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There’s no way around it. If your recruitment team does not focus on the candidate relationship, you will lose out on top talent. Recruiting is no small feat, and the hours upon hours that you spend fine-tuning your hiring process will all be for nothing if you don’t meaningfully connect with applicants.
But the frustrating reality is that you can take active steps to cultivate the candidate relationship, turn your hiring process on its head to deliver a high-caliber experience . . . and still see little results. How do you know if your efforts in cultivating this all-important relationship actually translate?
By sending candidate experience surveys to gather genuine feedback, you can get a leg up on the talent competition and understand what candidates really think about your process, from the highs to the lows. What better group of people to speak on the candidate relationship than the candidates themselves?
Despite the 68% of candidates that would like to provide feedback after an interview, 75% report rarely or never being asked for feedback.
Talentegy, State of Candidate Experience Report
And your candidates? They’re ready to be heard. Despite the 68% of candidates that would like to provide feedback after an interview, 75% report rarely or never being asked for feedback. Candidates have opinions on your hiring methods no matter what. If you don’t ask for their opinion in candidate experience surveys, they’ll gladly air their grievances on company review websites.
Here are three ways to stay accountable for your candidate relationships by collecting candidate feedback in your hiring process.
1. Evaluate DEIB Initiatives
More and more candidates—three out of four, to be precise—cite DEIB as one of the top values they look for. A hiring process that promotes DEIB cultivates an experience for candidates where they feel comfortable throughout the recruitment process and can tell that you’ve fostered a culture where differences are celebrated.
Yet creating DEIB strategies that actually leave an impact is easier said than done. Promoting DEIB in recruiting is a continuous process that requires regular evaluations on if your efforts properly translate and improve the candidate relationship.
Luckily, candidate experience surveys are a great way to gather metrics to endlessly improve DEIB in your hiring process and stay accountable for your goals. Consider asking for candidate feedback on how comfortable and inclusive each interview felt, and if candidates felt represented in their interviewer panels.
2. Check if Company Culture Translated
For most people, it’s easiest to understand a workplace’s culture through experience. Touring an office and shaking hands with potential coworkers makes the intangible concept of company culture incredibly tangible.
Yet with the rise of remote interviewing, recruiting teams grapple with conveying culture through a Zoom screen. Recruiters must now take an even more thoughtful approach to sharing company culture—a difficult task, but certainly not impossible.
As 46% of job seekers claim that company culture plays a crucial role when considering job offers, clearly communicating organizational culture—and checking if your efforts actually provide candidates with proper understanding—may be just the thing that enriches a candidate’s connection to your company and wins them over.
To check if your company culture properly translated to candidates, include questions regarding cultural understanding in your candidate experience surveys. Collect feedback on if the interview process gave candidates a clear understanding of your culture, or if they were left with an image that’s cloudy at best.
3. Assess Dissonance in Mission and Values
Conveying your company’s mission and values is just as important as conveying company culture. Across both the United States and Europe, 79% of candidates consider a company’s mission before applying, and 73% wouldn’t even apply to a company unless its values aligned with their own.
Candidates want to finish the hiring process feeling even more affirmed that your company aligns with what they care about most. This means that all aspects of recruiting, from the language in the job posting to the discussions in the interviews, must speak to your mission and values.
Imagine a candidate reads all about your company’s mission and values on your website, yet the discussions in the interview stage entirely conflict with what they read online. By asking for candidate feedback on how coherently your hiring process conveyed your mission and values, you avoid losing talent due to an inconsistent message.
Hold Yourself Accountable for the Candidate Relationship
Cultivating candidate relationships becomes even harder without a way to gauge if your efforts actually make a difference. That’s where candidate experience surveys come in.
When hiring teams collect ongoing feedback, everyone wins: candidates enjoy their hiring journey and feel that their opinions are valued, and recruiters stand out with a high-quality recruitment process backed by reliable insights.
Interested in taking your candidate relationships to the next level? You’re in luck. GoodTime Hire’s new feature, Candidate Pulse, collects feedback from candidates at every step to continuously improve your interview process—and your candidate relationships.
Learn more about Candidate Pulse here.
