate your candidate experience?
