How to Build an Amazing Candidate Experience

Delivering a great candidate experience is absolutely essential, regardless of how attractive you are as an employer. Why?

1. More Yeses

Employment decisions are surprisingly emotional. High performers have lots of options and they often choose based on the quality of the experience they had or the connections they built.

2. More Networking

If you want your team members to actively scout for talent, they need to know that the candidates they source will be treated well. Nothing shuts down networking activity faster than a bad candidate experience.

The first step in creating a better version of candidate experience is understanding your current one

Like anything in business, you can only manage candidate experience if you can measure it. You can’t base it on online reviews or anecdotes from recruiters. You need to be more systematic.

We recommend sitting down with every new hire and asking specific questions about their experience, from a place of trust and safety. Aim to do this at around the two-month mark — at that point, your recent hire is still new enough to remember their hiring experience in detail, yet there is usually enough trust and rapport established for them to feel comfortable being honest.

Talk to the people — hired and otherwise — who’ve been through your process recently

1. Determine who at your company each new(ish) hire likely feels most comfortable with. It might be their manager, it might be the person that referred them, it might be their onboarding buddy, it might be someone in HR. Make sure this person has sufficient training and maturity to maintain confidences.
   
2. Ask this person to set up a 30-minute, one-on-one meeting with the new hire at around the two-month mark.
   
3. In this meeting, have that point person walk the new hire through their entire recruiting experience, start to finish, and have them seek qualitative as well as quantitative feedback on each step. Be sure to create a safe space for the new hire to be open about any difficult or off-putting experiences.
   
4. Finally, discuss their decision to join. Ask them about their “next best option” (which might have been staying at their former employer). At the time they made the decision, how did your opportunity stack up against that next-best alternative? Prompt them with things like compensation, learning opportunities, autonomy, and flexibility.
   
5. Share this data anonymously with a trusted aggregator in HR or people operations. Use it in aggregate and avoid making it punitive (barring serious misbehaviors, of course).
   

If you make this a regular practice, you will gain huge insights — not only on your candidate experience, but also on your underlying candidate value proposition.

Final note: When someone declines your offer or steps out of the process, do the same thing I’ve outlined above: Figure out who the candidate had the closest connection to and have that person set up time with the candidate to run them through the same structured question list, though focused on their decision not to join, of course. 

If you only ask, “Why did you turn us down,” you’ll probably hear, “It’s not you, it’s me.” And that tells you basically nothing.

Happy hiring!

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

Jordan Burton has 17 years of experience as an executive assessor and interviewing trainer, working with top VC/PE investors and high-growth startups to help them hire the best of the best. He has trained thousands of founders, leaders, and investors on hiring and interviewing skills. He leads Talgo’s business development initiatives, managing relationships with Sequoia Capital, TH Lee, Palantir, Scale AI, and over 50 venture-backed startups.