How to use data to evaluate the candidate experience?

"You only manage well what you measure" - Peter Drucker

If you decide to invest in the candidate experience, make sure you have the right analytics system in place !

There are indeed many metrics you can use to track improvements to your candidate experience such as :

• The conversion rate of the career site
• The number of abandoned applications
• The rate of accepted offers
• The database engagement rate
• The number of reviews (positive and negative) on Glassdoor

These KPIs are a great starting point, but to assess what is and isn't working, and why, you need operational and experiential data.

Effectively measure the candidate experience of your career site

Operational data is about results:

- your time-to-hire (time to hire),

- your cost-per-hire (cost of a hire),

- the conversion rate of your talent pipeline,

Experiential data focuses on what influences these results:

- the traffic on your career site, the data related to your recruitment funnel,

- the unsubscribe rate to your newsletters,

- the attendance rate at events, the performance of your campaigns, etc.

Combined with qualitative data collected from candidates, this information will help you identify flaws in your candidate experience...and fix them.

An indicator to watch out for : the TPS

The TPS, or Talent Promoter Score, is an indicator used to measure the likelihood that a candidate will recommend your company to others.

Thus, it is a indicator of their satisfaction and their willingness to promote your company's employer brand without being specifically prompted.

If you can turn your candidates into ambassadors for your employer brand, you are more than likely providing an optimal candidate experience.

In fact, their interactions with your company have been so positive that they want to share them spontaneously.

How to measure your GST ?

To measure your GST, send a simple questionnaire to your candidates asking them how likely they are to recommend your company to their friends (on a scale of 0 to 10).

You can then analyze the results :

• Detractor candidates: Candidates who select scores of 0-4 are considered detractors. This means they are likely to share their bad experience and therefore damage your employer brand.
• Passive candidates: Candidates who select scores of 5 to 8 are considered passive. They do not have a strong enough opinion of your brand to influence it positively or negatively.
• Promoter candidates: Candidates who select scores between 9 and 10 are considered promoters, meaning they are willing to promote your employer brand.

If your candidate experience improves, you should see an increase in promoters over time.

Also, surveys to measure your GST can be combined with tools like Hubspot, allowing you to add more refined scoring to your candidate experience.