Everybody’s looking for something or some way to improve candidate experience. But what if we’ve been looking for the wrong things? And trying the wrong ways to make an impact?
At ERE Digital, May 25-27, Dominik Hahn, Allianz’s global head of employer branding, strategic recruiting, and onboarding, will be revealing how his organization created new practices to implement and measure candidate experience. During his presentation, “Sweet Candidate Experiences Are Made of This: New Ways to Operationalize and Measure Candidate Experience,” Dominik will explain:
Dominik and I recently spoke about his upcoming talk. Check out this sneak peak of his presentation.
Vadim: Candidate experience has been a hot issue for many, many years now. What do companies still get wrong about it, and why?
Dominik: From what I can see, many companies are measure all sorts of hiring KPIs — like time to fill and cost per hire — but not really candidate experience. At least, not in a meaningful way. What’s especially funny about this is that a company’s sales and marketing people of course measure customer experience. And they usually do this in simple ways, like using net promoter score (NPS) or a basic five-star rating. Companies can do the same with candidate experience by asking candidates to provide a rating at critical touchpoints along the journey. It’s not rocket science.
So what are you doing at Allianz?
We implemented a system where we measure candidate experience at five touchpoints using NPS. The first part we measure is the attraction state. This could be like when a job-seeker writes us an email, and where we try to respond within 24 hours. So we track people’s satisfaction with this mailbox service.
The second phase is the application, where we ask for an NPS to gauge how people feel about the application process.
Third is the selection process, or our hiring NP. This measures the experience someone has with a recruiter and a hiring manager. We send this request for a rating after the final interview. This really helps us drill down by entity within the organization globally. We’re able to spot differences across departments and geographies.
Fourth is a pre-boarding NPS, where we measure how people feel between the tim they are hired and when they start.
And finally, the fifth stage entails an onboarding NPS, which often comes after an employee’s probation period, usually six months.
I like how you are using this approach to cover the full process. I imagine that can help identify where things might and might not be working well.
Exactly. We cover the entire funnel, as opposed to measuring overall satisfaction, which wouldn’t really be actionable.
And as you can see, we do this really simply. We ask only one question at each stage about satisfaction, along with a request for the actual NPS.
And then we do not use this data to do internal finger-pointing. We don’t say to various entities, “Hey, we see that you’re performing badly. You’re doing a shitty job.” Rather, we have regular calls with heads of recruiting to help them learn from each other based on what’s going well in certain entities across the organization.
What’s been the response to this among hiring managers and senior leaders?
We just have started this journey. Many still need to get accustomed to this approach because they haven’t been used to getting measured based on candidate experience and then getting compared against each other. And so what happens right now is that after we send quarterly results to our recruiting community and hiring managers, we sometimes get questions about what some entities are doing bad. It will take some time for people to get more used to focusing on what entities are doing well, instead.
Have you discovered anything interesting so far when looking at results?
Well, we know in general, regardless of company, that candidates often feel a lack of transparency around the hiring process. And so again, if you look to the consumer world, take Domino’s. After you place an order, you can track every nitty-gritty step of it. But in recruiting, all candidates see is that their application is in process and then rejected. They don’t see other steps. That’s an area for improvement.
This is especially the case when it comes to candidates not having enough knowledge about how interviews work and what they can do to prepare for them. To make this more transparent for our candidates, we came up with voice-based job-interview training powered by Google assistant. While this doesn’t simulate an entire real interview because many questions will vary based on function and job, we can show the part of the interview that is the same across entities. These are usually the culture questions, based on four people attributes we have at Allianz.
Want more insights from Dominik about how to improve and measure candidate experience at your company? Join him at ERE Digital, May 25-27, for “Sweet Candidate Experiences Are Made of This: New Ways to Operationalize and Measure Candidate Experience.” Register here to receive 10% off your ticket price.
