As a recruiter, ensuring you have Candidate Experience feedback continuously rolling in will give you the insights necessary to continuously improve the Candidate Experience and journey. There’s no room or actual need for guesswork when it comes to considering how candidates perceive their experience with you, before or after the inevitable decision.
Candidate Experience feedback: when to send out surveys
There are many important candidate touchpoints at which surveys can be sent. Here are just a few that we’ve found insightful:
- Just after you’ve received their application. Send them a survey that helps you understand their estimation of your brand on various aspects. In the same survey why not ask them if they were easily able to apply for the role and whether they found enough resources on what working at your company is like. Let them know that this matters to you, and in their mind, they’re already dealing with a company that takes them and their opinions seriously.
- After a round of interviews. Give the candidate some time to digest all the information and discussion in the interview(s) they’ve had, then ask away. Did their expectations of the role based on what they researched beforehand meet with what you discussed in person? Did they feel welcome in your working environment? Was the content of the interview specific enough to the role in question? With concrete answers to these kinds of questions you’ll soon become acutely aware of where you need to improve in order to attract the right candidates, and equally know exactly what about your culture is appealing and can be leveraged.
- Decision time. Have you made an offer and the candidate accepted it? Find out the reasons driving their decision. Or have you rejected a candidate? This is an opportune time to follow-up a kindly written, respectful notification letter with an invitation to get their feedback. They may have been rejected, but would they still recommend you as a company? If you’ve been engaged and upfront with them throughout, and the reasons for rejection are also communicated in an upfront way, then why wouldn’t they be a brand promoter?
Automate hiring signal collection at scale
If this all sounds labor-intensive, fear not — automation is your friend. Once someone lands in your ATS and moves between stages, the right triggers should be in place to collect structured hiring signals at every key moment, from application through to hire.
With Starred, this happens automatically. Each touchpoint triggers a personalized, stage-specific check-in so you’re capturing the right signals at the right time, without manual effort. A landing page thanks candidates for sharing their input, and with one click they can follow you on social media or subscribe to your newsletter, turning a feedback moment into an engagement touchpoint.
An engaged candidate is a happy candidate. And response rates reflect it.
Which candidate wouldn’t respond to a potential employer that takes their experience seriously enough to ask? Beyond the process improvements, the employer branding signal you collect along the way is one of the most underrated benefits of running automated hiring intelligence.
Candidate Experience feedback should work for everyone
In the case of the candidate journey, this means that everyone gains: your candidate feels engaged by being asked directly for their opinion, as a recruiter you learn from the candidate’s experience and improve your process. It’s about respect: the candidate put themselves out there to apply, did their research, made every effort to connect well in interviews – and then what?“We’ll be in touch.”Silence follows.(and sound of crickets)… Or you proactively engage with the candidate – I hope the advantages of doing so are clear by now. By getting feedback on their experience as a candidate, you’re making sure that no matter where they land they remain your promoter. If they get the job, they may have picked you over a number of other offers because you engaged them. If their application falls through and some way down the line they choose you as a supplier it may well be because you took them seriously as a candidate. Maybe there’s another role that will open up at your company that they will be perfect for. Building a great candidate journey with continuous feedback is an essential step towards the end goal of having a great employer brand. You obviously want the best people to work for you, so get (even) better at hiring and start listening.
Case study: Starred x Carerix
At Starred, we believe hiring decisions should be grounded in real signals, not assumptions. We’ve partnered with Carerix — an excellent provider of recruitment solutions — to bring Starred’s hiring intelligence into their clients’ recruitment toolkit. Reinald Snik, CEO at Carerix, on why it matters:
"Effective knowledge about candidates is essential to intermediaries, outsourcers, HR managers, and hiring managers. Starred's feedback tool gives our customers a powerful instrument, which offers them real-time insight into candidates."
Careermaker is an innovative Dutch recruitment agency using both Carerix and Starred. Commercial Director Jorrit Brocaar describes how they put it into practice:
"We ask our candidates for feedback after their first discovery conversation with us, after they had their first interview with our client, and once they are one month into their job."
Careermaker also collects input from the hiring company at each of those touchpoints. As Brocaar puts it: "This gives us concrete insights into how good we are at our job: aligning our candidates' needs and values with those of our clients and vice versa."
Structured hiring signals, collected at the right moments and from every party in the process, are what turn a candidate journey into a source of competitive intelligence. Automate the collection, and the insights keep giving.
If you’re in recruitment or talent acquisition and you're not yet collecting structured hiring signals — from candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters — there’s a lot going to waste.
