Seeing your way through candidate experience

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Good afternoon and welcome to this overview of NPS and Candidate Experience.

It is early afternoon, so let's start by having everyone stand.

- Everyone that measures candidate satisfaction in one way or another - raise your right hand. Okay.
- If you use a candidate satisfaction survey that is made up of more than 10 questions - sit down.
- If you use more than one question - sit down.
- If you use Net Promoter Score stay standing, everyone else can sit.

It hasn't caught on yet but it will.

My name is Melissa Thompson and I lead Talent Acquisition at Citrix.
2 years ago, we began to uncover some disturbing practices in our recruiting process. As we mapped the candidate journey and began looking for the best ways to improve the candidate experience, one of our business leaders proposed that we use NPS (Net Promoter Score) to measure the success of the candidate process.

Earlier this year, we hosted our internal Recruiting Summit where the entire Americas and EMEA recruiting teams come together. This year our them was Experiment, Innovate, Change…
experiment - try new things
innovate - do things that others are not
change - embrace change even when it's not comfortable

With these three things in mind, we looked at ways we could move forward the candidate journey at Citrix.

Medallia, a leading internet survey company says: Net Promoter Score is an index that measures the willingness of customers (candidates in this case) to recommend a company's services to others.
NPS is used as a proxy for gauging the candidate overall satisfaction with company's service.

Quite simply, NPS is made up of three groups:
Promoters - who give a score of 9/10
Detractors - who score you between 0 and 6
Passives - who score you either 7 or 8

The Formula is quite simply % Detractors subtracted from the % Promotions

While NPS is widely used for Customer Satisfaction, as we noted from our informal poll it is not widely used yet for Candidate Satisfaction. So, how do we determine what good looks like. Well, we got an idea from Gerry Crispin who said in a Recruiting Daily Blog Post from April 2014:
NPS can range from -100 (everyone would not refer others) to 100 (everyone absolutely would refer others). Anything above 0 is considered ‘good’ and above 50 is ‘excellent’.

This is the updated communication format that we used in Q2 to survey all candidates who came onsite to interview.
Recall, that the Survey Question - Based on your candidate experience, how likely are you to recommend a friend/colleague apply for a job at Citrix?

The left hand side of the slide is the email offering candidates an opportunity to participate. The right hand side is the actual survey. In addition to the question, our survey provides an open space for comments and a checkbox for respondents to opt in to providing additional feedback. If they say yes, we then ask for a way to contact them.

We had a combination of coordinators and recruiters do calls to detractors to better understand their input. We found this was helpful in getting us to identify themes but we also found that people were incredibly surprised and pleased that their feedback was being take seriously.

This is a high level overview of the data from Q1 and Q2. Here is what we found - When it’s good – it’s very good, when it’s bad – it’s awful
Our global NPS at the end of Q2 was 38, up 2 points from Q1. Here is what we learned high level in the numbers:
1) Response rates matter
First quarter 13% response rate (277 sent),
next quarter 38% (1,723 sent)
- Net a higher response rate adds validity to the data and gives you a sample size large enough to identify trends.

2) Global differences were dramatic, let’s start from the bottom
In Q1, less than 20 people completed the survey, so the 0 NPS was not valid. The 26 is more aligned with what we would expect in a region where we still have work to do in getting the interview experience up to par.
For the EMEA data, there were changes in the support model from Q1 to Q2 and it clearly shows in the data. We aligned the coordinators in a different way, confirmed onsite interviews 24 hours in advance and all of that caused a more than 50 point swing.
In the Americas, the response rate was much the same quarter over quarter but a much higher volume of candidates completed the survey. So, 49 is closer to a realistic rate. Going back to the range from -100 to +100, remember, we defined 50 as excellent. I’m pretty happy at 49!

Early in the year, we got questions from leaders on whether candidates who take the survey but accepted the offer were providing a “halo effect”. I dug through the data and found quite the opposite, candidates that accepted the offer were as likely to provide negative feedback as positive, here is one example.

Another discover we made in the data is that passives are not always leaning toward the positive, In this example, I was surprised after reading the comment that the rating was an 8. So, those that are rating you a 7/8 are absolutely not promoters but their input is important.

These are examples of detractors who rated us 5 or 6. This is the meat of where we do the analysis and understand our opportunities to improve the candidate experience

Okay - So what did we uncover with all of our data from Q1 and Q2? Three themes:
Hiring Manager Engagement – This one comes through loud and clear in the data and reminds me of the old Breck Commercial. Someone that has a bad experience is going to tell two friends and so on. So, Hiring Managers need to be prepared for interviews and engaged throughout the hire process ensuring a positive candidate experience.
Volume of Interviews – We have heard many stories about 10+ interviews and no one thinks that is the right number, besides when can you ever get 10 people to agree on one thing.
Feedback – the third theme we have heard and my guess is you hear it to, is that candidate’s want specific feedback about why they were not selected.

To move the needle on the three key findings, we started with defining our end to end recruiting model with the acronym of CRISP. In each of the sections, we defined the role of the manager, TA and key stakeholders. Then to begin shifting manager mindset of their ownership of the recruiting process, we worked with an external vendor to develop a program called Winning Talent.

The focus of winning talent is to get managers to change behavior around things like preparing for the interview team and ensuring the interview team knows their role. It covers best practice around how many people should interview and # of interview rounds. Interestingly, we have used NPS for our Winning Talent training. The average NPS for everyone that has taken the class is in the low 90s, clear value add.

Candidates desire for specific interview feedback is not resolved yet but we’ll get there.

connect with the Marketing team! Google it! Fine the NPS Calculator…
There a lots of tools out there but I recommend first engaging with internal resources that may be using NPS on the customer side. If you don't have luck with that, reach out on some Linked In groups for others that have gone on this journey.
One thing we did was to send 2 members of the TA team to get certification - The reason for this is while NPS seems simple, it's easy to get the question wrong. Getting the question right is key to getting the output you need.

Seeing your way through candidate experience | Talent Connect Anaheim

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Seeing your way through candidate experience | Talent Connect Anaheim