GoodTime
Product
Platform
Solutions
Integrations
Resources
Company
Pricing
Search
Sign In
Get a Demo

Tag: Candidate Experience

15 Essential Candidate Experience Survey Questions

Posted on by Rachel Heller

The foundation of every successful relationship is clear communication, and recruiter-candidate relationships are no different. If you’re not asking candidates for feedback, you’re relying on guesswork when it comes to connecting with candidates in a meaningful way. That’s the magic of candidate experience survey questions.

These surveys take the ambiguity out of creating candidate relationships by allowing you to gather feedback on your hiring efforts. Armed with genuine input straight from the most reliable source—the candidates—you’ll be able to fine-tune your recruiting to ensure each and every candidate has a winning candidate experience.

When constructing your surveys, making them anonymous is the best way to encourage honest opinions. Candidates want to secure a job, and a lack of anonymity pressures them into designing responses that provide a better shot at an offer.

Ready to create a stronger connection with candidates? Here are 15 candidate experience survey questions to inform your efforts in crafting compelling candidate relationships.

Unlock 2025’s top hiring strategies: Insights from 500+ TA leaders

Be the first to uncover deep hiring insights specific to your sector — straight from the highest-performing TA teams.

Get the report

Open-Ended Candidate Experience Survey Questions

With open-ended questions, candidates can express their opinions in as much detail as they want. While the qualitative nature of this candidate feedback is a bit difficult to structurally analyze, the richness in responses is a significant positive.

Candidates can respond to your questions in their own way, allowing for an endless range of answers. Because of the infinite possibilities of open-ended questions, you’ll receive candidate feedback on unexpected aspects of the candidate relationship that you hadn’t previously considered.

Be cognizant of how many open-ended questions you include in each of your candidate experience surveys. Including too many questions creates surveys that are much too time-consuming for candidates to complete.

Examples of Open-Ended Questions

  1. How well were you able to connect with your interviewers? Please describe.
  2. How would you describe the overall experience with your interviewers?
  3. How would you describe the speed and efficiency of our hiring process?
  4. What are two things we could do to improve our hiring process?
  5. What were your two favorite aspects of our hiring process?
  6. Would you consider applying for a job at [your organization] again? Why or why not?
  7. Based on your experience, is [your organization] a place you would like to work? Why or why not?

Likert Scale Candidate Experience Survey Questions

Likert scale questions provide a bit more structure to data gathering and analysis. These questions ask candidates to evaluate their attitudes on a statement and select a rating on a scale from one extreme to another. Typically, “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” are at opposite ends of the likert scale.

Based on the sentiment that candidates select for each statement, hiring teams can assess the candidate feedback and zero in on problematic and successful areas of the candidate relationship.  

While open-ended questions generate rich insights, most candidates won’t want to spend time on a survey where all of the questions require typed-out responses. If you add a healthy dose of likert scale questions into the mix, your survey completion rates are bound to increase.

Examples of Likert Scale Questions

  1. My interviewers were knowledgeable.
  2. My interviews made me feel comfortable.
  3. I felt represented in my interviewer panel.
  4. The hiring process gave me a thorough understanding of [your organization]’s culture.
  5. I knew what to expect at each stage of the hiring process.
  6. The hiring process was quick.
  7. Recruiters communicated with me in a timely manner.
  8. Based on my experience, [your organization] is a company I would like to work for.

Join a community just for talent pros

GoodTime Talent Innovators is an online community for TA professionals to engage in discussions, network with one another, and discover exclusive events.

Join now

Do You Really Know How Candidates Feel?

When it comes to cultivating strong relationships with candidates, putting effort into creating positive experiences is only half the battle. Candidates must also feel that they’ve formed a connection with your brand and your hiring team, or else you’ve created no candidate relationship at all.

Stop making assumptions about your relationships with candidates and start gathering genuine insights with candidate experience surveys. (Your candidates will thank you for it.)

If you want to understand the ins and outs of each candidate’s experience, GoodTime’s interview scheduling software’s got you covered.

Learn how Hire’s new feature, Candidate Pulse, gathers invaluable candidate insights to take the candidate relationship to the next level.

3 Ways to Elevate the Candidate Relationship with Interview Feedback

Posted on by Rachel Heller

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.

9 Ways to Lead with Empathy in Your Hiring Process

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Forming connections with candidates is the future of attracting, winning, and retaining top talent. In fact, in our 2022 Hiring Insights Report, 46% of HR and talent leaders agreed that creating meaningful relationships with candidates is now non-negotiable. So, how do you form these bonds? Connecting with candidates all boils down to your ability to recruit with empathy.

Recruiters that put their best empathetic foot forward possess a keen understanding and awareness for how candidates experience the job seeking and interviewing process. Empathetic recruiters take this understanding and action on it to create a hiring process that attracts great candidates and shows that their hiring team cares.

Empathy is critical to the foundation of any relationship, including the connection between recruiters and candidates. Here are nine ways to recruit with empathy.

1. Understand That Life Happens

Everyone deals with their own unique stressors. You never truly know what’s going on in someone’s life, especially when it comes to candidates. Remember to handle candidates with a heightened sense of understanding. 

This isn’t to say that you should tolerate candidates ghosting you mid-interview process. However, if a candidate needs to reschedule an interview, recognize that life happens. Respond back from a place rooted in empathy, and provide them with the flexibility to meet with you at an alternative time.

2. Be Considerate of Virtual Candidates

Remote interviewing comes with an abundance of benefits for both interviewers and candidates. However, it also opens the door for frustrating complications to arise on the candidate side. 

Experiencing Wi-Fi issues and other disturbances in the middle of an interview is a virtual candidate’s worst nightmare. If a candidate’s in the middle of grappling with untimely interruptions, they’ll more than appreciate patience and reassurance from their recruiter. 

3. Small Talk Goes a Long Way

With candidates interviewing at multiple companies and receiving a handful of offers, it can feel difficult to stand out from the crowd. Want to know one crucial way to differentiate your hiring process? It’s incredibly easy, yet few recruiters put it in practice: talking to candidates like they’re humans. 

No matter how many interviews a candidate’s sat through, interviewing is an all-around nerve-wracking experience. Opening the conversation with light and easy small talk goes a long way in easing the tension and making candidates feel comfortable. With less stress on their shoulders, they’ll interview to the best of their ability.

4. View the Recruiter-candidate Relationship as Mutual

When recruiters operate with the sole purpose of turning applicants into new hires, their relationships with candidates become purely transactional. Candidates want to genuinely connect with your recruitment team, and navigating your hiring process with this transactional mindset is a surefire way to push them away.

Spend time nurturing the recruiter-candidate relationship. Find out what candidates want in a role—not just what they can offer your company. After all, you want future employees to enjoy their jobs.

5. Give Candidates a Voice

As all humans do, candidates want to feel that their opinions are valued. However, despite the 68% of candidates that would like to provide feedback after an interview, 75% report rarely or never being asked for their opinions. Let your candidates be heard!

Collecting candidate feedback actively conveys that you appreciate the input of candidates. Better yet, it also allows you to continuously reengineer your hiring process to best suit the needs and expectations of applicants.

6. Practice Active Listening

Meaningful communication is founded on active listening. Learn to live by the 70/30 Rule of Communication. To put this rule in action, aim to listen 70% of the time and speak 30% of the time when in conversation with a candidate.

And yes, active listening really does make a difference. When you listen for the content and feeling behind a candidate’s words, rather than waiting for your chance to respond, you build trust and rapport with your candidates. In turn, candidates will be more willing to fully express themselves.

7. Honesty Is the Best Policy

Applicants want to know what it’s like to work for your company from the very beginning of the interview process. In fact, 39% of candidates expect to learn about compensation in the initial job post. 

You’ll make it much easier for candidates if you’re open from the get-go on potential deal breakers, such as salary. Interviewing is time-consuming, so don’t make candidates wait until the final round to find out that they’ve wasted time on a position that offers less money than what they’re looking for.

8. Interview at a Time That Works for Candidates

In today’s candidate-driven market, don’t expect candidates to move their schedules around to suit your calendar. Instead, ask for their availability. Show that you respect their time by letting them schedule their interviews for whenever works best for their calendars.  

As we’ve said, your candidates are probably interviewing for multiple other companies. They’re more likely to remember and value your interview process if you act with flexibility and understanding. 

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

Calculate Your ROI

9. Recognize That Candidates Must Do What’s Best for Them

No recruiter wants their star candidate to send them the dreaded, “I’ve decided to go in another direction” email. However, at the end of the day, candidates must stick with the career move that’s best for their future. 

When you receive this type of message, respond with grace and celebrate their win. While this might seem like a small act, you’re setting the standard for how your company interacts with candidates, regardless of if they’ve accepted an offer. Remember: your actions reflect not only you as a recruiter, but also your company’s brand.

Recruit With Empathy Using GoodTime Hire

 Empathy is a muscle that can be developed with exercise. The more you recruit with empathy, the more your muscle will bulk up.

If you want to remain competitive and stand out from the talent competition, you need recruitment tech that champions empathy and puts candidates in the driver’s seat. Look no further than GoodTime Hire.

By empowering candidates to schedule their interviews, presenting applicants with the best available interviewers, and unlocking data to continuously optimize your hiring process, Hire builds lasting connections with every single candidate.

Learn more about the power of GoodTime Hire today.

Candidate Relationship Intelligence? What’s That?

Posted on by Rachel Heller

“Candidate Relationship Intelligence.” Maybe you’ve heard the buzz around this phrase on our social media or in previous blog posts, or perhaps this is your first introduction to it. Regardless, we’re glad you’re here. If there was ever a prime time to get acquainted with Candidate Relationship Intelligence, the time is now.

In case you haven’t noticed, the hiring landscape has faced some drastic changes in the past few years. Hiring is now tough all over. The only way to succeed is to evolve your hiring methods and tools. That’s where Candidate Relationship Intelligence comes in.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s first dive into why we need Candidate Relationship Intelligence now more than ever. 

The State of Hiring

Talent teams currently stand at the intersection of multiple macro trends. For one, we face an unprecedented talent shortage that coincides with the Great Resignation. As a way to mitigate this shortage, many companies now hire remotely. Yet in turn, hiring in the absence of physical contact makes creating a positive candidate experience even more challenging. 

On top of all this, the expectations of candidates have skyrocketed. For instance, candidates now highly covet a speedy hiring process. But even more than that, candidates expect companies to transparently showcase their stance on intangible elements, such as DEIB, flexibility, employee well-being, and social good. Candidates want to learn more about an employer’s stance on those elements through forming a genuine connection with them. 

If talent teams want to win in this all-time competitive hiring market, superficial hiring tactics must be laid to rest. In our 2022 Hiring Insights Report, 46% of HR and talent leaders agreed that creating meaningful relationships with candidates is now non-negotiable. In fact, out of all the companies surveyed, the ones that implemented four or more candidate-focused hiring practices outperformed others in hiring goal attainment.

It’s clear that the future of attracting, winning, and retaining top talent is meaningful interactions. In order to hit their hiring goals, teams must utilize new tools to boost efficiency and build authentic relationships with candidates.

The Way Forward: Candidate Relationship Intelligence

The solution to connecting with candidates and beating the talent competition is none other than Candidate Relationship Intelligence. Three core pillars compose this solution. These three pillars all feed into each other to keep the Candidate Relationship Intelligence machine moving.

Pillar 1: Automation

A long time-to-hire can sour your candidate relationships and cause disengaged applicants to consider alternate opportunities. More than half of applicants will move on if they haven’t heard from an employer within two weeks of applying. 

That’s why Candidate Relationship Intelligence brings automation to the recruitment process to remove any time lag on the recruiting team and candidate side. It automates everything that goes into coordinating an interview, from simple phone interviews, all the way to complex multi-stakeholder interviews.

Pillar 2: Relationship

Creating a genuine, long lasting bond with candidates starts with having the right interviewers in each interview. A negative interviewing experience can completely shatter a candidate’s impression of your company. In fact, 44% of job seekers say that their experience in the interview stage is the most influential part of the hiring process. This makes interviewer selection and training mission critical. 

A Candidate Relationship Intelligence solution helps to ensure that each interview includes interviewers with the right skill sets, well-trained interviewers, and diversity across the interview panelists. All of these factors combine to deliver a positive interviewing experience for candidates that further nurtures their relationship with an employer and the recruiting team.

Pillar 3: Insights

Your time-to-hire and relationships with candidates won’t improve if you don’t actively measure them. That’s what makes this third and final pillar so crucial.

Candidate Relationship Intelligence empowers recruiting teams with actionable insights—such as interviewer performance and recruiting team performance—to continuously optimize their relationships and the effectiveness of each interview. With an increased visibility on your hiring process, you’ll have an even deeper understanding of the actions you need to take to hit your hiring goals.

Ignite the Power of GoodTime Hire

GoodTime Hire is the only platform that delivers Candidate Relationship Intelligence with the full power of all three pillars. There’s a reason why over 300 companies, like Slack and Spotify, look to Hire to stay ahead of the talent competition—and get to “yes” up to 70% faster.

Ready to learn more about Hire? We can make that happen.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

Calculate Your ROI

TA Teams and Candidate Relationships: Big Talk, Little Action

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Let’s start with the good news. More and more TA leaders finally recognize that to snag the best talent, forming candidate relationships is the way forward. They know that candidate-focused hiring practices must take center stage, and one-sided practices must be laid to rest.

Now…the bad news: the execution just isn’t adding up. Our 2022 Hiring Insights Report surveyed 560 TA decision makers across the U.S. to understand their perceptions of the most pressing challenges facing their teams, and what should be done to reel in top talent. The report’s data shows that yes, talent teams recognize the importance of connecting with candidates, but not enough teams actually put candidate relationships in motion—and that’s a problem. Too much talk, not enough action. 

If there was ever a time to kick relationship building into high gear, the time is now. In 2021, companies surveyed fell 50% short of their hiring goals. Failing to prioritize meaningfully connecting with candidates means bad news for your hiring goal attainment. It’s time for less saying and more doing.

Candidate Relationships in Short Supply

On the bright side, 46% of our report’s respondents agree that creating genuine relationships with candidates is more important than ever. But the positives end there.

Despite this consensus, only 36% of respondents looked to build better candidate relationships in the past 12 months, and the same percentage plan on improving these relationships in the coming months. Companies have good intentions, but struggle with taking action.

Remote workspaces do not fare any better. Among the fully-remote companies surveyed, just 25% plan to build relationships with candidates in the future. Yet if anyone should focus on relationship building, it’s them. Remote employees are more perceptible to feelings of isolation. This makes it even more important to cultivate trust and connection in a remote hiring process.

Hiring Efficiency Falters

TA leaders surveyed indicated that their main focus lies in improving the overall efficiency of their hiring process. This is a good sign; respondents agree that prompt and clear communication throughout the hiring process is most valuable to candidates, which goes hand-in-hand with an efficient process. Improved efficiency also means more time and space to focus on high-value tasks—such as authentically connecting with candidates. 

But before companies can even start to use this space for building relationships with applicants, they have a ways to go in ramping up their overall hiring efficiency. The majority of respondents—60%—say that over the past 12 months, their time-to-hire has increased. Companies that hire fast have a major advantage in keeping talent engaged enough to win them over. However, the average time-to-hire among all respondents was three weeks.

As for the time spent on administrative tasks, HR teams reportedly spend more than one-third of their time scheduling interviews. Manual, clunky interview scheduling majorly lowers the quality of a hiring process—and a candidate-recruiter relationship. 

By establishing the right processes and technology to eliminate the time spent on administrative tasks and boost hiring efficiency, TA teams can maximize their bandwidth to focus on what matters most: connecting with candidates.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

Calculate Your ROI

Disconnect in Company Culture

It’s not lost on TA teams that job seekers deeply consider company culture before accepting an offer. Nearly all (90%) companies reportedly designed their interview process to reflect their culture.

The problem? Just 53% communicate their company culture to candidates during the hiring process. In other words, 47% of companies neglect to communicate an element that is incredibly top-of-mind for candidates—and risk losing out on star applicants due to this disregard.

Candidates want to know whether a company’s mission, values, and culture align with their own beliefs. They’re quick to turn down an offer if they don’t see themselves feeling happy and welcome at your company. One of the clearest paths to forming candidate relationships is by having them feel deeply connected to your culture—yet this can’t happen if the culture isn’t communicated to them to begin with. 

Want the Latest Insights? Read the 2023 Hiring Insights Report

It’s abundantly clear that in the HR world, there’s lots of talk but little execution—and companies aren’t achieving their hiring goals as a result. Candidates are interviewing you as much as you’re interviewing them, and they expect you to put in the work to form a connection. 

For TA teams to make long-lasting bonds with applicants, they must pull themselves up by the bootstraps and take action. That means leveling up their efficiency to free up time to focus on candidates, and thoughtfully communicating elements of their culture to win applicants over. 

Want to catch up on the latest hiring trends? Get excited: our 2023 Hiring Insights Report is now available. 500+ HR leaders, 1,000s of real findings, 1 industry-leading report. Read the report today.

The Data Is In: Recruiters Must Connect to Compete

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Recruitment teams, let’s make one thing clear: candidates now call the shots.

In every sense of the word, we’re living in a candidate’s market. The job market is twice as competitive as it was pre-pandemic, and it’s increasingly common for candidates to end up spoiled for choice with multiple offers. To top it all off, the Great Resignation is still in full swing, as employees leave for greener pastures in droves.

In our ever-evolving hiring landscape, companies must stay in-the-know on the latest HR trends—or risk getting left in the dust. To gain an inside look on these trends and uncover how to succeed in a candidate’s market, GoodTime surveyed 560 HR, talent, and recruiting leaders across the U.S. for our 2022 Hiring Insights Report.

The findings? Companies that build genuine candidate relationships smash their hiring goals. If teams want to compete with the talent landscape, they must invest time and energy into building relationships with applicants. There’s no way around it.

Candidate Relationships Remain Paramount

When asked how they would describe the changes they’ve observed in the hiring landscape over the past 12 months, 46% of HR leaders said that the ability to create meaningful relationships with candidates has become more important than ever before. This is 1% below the top response, “the hiring landscape has become more competitive due to an increased demand for talent.”

The data shows that focusing on candidate relationships will remain of utmost importance in the future. The ability to create meaningful candidate relationships topped the list of how HR leaders expect the landscape to evolve in the next 12 months. 

Interestingly, when asked which hiring challenges they’ve faced in the past 12 months and which challenges they expect to face in the coming months, HR leaders ranked “retaining top talent” as the biggest challenge each time.

The writing’s on the wall: connecting with candidates is a key component of a successful hiring process. This won’t change anytime soon. But creating candidate relationships is as important for talent retention as it is for acquisition. Retaining talent starts from the very first moment that a candidate has a conversation with a recruiter. In order to turn candidates into long-term hires, talent teams must cultivate genuine connections with new employees from the get-go.

Say Good-bye To One-sided Hiring Practices…

If you didn’t know before, now you know: one-sided, staged hiring practices belong in the past. “Our company has ‘Bring Your Pet to Work Days!’” just doesn’t have the same pizzazz anymore. Candidates expect something deeper.

We asked our report’s respondents what, if anything, does their organization currently do to build a meaningful relationship with candidates throughout the recruiting process. Out of the seven items to choose from, the first seven are candidate-focused hiring practices, and the last two—office tours and free lunch—are outdated methods. Unsurprisingly, we found that less than 35% of companies partake in the last two methods.

The vast majority of companies now realize that one-sided practices don’t generate offer acceptances. Flashy perks hold no value in today’s Distance Economy. (Finally, we can put the in-office ping pong table to rest.) Emphasizing genuine connection, transparency, adaptability, and candidate well-being transforms candidates into new hires.

…And Say Hello To Candidate-focused Methods

It’s no secret that hiring in today’s intensely competitive labor market can feel like an uphill battle. If you want to give your hiring goal attainment a major boost, look no further than candidate-focused hiring practices. 

Among the report’s respondents, we found a notably positive correlation between the number of candidate-focused hiring practices implemented and the percentage of hiring goals met. Specifically, companies implementing seven candidate-focused practices from the previous list saw a 17.7% gain in attaining their hiring goals. 

In fact, as long as companies implemented at least four candidate relationship best practices from the list, they outperformed the average. The business gains from creating genuine candidate relationships are very real. If you care about your bottom line, it’s time to connect.

Want the Latest Insights? Read the 2023 Hiring Insights Report

The recent changes in the hiring landscape are enough to make anyone’s head spin, but at its core, succeeding at TA in today’s world isn’t as complicated as it seems. If applicants don’t feel connected to your company, they won’t join. And if employees feel disconnected from your company, they will leave. It all boils down to connection. Candidates are people, and everyone yearns for a genuine connection. It’s only human nature.

The solution to TA is right in front of us: invest in candidate relationships as you would in any meaningful asset. You’ll be impressed with the payoff.

Want to catch up on the latest hiring trends? Get excited: our 2023 Hiring Insights Report is now available. 500+ HR leaders, 1,000s of real findings, 1 industry-leading report. Read the report today.

Recruitment Automation vs. Human Touch: How to Balance Both

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Balancing recruitment automation and human touch is much like walking a tightrope. Too much automation? Your hiring process starts to feel robotic and impersonal. Too much human touch? Your daily recruitment tasks become far too tedious and inefficient.

Reaching a perfect balance between automation and humanity is the secret to building solid relationships with candidates and maintaining the efficiency that’s needed to engage top-tier talent. So—how do you achieve the perfect balance?

Automate To Boost Human Connection

HR professionals spend a whopping 86% of their time on administrative duties. The right tech tools can slash this time in half. But while your tech automates tasks for you, should you kick your feet up and bask in your newfound free time? Of course not—you have candidates to attend to!

Recruitment process automation is only helpful to the extent that it gives your talent team more time to connect with applicants on a personal level. If you use technology to replace rather than amplify human connection, you’re doing something wrong.

As wonderful as it is to have your tech stack take care of recruitment tasks, certain human elements are incredibly hard to replicate. Take empathy, for example. 96% of employees agree that empathy makes them want to stay at a job. Displaying empathy from the first moment a future employee interacts with a recruiter is crucial, and true empathy simply doesn’t have a technological equivalent.

Far too often, people view HR tech tools as a threat to human connection. But in reality, it isn’t the tools that are threats. The ways that some people use the tools are the true threats to connection. Talent professionals must recognize that technology can free up time for their teams to focus on what matters: building empathy, trust, and transparency to create better candidate relationships.

Leverage Talent Tech for Personalization

Personalization goes a long way in making people feel special, and the same applies to candidates. It’s the reason why people love personalized music recommendations. We want to feel unique, and above all, we want to feel seen. It’s only human nature.

While recruiting tech can’t replicate all the human elements that a successful hiring process requires, technology that enables personalization adds a human touch. For instance, custom email templates that automatically generate personalized communications for each candidate foster meaningful connections with minimal effort. The companies that succeed in making their automation feel less automated are the ones that come out on top.

Use the free time that automation provides to further emphasize personalization and elevate the recruiter-candidate relationship. Spend time jotting down more notes on relatable aspects of a candidate’s background that could translate to conversations in the interview stage (who knows—maybe you attended the same college). 

Candidate Relationships Are Human Relationships

Applicants have increasingly high expectations of your recruitment process. They expect a tech-driven hiring process to match their tech-driven lifestyle. However, candidates still want to connect with your talent team on a human-to-human level. After all, candidates are humans, too. If candidates don’t connect with your company in the process, there’s a good chance that they’ll turn down your job offer. 

Ironically, while candidates crave a personal touch throughout the hiring process, more and more candidates seek virtual work opportunities. Now that remote hiring is the norm, companies are pulling out all the stops to make hiring from across the world feel a bit less distant.

Achieving a balance between leveraging recruitment automation and human touch is the key to competing in today’s fiercely competitive market. To strike the perfect balance, treat candidate relationships the same way you would treat human relationships. Texting a friend can sustain a friendship, but you still need to connect in person once in a while. Likewise, recruitment automation can boost your hiring efficiency to impress applicants, but you still need to personally refine your connection to candidates. 

Say Hello to Candidate Relationship Intelligence

Pre-pandemic, less than half of recruiters said that they have the technology they need to build relationships with candidates. 53% wanted to emerge post-pandemic with the tools needed to improve their relationship building. Want to become one of the recruiters that rave about their tech stack? Time to level up your technology.

GoodTime Hire harnesses Candidate Relationship Intelligence to automate coordination, build relationships during interviews, and provide actionable insights to continuously improve your connections with applicants. It’s the tech of your candidate relationship-building dreams.

Learn more about how Hire can supercharge your talent acquisition team.

How to Win Top Talent With Strong Candidate Relationships

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Want to move the needle on your hiring goals? Sorry to break it to you, but cool swag and flashy benefits don’t cut it. Today’s top talent leaders focus on fostering candidate relationships. 

Recruiters had the upper hand in the recruiter-candidate relationship in the past, but not anymore. Candidates now hold all the cards in choosing where they want to go for their next career, and they’ve grown more and more selective. Job seekers won’t just accept any offer that comes their way; they expect deeper relationships and intangibles such as flexibility, transparency, and a visible commitment to DEIB.

To snag the best talent from the bunch, you must establish a genuine connection to your company’s mission, to the team, and to your recruiters. So, where do you start? 

GoodTime Account Executives John Bartsch and Siegfried Huffnagle, joined by Maria Riabukhina and Matthias Schmeißer from Beamery’s talent team, sat down to discuss the secret sauce to cultivating healthy candidate relationships. If you didn’t catch the webinar, here’s the TLDR with the key takeaways on how to better connect with candidates for hiring success.

Four Pillars of Candidate Relationships

Yes, investing time into connecting with candidates is non-negotiable for recruiters, but what do candidates actually expect from the relationship? Here are four main pillars that should comprise your candidate relationships.

Genuine Connection

While remote work has created a distance economy, candidates don’t want to feel so “distant.” Genuine connections are now more valuable than ever. In fact, 72% of candidates would reject a job offer if they didn’t feel connected to the company culture during the hiring process. Even if the salary and the job description are aligned, if candidates don’t recognize a human-to-human connection, it’s a no go. Recruiters must address candidates from a position strongly rooted in authenticity.

Transparency

To instill your recruitment process with authenticity, start by prioritizing transparency. Don’t leave candidates guessing; applicants want to know what it’s like to work for your company from the very beginning of the interview process. 39% of candidates expect to be informed about compensation in the initial job post. Besides expecting open communication surrounding compensation, candidates want potential employers to be loud and clear on their DEIB initiatives.

“People have spent the last couple years thinking about what’s most important to them, how they want to spend their time, and what their values are. People want to make sure that the time that they spend at work is aligned with that.”

— Siegfried Huffnagle, Account Executive at GoodTime

Adaptability

GoodTime found that candidates currently interview at 4x more employers than pre-pandemic — meaning that the talent competition is more intense than ever. This is largely due to the rise of remote work. As the office workspace continues to evolve, so does candidates’ ideal work arrangement. Flexible work arrangements are now at the top of job seekers’ wish lists. Companies must adapt to the work preferences of candidates, and demonstrate that adaptability throughout the company culture.

Candidate Well-being

All in all, candidates don’t want to sacrifice their well-being for their job. Sixty-two percent of employees cite well-being support as their top priority when job hunting. Work must exist in harmony with health — there’s no way around it. Recruitment teams should be prepared to openly address the efforts that their company makes in prioritizing the health and general well-being of their employees.

Boost Connections With Recruiting Tools and Techniques

Once you’ve mastered the building blocks of candidate relationships, it’s time to reel candidates in — hook, line, and sinker. Examine your hiring methods and tools and look for areas of improvement. You’ll not only enhance the relationships created from your hiring process, but also move candidates through the funnel more efficiently to get an offer in their hand.

Gather Candidate Feedback

Now that candidates are in the driver’s seat, they want more ownership and involvement in the recruitment process. For this reason, gathering candidate feedback becomes both necessary and expected. Who can speak to the quality of your hiring process better than those that experience it firsthand? By factoring in candidate feedback on your entire interview process, talent teams can ensure that their process exceeds expectations.

Build DEIB From the Studs Up

If you think you can skate by in the hiring process without highlighting your company’s DEIB efforts, think again. To align with candidate expectations, recruitment teams must present candidates with a holistic image of what their company stands for on DEIB. This translates to having the tools and strategies in place to provide this image from the very first moment that candidates sit down to interview.

“Companies that are enabling diverse and inclusive interview panels experienced a 4X increase in interviews in less than one year. This really speaks to the importance of training up your interviewers and having a broad and diverse pool.”

— John Bartsch, Account Executive at GoodTime

Prioritize Interviewer Training

How do you demonstrate a genuine commitment to DEIB? Start by training a diverse and expansive pool of potential interviewers. Widening your interviewer pool not only ensures that you’ll always have people available to interview applicants, but also cultivates a group of diverse panelists that are representative of both your company and the candidates you want to attract. Having five alternative interviewers for each interview translates to a 95% chance that one of them will be available for the time slot selected by the candidate.

Empower Your Recruiting Tech Stack

A robust tech stack seals the deal when it comes to impressing candidates. Beamery’s talent lifecycle management platform delivers meaningful insights to shape customers’ holistic talent strategy. Here at GoodTime, our Hire product uses Candidate Relationship Intelligence to automate coordination, connect with candidates, and gather actionable data.

Interested in learning all about the positive change Hire can make for your recruiting process? Say no more.

Yes, You Can High-Volume Hire AND Create Candidate Relationships

Posted on by Rachel Heller

High-volume hiring isn’t for the faint of heart. Hiring a mass amount of candidates in a short time frame AND investing the time to create bespoke candidate relationships with each potential hire? Recruitment teams must practically become superheroes to get the job done.

Recruiting coordinators should always focus on fostering strong candidate relationships, but when overwhelmed with the unique challenges that come with hiring at scale for rapidly growing companies, how can you possibly make time for candidates?

Here’s the good news: with the right strategies and software, you’ll hire at scale AND develop genuine candidate relationships in one fell swoop. 

Don’t get trapped in a cycle of tedious recruiting tasks at the expense of your candidates. Read on to discover key ways to keep the candidate relationship front and center while acing your high-volume hiring strategy. 

Grow Your Interviewer Pool

The last thing you want to deal with when hiring a large number of employees is an interviewer pool that’s much too small for your scheduling needs. Expanding this pool is an absolute must-do to guarantee that you always have quality interviewers at your fingertips.

Need further encouragement to grow your interviewer pool? Consider the cost of interviewer burnout. Our studies show that 30% of employees typically handle 70% of the interviewer load. When interviewers find themselves bogged down by heavy workloads, they can’t possibly be on their A-game to connect with candidates.

Interviewer training is the key to evenly distributing the interview load across your company’s employees. Training your interviewers might sound time consuming in the context of high-volume hiring, but have no fear: tech tools make scaling interviewer pools an effortless process.

After you train more employees in the art of interviewing, you’ll have a large group of capable interviewers with ample time to personally connect with candidates — even in the middle of chaotic high-volume recruiting seasons.

Automate Your Interview Scheduling

When you say good-bye to manual scheduling and hello to automation, everything falls into place. Suddenly you can spend more time prioritizing candidates and less time playing calendar tetris.

Automated candidate-driven scheduling streamlines your high-volume hiring and mitigates long wait times to ensure that candidates move on to the next step in the process as soon as possible. After all, recruiting coordinators are busy, but so are candidates. Candidates don’t want to wait around for someone to schedule their interview, so why not let them schedule themselves?

Allowing candidates to self-schedule their interviews based on their own calendar eliminates back-and-forth emails and conveys that you appreciate their time. That’s a win-win.

Rediscover Eligible Candidates

The best strategy when high-volume hiring: work smarter, not harder. Before you scour the job boards for qualified candidates, first identify the candidates you already have at hand that fit the criteria for a new opportunity.

Now is the time to consider previous silver or bronze-medal candidates. Just because you passed on a candidate previously doesn’t mean that you should forget about them — the timing might not have been right, another candidate might’ve narrowly beat them, or the candidate might’ve been better suited for a different position.

In addition to considering previous candidates, you can also look into current employees who are interested in switching jobs internally and talent that your hiring team connected with at professional events.

Tapping into candidates that are already on your radar gives your hiring efforts a boost by eliminating the time it takes to source and screen fresh candidates. Not only that, but reaching out to old connections promotes positive candidate relationships through the power of continuous candidate engagement.

Engage with Candidate Experience Surveys

In a perfect recruiting world, we’d suggest for you to supply each every candidate with feedback on how they performed within your hiring process. But this is the real world, and sending each candidate feedback is nearly impossible to do when hiring in mass quantities.

What is possible is sending automated candidate experience surveys to your candidates. Collecting candidate feedback through anonymous surveys provides an inside look at the current state of the candidate relationship within your hiring process, straight from the perspectives of those who know your hiring process best: your candidates. 

This is a highly effective, highly low-effort way for you to collect crucial data to improve your recruitment strategies and keep candidates engaged, all without expending valuable time and energy during your hiring frenzy. What’s better than that?

Above All: Leverage Tech When High-Volume Hiring

When filling many positions at once, it’s much too easy to get caught up in the noise and neglect to engage with your candidates. One of the worst things that you can do while trying to attract the best talent is to provide candidates with a hiring process that feels cold and impersonal.

Make every interview impactful with Candidate Relationship Intelligence. GoodTime’s high-volume recruiting software supercharges your recruiting and unlocks meaningful data so that your team gives candidates the genuine connections that they expect — every single time.

Request a demo to see how Hire creates more than just a candidate “experience.”

Culture Fit Is Dead. It’s Time to Hire for Culture Add.

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Keeping your company’s culture in mind is a must-do when recruiting for open positions, but should you really hire for culture fit? Or is hiring for culture add the new way to go?

When done right, hiring for culture fit means looking for candidates that align with the core company values and the way that things are done at an organization, making it even more likely that they would thrive in the workplace and successfully perform as new employees.

Sounds logical, right? Most recruitment teams would agree: 83% of recruiters reportedly consider culture fit to be the most important hiring factor after previous job experience. Meshing with company culture is equally significant to candidates, as more than half of job seekers say that company culture is more important than salary when it comes to being satisfied at work.

But as is the unfortunate fate for many recruiting buzzwords, culture fit has been misinterpreted and misused to the point where the concept now does more harm than good. It’s time to say good-bye to hiring for culture fit and hello to hiring for culture add.

Dangers of Hiring for Culture Fit

Culture Fit Is Difficult to Define

How well a candidate fits into a company’s culture is incredibly subjective and hard to measure. One recruiter may see a candidate as a perfect culture match, and another may have a completely different perspective.

Leaving culture fit open to interpretation makes it susceptible to misuse. What recruiters and hiring managers often end up measuring instead is how well they get along with a candidate. This is where hiring for culture fit becomes problematic.

Prioritizes Similarities When Hiring

The rumors are true: birds of a feather really do flock together. Science shows that we naturally take comfort in identifying with people who are similar to us. In a recruitment context, this means that if a candidate shares a specific characteristic or lived experience with a hiring manager, this commonality creates a bond. 

In turn, some hiring managers neglect to prioritize alignment between the company and the candidate — aka, what culture fit should really be about — and instead focus on alignment between themselves and the candidate. Hiring for culture fit turns into hiring for homogeneity, and I’m sure you can guess how this impacts DEI recruitment efforts.

Negates DEI Recruitment Principles

Selecting candidates based on how well you mesh with them goes against everything that equitable hiring stands for. What started as an attempt to hire for culture fit snowballs into a company that lacks diversity and struggles with DEI hiring practices.

Prioritizing sameness maintains the status quo and creates unconscious biases. Diverse candidates — whether this means diversity of thought or of demographic characteristics — find themselves at a disadvantage.

All in all, hiring for culture fit in this manner creates a workforce with employees that think and look the same. A truly successful company is a diverse company, where issues are tackled and innovations are created thanks to employees with a wide range of thought processes and lived experiences. 

Start Hiring for Culture Add

Stop looking for someone who simply fits your company culture and start searching for something more meaningful: culture add. 

Hiring for culture add means considering your company’s culture while looking for candidates who would enrich the culture with diverse experiences and ideas. In this way, your hiring team fosters a forward-thinking mindset by considering how adding certain perspectives and backgrounds would create a successful future for your organization. 

How to Hire for Culture Add

Assess What’s Missing from Your Organization

It’s impossible to identify candidates who would add to your company culture without first examining what your company lacks. Perhaps you don’t have enough employees who take risks and propose pie in the sky ideas, or who thrive when hyper-focused on the details of a project.

Once you’ve identified what you’re missing, your hiring team can venture forward in their search for candidates who would be successful additions.

Ask Candidates How Your Culture Can Improve

A good candidate keenly understands and appreciates your company culture. A great candidate goes against the grain and recognizes where your culture needs improvements.

If a candidate acknowledges gaps within your company culture, they’d likely be an employee who contributes to your culture with positive change and a different perspective on how to do things, instead of an employee who assimilates to how things have always been done and fits your current company image.

By hiring candidates who can recognize these gaps, your company benefits from a diversity of thought that pushes your organization forward and challenges the status quo.

Diversify Your Sourcing Channels

If you’re struggling with hiring for culture add, it might be because your talent pool is too homogeneous. Take this as a sign that you need to add diversity to your sourcing strategies.

Start by getting acquainted with online job posting platforms that cater to diverse populations, such as the Professional Diversity Network and Diversity Job Board. Posting your job openings on these websites encourages historically underrepresented groups to consider employment at your company.

You can also seek out and hold events with local chapters and associations where diverse candidates meet. This way, you’ll form meaningful candidate relationships with job seekers who could add immense value to your organization’s culture.