Candidate Experience Survey

Hiring managers and team leaders are obsessed with quality of hire for good reason–after all, your goal when it comes to hiring is to find, secure, and retain the best people for the job. But even if you find the right pipelines and sources that lead to high-quality hires, you still have to ensure those individuals complete the entire application process and are excited about your brand.

Long, tedious, and cumbersome hiring processes can hurt your brand and deter quality candidates from completing the hiring process. That’s why you need to leverage candidate experience surveys. Candidate experience surveys will give you insights into the recruitment experience, so you can refine your hiring practices, improve the candidate experience, gain feedback from applicants, and secure quality hires. 

What is a candidate experience survey?

Candidate experience surveys are brief surveys that hiring managers and HR professionals conduct at different stages in the hiring process. The purpose of a candidate experience survey is to assess and improve the hiring process for applicants, while also enhancing your recruiting efforts.

The same way that you conduct customer surveys to improve the customer experience, you need to gain insights on the user experience for candidates in order to improve your hiring process and land more qualified hires. 

Candidate experience survey best practices

Here are a few best practices you can follow when conducting candidate experience surveys. 

• Pick the right questions: To get the most out of your surveys, make sure your questions: 

• Are open-ended, if they’re presented as short-response questions
• Cover a variety of aspects of the hiring process
• Are simple, clear, and to the point
• Provide space for both positive and negative feedback
• Are easy to answer, often requiring only one click to proceed

• Use seamless software: The technology you use will contribute to the user experience for candidates. Advanced hiring software, like Crosschq, provides you with the tools to fully customize, curate, and send your surveys across email, SMS, Slack, and MS Teams. Using mediocre technology that isn’t sleek, smooth, or efficient won’t just create a poor user experience for your candidates, but it will reflect poorly on your brand as a whole. 
• Send surveys to candidates you do and do not hire: There’s a good chance you will learn different things about your hiring process from candidates who do and do not get hired. Even with anonymous surveys, hired candidates may be less willing to provide negative feedback. By allowing both hired and non-hired candidates to give feedback, you’re ensuring a more diverse set of data that will allow you to better refine your hiring process. 
• Integrate surveys into different parts of the hiring process: You should integrate pre-interview surveys, post-interview surveys, pre-hire surveys, post-hire surveys, and other types of surveys that give you insight into multiple parts of the hiring process. 
• Share your feedback, good or bad: You can’t learn from your feedback if you don’t share those insights and use them to refine your recruitment approach. From the initial job description to reaching out to candidates and scheduling the interview, you want to share feedback from every aspect of the hiring process. 

Common candidate experience survey questions

Here are 10 candidate experience survey questions that can help you hit the ground running with your own survey. Keep in mind that you can and should adjust the wording or presentation to reflect the template of your survey (1-5 rating, short answers, multiple choice surveys, etc.). 

1. Were the job responsibilities clear from the job description?
2. Was it easy and straightforward to apply for the job? 
3. Did you have good communication lines with the hiring team throughout the hiring process?
4. Were our recruiters polite, professional, and helpful? 
5. Were the application steps clear and easy to follow?
6. Did we answer all of your questions adequately?
7. What made you apply for the job?
8. How satisfied are you with the hiring process?
9. Would you recommend our company to others?
10. What would you change about the hiring process (interview, application etc.)?

Candidate experience survey template

You can use any of the following question types to serve as your template. Keep in mind that with Crosschq, you can fully customize and adjust your survey questions with our easy-to-use survey integration. 

Open-ended questions:

• What would you change about the interview?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

• What was the most challenging part of applying?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

• How would you describe your experience with our recruiters and hiring managers?

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Likert scale-based questions:

On a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 meaning you strongly agree and 1 meaning you strongly disagree. 

Binary questions:

How Crosschq Can Help

Candidate experience surveys will help inform and refine your hiring process from start to finish. With Crosschq, you can curate customizable, flexible, and easy-to-use surveys for candidates at any stage of the recruiting process. We include automated skills surveys, reference check technology, and candidate satisfaction ratings, so you can track the candidate experience with ease. 

Staying on top of the candidate experience will improve your quality of hire, especially with long-term insights. You can also leverage Crosschq’s “Q” Report, which looked at 24+ million hiring decisions we’ve helped leaders make. Those decisions have contributed to radical insights about the hiring process that can help you find top talent today, like how interviews are limited and why referrals aren’t always the best way to find new candidates. 

Reach out today to request a Crosschq demo from our team.