As we discussed in our previous blog post, providing an exemplary candidate experience is an important part of not only attracting top candidates, but also convincing them to accept your offer of employment and choose to work for your organization.
In that blog post, we discussed the role of the hiring process in the candidate experience. While the hiring process is important, what’s also important is improving the process over time.
One of the ways to accomplish that is for the officials within your company to compare notes once a position has been filled. Now, you might be tempted to feel as though your work is done at that point. After all, you hired somebody, right?
However, that is NOT the case. In addition to onboarding your new employee (a completely separate topic, by the way), you should also analyze the manner in which the new employee was hired.
And what is the best way to conduct this analysis? The best way is to solicit feedback from the candidates who just went through the hiring process.
When you analyze the process yourself, you’re analyzing what, in your mind, is a successful process. However, not everybody who went through the process considered it a successful process.
In fact, everybody who did not get hired probably did not consider it successful. And that is exactly why you should solicit their feedback.
There’s an easy, effective way that you can obtain this feedback from candidates. There are online software programs (Constant Contact and MailChimp, for instance) that will allow you to create a survey. You can also use Google Forms for this purpose.
Once you create the survey, you can email a survey link to candidates. In fact, you can make it part of your regular correspondence with candidates who participate in your hiring process.
I know what you might be thinking: “Aren’t people going to use this as an opportunity to vent and voice their displeasure because they weren’t hired?”
First, if you have candidates who don’t take the high road and proceed to trash the company, then you can feel good about not hiring them as employees. Second, you can also safely screen them out if they apply for positions in the future.
The majority of candidates will provide honest and truthful feedback. They might even feel flattered that they were asked in the first place. It could make the hiring process an even more positive experience for them.
Who knows? They might be a better fit for another position within your company in the future. If that’s the case, they’ll be more likely to apply for that position . . . and they’ll be more likely to tell their friends and colleagues about their experience in the meantime.
Keep in mind, though, that the most important part of soliciting feedback from candidates is to act upon that feedback and make improvements because of it.
Your competition is doing whatever they can to improve their candidate experience. Don’t allow them to hire the best candidates in the marketplace because you’re not improving yours.
We help support careers in one of two ways: 1. By helping to find the right opportunity when the time is right, and 2. By helping to recruit top talent for the critical needs of organizations. If this is something you would like to explore further, please send an email to stacy@thevetrecruiter.com.