Top Tips on Gathering Candidate Feedback – and why it’s a great idea to do so.

With competition in the recruitment industry remaining fierce it is crucial to ensure your recruiters are regularly interacting with your candidates. Analysing candidate feedback can help your company meet internal gold standards and drive service improvements to provide candidates with the best possible recruitment experience.

One of the best ways your agency can develop how it engages with candidates is to ensure recruiters regularly ask them, placed or not, for feedback. Job seekers have numerous vacancy details at their fingertips and many recruitment agencies to choose from. With savvier job seekers agencies must be on top of their service, constantly looking for ways to improve candidate interaction and make sure their candidates are happy.

So what can you do to engage your candidates in order to gain feedback on your service offering? Here is our checklist:

# Monthly Surveys

– Surveys are a great way of interacting with candidates. Surveys can be conducted based on specific workflows and stages of the process. For example, send surveys to recently placed candidates requesting feedback on the application process along with feedback on their new job. Alternatively, ask for participation in a survey from those not placed to find out how your recruiters are handling the rejection process. This is a great way to find out how you can improve next time. Are your recruiters even informing candidates if they aren’t selected for a role?

It is crucial to have a consistent and respectful rejection process in order to build long-term relationships. Your recruiter may not have placed that candidate today, but in six months’ time they may have the perfect job for them. 

# Comment Cards

– These are great for engaging first-time candidates. Display cards in your office and ask candidates to complete them after their first interview. Ask how they felt they were treated, how you can improve and what services they would like to see next time.

# LinkedIn Recommendations

– This is all down to the individual recruiter. It is important they have a LinkedIn profile professionally representing their role within your agency. For many candidates, LinkedIn has become the ‘go to’ site prior to any interview. Not having a profile, or having a profile with little to no content or an unprofessional photo, can give a bad first impression of the company and the recruiter.

Rather than reaching out blindly to candidates, your recruiters will gain far more responses with a good LinkedIn profile backed up by recommendations from successfully placed candidates.

It is important your recruiters are selective when asking for recommendations. There’s no need to ask everyone they work with for recommendations, focusing on their A-star candidates can be far more beneficial. Understanding the importance of recommendations on LinkedIn will help your agency build a healthy and professional online profile. 

# Google+ and Facebook reviews

– Has your recruitment agency got a company page on these social media sites? If so, encourage and incentivise candidates to leave a review. Perhaps you can run monthly competitions to encourage candidates to provide feedback.

Creating a great impression first time around will ensure your candidates come back to you time and time again, trusting your brand and every individual recruiter. While you may not get positive feedback every time, all feedback is good for building a better candidate experience.