The recruitment process allows the company to expand the team with valuable employees. This is an excellent opportunity to get the insight you need to create a positive candidate experience and improve the company’s image (employer brand). Conducting customer and employee satisfaction surveys is already a standard. Candidate experience surveys are slowly joining the must-do HR surveys in companies worldwide. Surveying candidates soon won’t be additional research for HR and recruiters but a regular part of the hiring process.

More information about the application process, more chance of positive candidate experience

Candidate Survey is a simple tool that allows you not only to learn about the progress of the recruitment process. Thanks to candidate experience survey results, the company will learn how to attract the most qualified candidates, improve its course, and evaluate which stages are evaluated negatively or positively. By measuring candidate experience via survey, you can get valuable feedback about:

• the whole recruiting process and the quality of the hiring process in different departments,
• hiring managers,
• the market of job seekers,
• employer brand,
• company values, communication, and culture,
• the quality of our job offer (job descriptions, career site, etc.)

Except for the ready-to-use candidate experience survey template below, we will also describe the most common questions of candidate surveys and the benefits your company can get while conducting them among job applicants.

Who to invite to complete the candidate experience survey?

The answer is simple – candidates applying for employment in our company, so all participants of the recruitment process. To be reliable, it should be directed to all – both hired and rejected candidates at various stages of recruitment, including attaching a CV on the career site and the interview process with the hiring team,

The more candidates surveyed, the better – an effective way to get results from many respondents (achieve a high response rate) is to attach a link to the feedback survey with the recruitment results.

Great Candidate Experience Survey questions

The hiring process could be complicated. If you work in the HR department or are a recruiter by yourself, you know it well. Thanks to candidate experience surveys, you can collect valuable feedback and quickly fix even poor recruitment experience. But what are the right candidate experience survey questions to ask? Here you have a few good examples:

1. How would you rate the interview process?
2. How will you evaluate the individual elements of contact with the recruiter:

• Knowledge of your CV and experience;
• Application form, job description, and company description on the job seekers platform;
• Waiting time for feedback during the recruitment process and after sending the application
• Information about what stage your application is at
• The way the appointment was made
• Recruiter’s culture
• Quality of the feedback provided during the recruiting process

3. Based on your recent recruitment to [COMPANY_NAME], please rate on a scale of 0-10 how likely it is that you would recommend applying to our company to your friends or family. (NPS question to measure the overall level of candidate satisfaction);
4. Please write what we did wrong so that we can improve the recruitment process in the future (deepening, open questions after NPS);

You can adjust this candidate experience survey questions to your recruitment process, for example, by changing the Net promoter Score question with questions about overall candidate experience (How would you rate your experience during the recruitment process?).

But even before you dig into the details of candidate experience, ensure you have all the essential information you will need to analyze results. So if your survey is not connected to HR or the recruitment system (HRM), remember to ask the basic candidate experience survey questions, like:

• At what stage did the recruitment end?
• Which department did you apply to?
• Which position did you interview for?
• How did you find out about the recruitment for this position?

Note: remember to limit the open-ended questions to a minimum. Closed questions are easier to fill in and save applicants time and effort.

When to conduct candidate experience surveys?

The timing of the Candidate Experience Survey is critical. You should know that the answers given before knowing the recruitment process results may not be candid.

That’s why we advise sending candidate experience surveys a few days after the candidate familiarizes himself with the recruitment results. The opinion is then more balanced, devoid of emotions resulting from rejection or acceptance into the position.

Candidate experience survey – benefits

Asking for opinions of candidates participating in recruitment processes can bring many benefits to your organization, the whole HR team, and a particular recruiter. Here are some of the most significant advantages:

1. Optimization of recruitment processes
2. Improvement of the employer’s image
3. Constant monitoring of recruitment evaluation
4. Very fast information about incidents

Tose cons have one thing in common – they help you get data to create a positive candidate experience and improve candidate journey.

Note: informing candidates about the recruitment process results is a must. Don’t make them wait longer than necessary to make the right decision. Too long a waiting time harms job applicants and potential employees.