Any successful strategy leaves room for continual improvement and evolution. Creating opportunities for candidates to provide feedback provides a platform for candid reviews, and helps talent acquisition teams continually enhance the recruiting experience. Follow the checklist below to most effectively measure the candidate experience and understand how potential new hires view your company.

1. Survey candidates post-interview process

Create a brief, anonymous survey to send at the end of the hiring process to gain honest insight in your company’s interview experience. Circulate a quarterly report with the summarized data, to keep stakeholders informed on candidates’ reviews.

Where to start: Create a five to eight question survey using a tool like Survey Monkey to capture and summarize candidate feedback.

2. Survey both candidates who accepted and rejected your offers

Survey every candidate who went through your interview process, whether they accepted or rejected your offers. This will give you the most well-rounded insight into what is working and where you can improve your candidate experience strategy.

Where to start: Automate candidate surveys as part of your candidate communication strategy workflow. If you discover you aren’t receiving the volume of responses to gather the data you need, consider incentivizing the survey, by holding a monthly gift card drawing for a randomly chosen applicant.

3. Survey candidates throughout the interview process

An alternative to surveying candidates at the end of the process is to measure the candidate experience in real-time. This will help you address issues as candidates progress throughout the process, and you can can intervene to resolve any potential negative experiences.

Where to start: After every stage in the interview process, do a quick check-in with each candidate and send them a few follow-up questions as an on-going pulse check.

4. Include key questions

To keep candidates engaged and more likely to complete your survey, only ask the questions that are most important to your talent acquisition goals.

Where to start: The following are sample questions that can help form your survey content.

  • Was the position clearly explained to you throughout the process?
  • How was the communication throughout the process?
  • How was your in-person interview experience?
  • Would you refer your friends or family to apply for a job?
  • What was your primary motivation for applying to our company?

5. Measure feedback on third-party sites

To gain insight into the full candidate experience, include third-party feedback in your measurement strategy, including reviews on Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Indeed and social media. This will give you insight into what candidates are telling others about your company.

Where to start: Set up Google Alerts for your company, and implement a free social media monitoring service such as Hootsuite or Buffer.