Recruitment Process Feedback - 9 Tips To Help You Get The Most From Your Feedback Process When hiring new talent, it's clear that the recruitment and on-boarding process can be a costly exercise if it goes wrong. The thought of a new starter quitting after two weeks on the job because 'the role's not what they expected' is enough to make most professional recruiters cringe. Why then do so few organisations take the time they need to put an effective recruitment process feedback system in place to ensure the recruitment process is as effective as it should be?

Below are 9 tips to help ensure your recruitment process feedback system is one to be proud of:

1. Systemise your feedback process.

Whether you're asking for feedback from job applicants or hiring managers, it's important to appoint a person to be responsible for regularly pulling off all the contact names of the people you dealt with in the prior period, and e-mailing them your survey link. When setting up a feedback process often companies spend a lot of time refining the questionnaire and not enough attention to establishing a regular invite send procedure. Invites scheduled on a monthly or fortnightly basis work best as the respondent's experience is still fresh in their minds. Ensuring regular feedback is sought also helps you to create an instant feedback loop and monitor and track how any improvements to your recruitment process have been received as changes are made.

2. Involve all stakeholders.

A common mistake is limiting the collection of feedback to just the candidates you successfully place. That's akin to only asking the people that come back for seconds on your cooking whether they enjoyed your food. You may feel great about the glowing feedback you receive, but the only way to truly improve is to listen to any negative feedback and develop plans to address these weaknesses. Your recruitment process feedback system should seek the opinions of three parties: unsuccessful job applicants, successful hires and hiring managers/clients.

3. Streamline survey length and content.

Keep the questionnaire tight, and focused on the respondent's experience. Often companies get carried away by overwhelming a respondent with 10 questions for 12-15 different sub categories when 2-3 well thought out questions on 6-7 key topics would have been sufficient. When planning the questionnaire take a moment to envisage what the end report that you want to view will look like, and then be ruthless in culling out all but the essential questions you need to know.

The key areas of the recruitment process that you should cover in your questionnaire to applicants include:

a. Source of advert / how they found you.
b. The phone and (if applicable) onsite interview process.
c. The job offer process (reasons for accepting/declining).
d. Recruitment process communications.
e. Overall satisfaction.
f. Ideas for improvement.
g. Refer a friend.

Make sure you use survey software that allows 'branching functionality' to shorten the survey and filter out respondents from viewing irrelevant questions. So, for example, the 'refer a friend' section is only viewed by satisfied respondents to your survey.

4. Collect Referrals.

If an applicant or hiring manager thinks you're done a great job, then there's nothing wrong with branching them off to another page in your survey that only your 'admirers' see and asking them if they know anyone else who you may be able to help. This is a great way to collect valuable referrals from the very people that think most highly of you.

5. Set up 'Action Alerts' to help you quickly identify major issues.

In limiting your review of feedback results to every 2 or 3 months you may miss the window of opportunity to address any problem areas and be alerted to lower levels of satisfaction regarding your recruitment service. Customer service experts will tell you that customer complaints that are dealt with quickly and professionally will result in a better outcome and a more satisfied customer than those complaints that are left to fester. As such, it is advisable to set up 'Action Alerts' in your online surveys that will instantly e-mail you if a major problem has been raised by a respondent completing your survey. For example, if a hiring manager has provided you with an overall satisfaction score of 2 out of 5 or worse, you should be alerted to that problem straight away for a quick assessment on whether you need to investigate the issue further.

6. Pre-load important 'known' data about the respondent into your reports.

If you already know basic information about a candidate or hiring manager you are about to ask for feedback from, and can easily export this information from your internal system (eg. the person's name, department, role applied for, location, gender, etc), then why force the respondent to answer these questions all over again in your survey? Thankfully good survey software makes this process easy. Preloading demographic data into a standardised format not only makes the survey shorter for the respondent but also makes it easy to drill down on your survey results come report time, as standardised data formats make it easy to group and compare data.

7. Focus on writing an effective survey invite.

One of the biggest mistakes we see with survey invites is a focus on THE COMPANY and how much THE COMPANY wants the information. Most people don't care about THE COMPANY. Instead talk about THEM and convince them that they should be bothered spending their precious time providing you feedback. This also applies to the invite subject line - include words such as 'you' and 'your' in the subject line for best response rates as opposed to the traditional 'Company XYZ feedback survey'. There's more to getting survey invites right to ensure optimal response rates than you would first think, but a little extra care and attention upfront is well worth the reward of higher ongoing participation rates.

8. Offer an incentive for completion (as opposed to starting the survey).

The higher the response rate to your survey is, the more representative the data will be, and the more reliable your reports become. So it's in your interests to encourage a great response rate to your survey. Our experience in running hundreds of recruitment surveys shows there's nothing like a small incentive to help encourage completion rates. Bags of lollies, iTunes credits, gift vouchers all work - just bear in mind ease of fulfilment after the survey closes. I'm more a fan of the 'everyone that participates receives something' approach as opposed to the 'go into the draw to win one prize' approach as it taps into the powerful rule of reciprocity (we'll give you X in return for Y). One more tip - incentives do work well, but make sure you offer them to people that complete the survey (not just to those that start it).

9. Collect testimonials

It can be a great idea to use the positive comments received (hopefully!) from candidates completing your survey to help you market your organisation as an employer of choice. Insight into the candidate's positive experiences and the efficiency of your recruitment process can be of great use as content in grad program literature or for addition on the careers section of your website. Some of our clients achieve this by adding a simple tick box at the end of their surveys: 'Are you happy for us to use any appropriate comments you have made during this survey as testimonials in any future marketing materials we may produce? Yes / No.'

Please be assured that your correspondence with us is confidential. We will not divulge email addresses or any other details you provide to outside sources.

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© 2009. Written by Paul Quinn, Founder of PeoplePulse - Australia's leading online staff survey software. Paul is based in Sydney and has been running surveys and advising companies on staff and recruitment feedback processes for the last 7 years.