No matter how much time and energy you dedicate to your recruiting efforts, opening yourself up to feedback from candidates can be a little intimidating. Will they expose your biggest flaws and embarrass you and your colleagues? There’s a chance that these things will happen, but the rewards of getting honest feedback from candidates are so much greater than the risks.
At Greenhouse, we treasure candidate feedback, and it's especially important to me as Director of Talent Acquisition. I'd like to share why Greenhouse decided to collect candidate feedback, how we’ve measured the somewhat tricky data point of “candidate experience,” and what we’ve done with the results.
Part 1: Deciding on our recruiting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
At Greenhouse, we spend a lot of time thinking about recruiting, so we wanted to identify the most effective ways to measure our recruiting team’s success. This topic was so important to me as Director of Talent Acquisition that I led the initiative to define our recruiting key performance indicators (KPIs). We now track ourselves against these KPIs and regularly report on them to senior leadership.
When we were developing these KPIs, there were two sides of the coin in the middle of the hiring pipeline: candidate throughput and process quality. We relied on source to close days to measure our process speed, but realized that it was important to develop a Net Promoter Score for one of our key customers: candidates. (A Net Promoter Score is a way of determining someone’s likelihood of recommending you to a friend or colleague—it measures how satisfied your customers are.) In order to get regular feedback from candidates, we decided to track candidate survey results quarter over quarter.
We do this in two ways. First, we make use of the candidate survey tool that's programmable through Greenhouse. We automatically send the survey (see screenshot below) to anyone who makes it to the face-to-face interview stage one week after their interview, regardless of whether an offer is extended. All interviewees receive the same set of questions, designed to gather their unbiased input on the interview process. Second, we have an email template that recruiters send to candidates after their onsite interview asking candidates to leave feedback on Glassdoor about their experience.
Part 2: Turning data into action
About once a quarter, our team reviews the data we’ve gathered from our candidate survey and Glassdoor reviews. We look for trends and figure out how we can take that information to provide a better candidate experience, both to make sure our employer brand authentically resonates how great it is to be a Greenhouse employee, and to ensure we convert our best candidates to hires. What's great about these meetings is just how actionable they end up being. For example, there were two big changes we made based on this feedback:
1. Candidate rejections
We learned through the survey that candidates felt they had developed great relationships with their recruiters through the process, felt truly cared about, and then felt jarringly dropped if we decided not to move forward with an offer. The difference was stark, and made the rejection feel more negative than it might have if they hadn’t built such a close relationship.
As a team, we talked this through and tried to put ourselves in the candidate’s shoes. If we’d had a lot of communication with a recruiter but hadn’t been selected for a role, how would we want that information to be shared?
We decided to pilot different ways of ending the recruiting process for candidates we wouldn't be hiring for any given req. We used that information to understand what seemed to work best for our team and the candidates, which led us to our current approach. We now deliver the news over email (to prevent catching anyone by surprise or at an inopportune time), but offer to jump on a quick call if they'd like more feedback. We will then provide whatever feedback is kind, constructive, and actionable for the candidate to carry forward as they interview elsewhere. This change has been well received by both our candidates and recruiters, but would have been tough to make internally without the data to back it up.
2. Challenging tech interviews
A few candidates who had gone through our tech interviews shared that they didn't find them very challenging. Our VP of Engineering and I both agreed that we wanted the interviews to be an authentic representation of the challenges our engineers face every day at Greenhouse, but at the same time, we didn’t want to fabricate a tough interview simply to stump candidates. Up until that point, we hadn’t designed an interview that was challenging for all levels of candidates—junior engineers found it challenging, but senior engineers did not.
In this case, the survey results acted as a starting point for us. From there, our lead tech recruiters reached out to engineers who had turned down our offers to learn more detail. Fortunately, we had interviewed some really great people who were happy to help. This feedback allowed us to kick off a project to completely revamp our tech interviews. Now more senior engineers will be able to progress further on certain technical challenges than more junior candidates, but everyone will find it challenging. This should offer a more tailored and scalable process rather than the one-size-fits-all model we’d been using before.
Part 3: An unexpected benefit
I’ve realized over time that there's one more interesting benefit to soliciting candidate feedback—it helps provide transparency into the recruiting team for senior leadership and provides a platform for collaboration. Right now, our CEO, Daniel Chait, responds to almost all Glassdoor reviews, but particularly those that are less than favorable.
When a more constructive interview review pops up, it gives us a chance to collaborate on our process. It has often served as a great way for me to either highlight initiatives we already have underway to address the concern, or to work together with Daniel to see if we can find a solution to prevent the same thing from happening again. It's been a constructive way to develop our working relationship, provide transparency into our teams’ work, and collaborate on challenges together.
Conclusion
In short, I'd highly recommend systematically collecting candidate feedback on your process. The data it provides helps push through changes that would otherwise be based on gut instinct or anecdotal evidence. A common concern is that a disproportionate amount of negative feedback will come in from disgruntled interview participants. In fact, we see the opposite! Across Greenhouse customers who are using the in-app survey, 74% of candidates respond favorably to the question “Overall, my interview experience was a positive one.” This is a great benchmark to use for your own survey results!
And, for all the candidates reading this: thank you for your feedback! We really do use it to continually improve!
Want to learn more about how Greenhouse collects and measures candidate feedback? Download our eBook, The 5 Recruiting Key Performance Indicators, to learn more.
