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Written by Nathan Hewitt

How to reduce candidate dropout by measuring and boosting candidate experience

How to measure candidate experience | Sapia Ai candidate experience software

Candidate experience: Everybody’s talking about it, few companies are actively investing in it.

According to a Sapia-sponsored Aptitude Research report from earlier this year, 68% of companies admit they have no plans to address the interview portion of their candidate experience throughout 2022 and 2023. Despite this, 50% of these companies know they’re losing talent due to their application and interview processes. What’s more, according to Forbes, companies that prioritize candidate experience can see their average quality-of-hire improve by 70%.

Why the unwillingness to address such an important facet of recruitment? In most cases, the teams responsible for enacting change to candidate experience are steeped in the everyday throes of talent acquisition, and don’t have time right now to examine their processes. Statistically speaking, this is probably where you’re at. Totally understandable; the 2023 labor market is tough. If your house is on fire, you’re probably not focussed on how well you treat the visitors at your doorstep.

Recently, on our Pink Squirrels! podcast, we sat down with Lars van Wieren, CEO at Starred, a candidate experience measurement tool. Lars offered some practical tips on getting started with candidate experience: Benchmarking it, measuring it at different stages of the process, and setting your business up to review and act on the findings.

Step 1: Benchmark your candidate experience

As the saying goes, what gets measured, gets managed. Lars recommends starting with a basic benchmark for your candidate experience. This need not be difficult, and you don’t necessarily need a fancy tool to start gathering these data.

Simply ask your candidates: How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague? This is, in essence, a Net Performer Score (NPS) question, and the scale (1 to 10) should reflect that.

The impact of useful candidate experience | Sapia.ai candidate experience software

Ideally, you should be gathering feedback on your candidate experience at each stage of the application process, but to begin with, ask the question at the very end. And to get the best, least-biased data, you need to ask all applicants whether or not they’ve been shortlisted or hired – if you only ask those who have been shortlisted, or the few people who have been successful, you’re likely to get magnanimous results that don’t reflect your true candidate experience.

The NPS tracking question is easily configurable and embeddable into automated emails, meaning it can be set up through your ATS with little additional work.

When you begin to analyze the data, keep things simple: Dump the data into a spreadsheet, and look at your average numbers. If your score is below 0, you’ve got work to do – if it’s 0 to +30, you’re doing well. 30+ and over, well done!

(If you’re reading this, it’s probably not likely that you’ll get a 30+ score on the first go-round. That’s okay – the goal is to find out how much work you’ve got to do.)

The benefit of benchmarking NPS is that it gives your business a single, easy-to-understand proxy for the health of your candidate experience. Once you’ve got the number, you can start to make small changes to your application experience and see how that affects the overall number.

For example, you might consider making the following changes to improve your candidate experience:

  • Maybe we don’t need to ask for cover letters. Most candidates don’t like writing them (statistically speaking), and they’re a time-suck for our team.
  • Maybe we can shorten the content on our careers page. It’s long, and difficult to navigate.
  • Maybe we should consider using Easy Apply functionality.
  • Maybe we are running too many interviews in our process. Let’s do fewer, and see how that works.

At the same time, you might consider looking at your candidate abandonment rate – we’ve got a post on measuring and improving it here. Candidate experience scores and abandonment rates are almost always linked. Improve one, you improve the other.

Step 2: Gather more data on each step of your job application process

Our joint report with Aptitude Research uncovered some interesting data on the importance of two-way feedback between candidates and employers.

Gathering and acting on mutual feedback:

  • Boosts quality of hire from 36 to 58%, on average
  • Boosts candidate experience from 34 to 44%, on average
  • Improves first-year retention from 35 to 50%, on average

Feedback is critical. And, to make it as accurate and indicative as possible, your feedback should ideally be gathered at each stage of the application process: Application, screening, interviewing, assessment, offer, and rejection.

By doing this, you’ll know exactly where your candidate experience is lacking – and you can make fast, effective changes.

Multi-step candidate experience feedback may not be easy to do with your current setup, but it is relatively simple to configure if your ATS/chosen software solution has the capability.

Step 3: Get your team around the candidate experience data

Generally speaking, the task of improving candidate experience is that of your entire talent acquisition or recruitment team. But it’s a good idea to appoint an internal candidate experience champion – someone who is responsible for collating the benchmark data and regularly reporting on it.

What’s the reporting cadence? Depends on the amount of applications you have, and the length of your application process. A monthly score update check-in works best for most. Monthly measurement will likely give you an insightful trendline.

While the task of improving candidate experience is never done, it needn’t require an overhaul to your entire recruitment business. Start small, make iterative improvements over time, and focus on making at least one more candidate smile.

(P.S. Candidate experience is a natural benefit of using our Ai Smart Interviewer – in fact, more than 90% of the 2 million candidates we’ve interviewed have loved our process, and 84% of them are highly likely to recommend you to a friend or family member. Reach out to us here to find out more.)


Blog

2022 Year in Review

We’re taking a quick look behind us before we crack on with making hiring fairer for even more candidates in 2023.

Product Highlights

This year we built and upgraded 17 of our customers to our new secure platform, Edge 3; and released a host of features that have transformed our candidate and hiring team experience.

Candidate Experience

In the early part of the year we made a bunch of nifty design improvements to make Chat Interview even more intuitive. Then we added features like reminder emails, a progress bar, improved the experience of entering phone numbers for global candidates and introduced a planned delay in sending My Insights profiles.

In the world of video, we enabled customers to use standalone Video Interviews, and added some smaller changes like improving the compression of our video platform, and adding the ability for hiring teams to use pre-recorded videos to ask questions or play scenarios to candidates.

Hiring Team Experience

After we completely rebuilt our platform to make it more secure, user friendly and flexible; we continued to improve the experience for hiring teams with features like optimizing Talent Insights on mobile devices; improving ease of access while maintaining security with ‘remember this device’; and improving candidate search and management.

Insights

Alongside a number of additions to our people insights product, Discover Insights, our new Integrations dashboard taps into valuable data from ATS’s to give integrated customers a holistic view of candidate experience, efficiency and inclusivity along the hiring journey.

Partnerships & Integrations

Our Integration Warriors did us proud this year. We completed 7 new ATS integrations, enabling a seamless candidate and user experience for customers of SmartRecruiters, Workday, SuccessFactors, eArcu, Greenhouse, PageUp and Avature.

We were also accepted into the Crown Commercial Service Marketplace, making it easy for UK government departments to access our offering; and we continued to work with some of the largest RPO partners globally to help transform the hiring process of some incredible brands.

Security

Security and compliance are always a priority at Sapia. With Edge 3 came multi-region data hosting, more secure login features, and user hierarchies to ensure secure storage and access to candidate data.

And as a gift to round out the year, our auditor AssuranceLab completed our SOC 2 Type 2 surveillance, and we’re on track for successful accreditation, with a report available in Q1 2023.

Looking forward to 2023

Next year brings new challenges as we’ll continue to improve our offering while expanding our customer base globally.

On the horizon are some exciting improvements to Talent Insights; a host of new integrations including Workable, iCIMS, Oracle, Cornerstone, Bullhorn, Lever, Jobvite, JazzHR… and one release that we’re not quite ready to announce just yet.

Let’s just say it’ll be muy, muy grande, et très excitant!

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Blog

11 Essential Things to Know About Employee Turnover – Infographic

Do you know how much employee turnover costs your organisation? And how much you could save by improving your retention?

Only 28% of organisations can answer ‘Yes’ to these two questions!

For everyone else, it’s a daunting dilemma that’s often swept under the carpet. But that’s obviously not going to solve the problem.

If you really want to do something about your turnover issue, the first step is to fully understand it.

So, we have highlighted the 11 essential things you need to know about employee turnover in this handy infographic!

All the facts in the infographic are hand-picked from our white paper ‘Employee Turnover: The hidden cost crippling business’.

The paper explores virtually every aspect of turnover, including the best metrics to monitor, costs to include when you calculate your turnover costs, and how to go about combating the issue before it gets out of hand.

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Blog

Why video screening will kill your D&I star

Right now video screening is the solution of choice for many, given the challenges of recruiting during the pandemic. Every day I’m asked about video solutions, and every week there seems to be a new video solution for hiring.

This isn’t people simply switching to Zoom, but rather embracing AI  video platforms where you are judged by algorithms. Often algorithms crawl these videos to identify top candidates. This is not great. In fact, it’s horrifying. Not all video interviews are bad, given the pandemic it’s often become a necessity as a default for face-to-face interviews in the final stages of a recruitment process. But when it comes to top-of-the-funnel screening with first interviews, video interviews lead to biased outcomes.

Put simply, image and video recognition is built to favour white faces. In the documentary Coded Bias an M.I.T. Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini found that the algorithm couldn’t detect her face–until she put on a white mask. There are hundreds of validated research findings which confirm this.

Video Screening

Video invites judgement. It adds stress to the candidate with added pressure around hair and makeup, picking the right fake backdrop (yes, there are hundreds of advice columns on this), and practising and rehearsing your answers until you nail the recording. It turns a simple interview into a small theatre production.

Not everyone is comfortable on video, most especially introverts, people with autism, and people who feel marginalised. These factors do not influence or speak to a person’s ability to do a job, but by using video as part of the interview process they are put at a deep disadvantage. What percentage of people are you excluding just by using video?

Chat is a better option. It solves the challenges of remote interviews while being inclusive.

Try it for yourself, we’ll send you real results. 

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