6 Reasons to Conduct new Hire Surveys

 As most of you will no doubt be aware, hiring and onboarding can be a time consuming and expensive hobby. It is also the crucial gateway to your organization and it is one of the channels through which your employer brand is communicated to both candidates and the wider market place. A high-quality hiring process will support your employer brand and make your business more attractive to candidates in the market-place. An effective hiring process will also enable you to hire the right people more of the time who are properly informed about and groomed for the role and your company, and they will also be ready to hit the ground running.

Even though the actual candidate recruitment experience is very important to the talent management process, how many of you actually measure the candidate experience during the hiring process? In my experience, most companies are focused on time-to-hire, cost-to-hire and quality-of-hire (all worthy metrics), but I also think there is space for and a requirement to measure the quality of the candidate experience, because it can bring many benefits to your organizational talent management process, for example.

Below are six reasons to conduct new hire surveys when assessing your company’s recruitment process :

1. You can establish what the candidates’ perceptions of the hiring/recruiting process were. For example, did the candidates feel comfortable throughout the selection process or did they consider any parts of the process to be inappropriate, boring, and/or overly long?

2. You can discover the key factors that draw candidates toward your organization. It also helps you to see which benefits or features seem to be most attractive in general or to particular demographics. This can educate your hiring team as to what benefits to highlight in future hiring situations for maximum talent attraction.

3.You can find out exactly how the top talent, (those who were actually hired), found you. You may find that certain recruitment sources are yielding better crops in terms of talent and you can focus your future hiring efforts in these areas for greater attraction effect.

4. The survey can also be used to establish if the actual job that the new hire is doing meets the expectations that were set during the hiring process. This can help you to see if the role is being misrepresented in any way during the hiring process, enabling you to improve your hiring process in the future by making sure candidates receive a more realistic representation of the job during the hiring process – if this is what is needed.

5. You can improve new hire retention as new hire surveys can give new starters the chance to suggest areas for improvement in the hiring process and can give them the opportunity to highlight any problems that they may be facing. Then, the company can address these issues or recruiters can lobby for them to be addressed on the candidate’s behalf.

6. The hiring process does not truly end until after the onboarding process and when the employee has been fully inducted into the organization. A new hire process should evaluate the onboarding process, giving the employee the chance to voice concerns about their own onboarding and/or outline any shortcomings. This can highlight weaknesses in your onboarding process, which can guide you, so you can apply patches and improve the process so that your new hires “stick” and are well prepared to start performing well in their new role.

And finally, in terms of execution, ideally the questions relating to the hiring process should be delivered within a couple of weeks of starting and the questions about onboarding should be delivered after about 90 days or at the end of the onboarding period.