A candidate experience survey enables HR professionals to gather feedback from applicants, assess the recruitment process and improve it where appropriate. A positive candidate experience strengthens your employer brand. When applicants have a good experience during the application process, they are more likely to share it with others, strengthening your reputation as an employer over time. Here, we provide an overview of candidate experience and explain how an online survey can help you understand and measure it.
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What is candidate experience and why should you measure it?
Candidate experience encompasses every interaction applicants have with a company during the recruitment process, from visiting the company website and reading the job advert, to using the online application form, receiving a job offer and being onboarded, or receiving a rejection. Interviews and, where applicable, assessment tests are particularly important candidate experience touchpoints. This is where applicants form impressions of the company and its culture, which they often share with friends and acquaintances.
A positive applicant experience, including prompt and transparent feedback for candidates, can lead them to recommend the company to friends and acquaintances. They may also leave positive employer reviews on review platforms, bringing the company to the attention of other potential applicants. It is therefore important for organisations to measure candidate experience and make the recruitment process as positive as possible, not least to avoid negative employer reviews and reputational damage.
Measuring candidate experience with an online survey
Candidate experience can be measured easily with an online survey. An applicant experience survey can be used with different groups: applicants who have accepted a job offer and were successfully recruited, as well as those who declined a position or withdrew from the application process. When a company consciously creates a positive candidate experience, applicants are more likely to give positive feedback about the recruitment process, whatever the outcome.
An online candidate experience survey should be anonymous to encourage as much honest feedback as possible from job candidates. Applicants who feel that they cannot be identified through their answers and will not face disadvantages for negative feedback are often more willing to share their experiences openly and in detail. The applicant experience questionnaire should also be as short and concise as possible, especially when it is intended for candidates who have left the recruitment process. The less time it takes to complete, the better the response rate.
Whether a LamaPoll survey is anonymous depends on several factors. Our Helpdesk overview explains what to consider when it comes to anonymity: anonymous surveys.
With LamaPoll, you can create and distribute short candidate experience questionnaires in your company’s corporate design with very little effort. The survey link is generated automatically and can, for example, be included in an email to job candidates.
Feel free to use our survey template, which is available free of charge. Select “Use” to copy the questionnaire template to your LamaPoll account and tailor it to your needs.
What are the benefits of an applicant experience survey?
An online candidate experience survey is quick to create and offers several benefits for organisations, not least because online surveys can be distributed so quickly. A survey sent shortly after an application process captures applicants’ current impressions, assessments and feelings. Open questions, such as comment fields in the questionnaire, are especially valuable because they allow candidates to share individual comments, suggestions for improvement and criticism.
Benefits of an online candidate experience survey:
- Direct, fast first-hand feedback on the application process
- Ideas for improvement, particularly through open questions such as “How could we improve our application process further?”
- A stronger employer brand over time through a positive candidate experience
Candidate experience in the context of employer branding
The experiences applicants have during the recruitment process, their candidate experience, affect the employer brand. Employer branding does not begin with onboarding, when job candidates join the company as new employees. It begins earlier, during the application process: when they read the job advert, communicate before an interview and meet interviewers in person at the company’s premises. Throughout the process, applicants form an impression of a potential employer and decide for themselves whether they can imagine taking up a role there.
It is therefore important for organisations to use data from relevant surveys to make the candidate experience as positive as possible. This strengthens the employer brand and, in turn, helps attract the best talent in the job market.
Candidate experience has a lasting impact on an organisation’s employer brand. Find out more about employer branding and relevant measures here: Employer branding: definition, examples and measures
What is LamaPoll?
LamaPoll is a survey tool for creating employee surveys and measuring employee satisfaction. You can use it to create, conduct and analyse all types of employee survey. Create your employee survey in just a few steps, apply your organisation’s corporate design and invite employees conveniently by email or via your intranet. You can quickly gain insights that help improve employee satisfaction. You can register for our survey tool free of charge and immediately conduct surveys for up to 50 employees with no obligation. If you need more responses to your online employee survey questionnaire, simply choose one of our monthly plans. You can also use our employee survey questionnaire templates and examples.
