How to Create a Candidate Experience Survey: Best Practices & Free Template 

A candidate experience survey is a series of questions sent to applicants, interviewees and new starters to understand their perspective on your recruitment process. The aim is to collect both quantitative and qualitative feedback and use it to improve the process for future candidates. 

Over time, you may look to include specific questions for certain roles or levels, but it’s a good idea to start with a candidate survey template that covers each key stage in your recruitment process:

Job application process

From the click of a single button on a recruitment board (e.g. Indeed, LinkedIn) through to submitting a complete portfolio of work, the list of ways you can apply for a role is endless. But are you attracting the right people?

Asking questions about the job application process in a candidate feedback survey allows you to check whether your expectations are reasonable. You might be putting people off by asking for too much, or perhaps your application form is difficult to complete or in a format that’s hard to read.

Interview experience

Interviews and interviewers can be brilliant or terrible. You want to be at the positive end of that scale, so use candidate feedback to find out where the challenges are:

• How good are your interviewers?
• Do they ask questions relevant to the role?
• Are candidates getting the chance to demonstrate their skills?
• Was there anything about the venue which needed to change?

Use the results to refresh interview skills training or look at room setups to make sure applicants are getting the best experience with you. 

As businesses become more aware of neurodiversity, some are also issuing interview questions in advance. Consider whether that might benefit your recruitment process too, especially if some managers have a tendency to “go rogue” and having set questions would help them stick to the script.

Communication from the recruitment team

This is an area which can get overlooked. People focus on whether the right type of candidates are applying, and how they interview on the day. The ones who get missed are those who didn’t attend the interview. So you need to explore how often that happens and why.

Perhaps the candidate found another job when they didn’t get a response from you for three weeks. Maybe their initial impression was brilliant, but the communication afterwards didn’t deliver the same feeling.
You can address this using simple ratings questions to gather feedback. Some candidate experience survey examples include:

• How satisfied were you with the timeliness of communication during the interview process?
• How connected did you feel to the business throughout the interview process? 
• How clear were you on what to expect at each stage of the interview process?

The exact question(s) you ask will depend on your organisation, but the important thing is to check whether your communication is working effectively.

Overall perception of the company

Whether they get the job or not, would people recommend you? It’s easy to forget about applicants after an interview, but candidate experience survey best practice suggests you explore this more closely.
Bad experiences can come in various forms:

• A manager who’s unprepared or running late
• Poor or no communication when you’re unsuccessful (apart from sending out a candidate feedback survey).
• Unrealistic expectations for interview assessments

Find out whether any of these are an issue for your organisation, and take the opportunity to address them for the future. 

A candidate feedback survey highlights the positive and negative aspects of your recruitment process. It tells you what you should do more and less and gives you feedback you don’t get any other way.

Many applicants will never become part of your business, but the impression you leave is critical to your long-term success. A candidate experience survey provides data you can analyse about which aspects of your process require change. Once you know that, you can make the necessary improvements to attract, and keep, the best people for your teams.

Identifying bottlenecks in the hiring process

Hiring the right people is essential for creating a successful business, yet over half of all applicants (55%) get no response when they apply for a new role. So, when you plan recruitment, do you make sure managers have the time available to do their part?

Often, it’s their workloads which negatively impact the candidate experience and it becomes a vicious circle. Their team isn’t fully staffed, so there’s more work to do. As a result, they find it hard to prioritise reviewing CVs or providing interview feedback. The process stalls, candidates get frustrated, and you lose good people so have to start again. 

Improving candidate satisfaction

Candidate satisfaction surveys work in a similar way to employee engagement surveys - you never expect everything to be brilliant. Rather, you start by understanding where you are now and look for those areas where you can improve your score and make the biggest impact. 

When you use the same candidate experience survey template for all your roles, you quickly create that picture of what’s going well and what could be better. 

Hopefully, you’ll identify you already have best practice built into some areas of your candidate experience, but it’s likely others will need work. By regularly seeking feedback and adjusting your process, however, you can make both the radical and incremental changes you need to get better ratings. 

Enhancing employer branding

A bad candidate experience can damage your reputation; a good one can enhance it. You want to make sure people walk away feeling great about your organisation, even if they don’t get the job.
A candidate feedback survey helps you identify:

• Differences between expected and actual company culture – does your social media tie up with what people are saying at interview? If it doesn’t, you may need to look at your employee experience too.
• Inconsistent messaging between job adverts, recruitment emails and interview discussions – explore options for how to improve your candidate experience and get better feedback
• Lack of clarity about your employee value proposition – if people are walking away not clear on your mission and vision, something has gone wrong along the way.

Getting your employer branding right is key to attracting the best candidates, so use your candidate experience survey to identify the areas where communication needs to change.  

Reducing negative reviews on platforms like Glassdoor

Unhappy people are more likely to make their feelings known, albeit anonymously.

Glassdoor can be a window into all sorts of niggles and complaints about businesses, so make sure your candidates aren’t using it. Instead, use your candidate feedback to highlight any issues and actively address them before people get annoyed into writing negative reviews.

Improving the quality of future hires

When you get your candidate experience right, you attract better applicants thanks to an enhanced company reputation and more positive reviews. In essence, more people want to work for you.

Candidate survey feedback allows you to address any concerns raised, helping you to:

• Understand what people value most about your interview process so you can do more of it
• Ensure applicants are given the opportunity to demonstrate their skills and knowledge, allowing you to select the best match for your positions
• Reassure them they’re doing the right thing accepting your offer, thanks to the strong communication you’ve put in place throughout the process

It also supports your employee value proposition (EVP) and drives engagement. By setting the expectation you’re open to feedback, new starters will happily share their experiences once they join, allowing you to make further improvements and create a company they want to remain with for the long-term. So can you really afford not to gather the data?

Now you know why it’s important to gather candidate feedback, here’s some guidance on how to create your candidate experience survey:

Keep it concise and relevant

Aim for five to ten questions. You don’t want to bombard people by requesting huge swathes of information, so focus on the key aspects you want to explore right now.

Use different types of questions

It’s important to gather different data in your survey responses:

• Quantitative answers: multiple choice e.g. yes/no answers, and ratings scales (1 to 5, strongly agree to strongly disagree) give you access to simple results you can analyse quickly
• Qualitative answers: open-ended responses. Candidates can write one word or ten paragraphs. This is where you build the fuller picture, as people share their experiences in more detail

Ask about specific stages of the recruitment process

As you develop a candidate experience survey template, ensure you capture all the standard recruitment stages you use. You want to know everything you’re doing supports a great experience, so reflect on the main elements which everyone goes through. 

Ensure anonymity to encourage honest feedback

You are probably using blind recruitment processes to reduce risks of bias and discrimination already. Apply the same anonymity to survey responses to encourage honest feedback about how you can improve your candidate experience. People are more likely to be honest if they feel there is a layer of distance between them and their feedback.

Use technology to send your candidate experience survey automatically

You don’t have to do all this manually. Many HR platforms will help you create a candidate survey and issue it directly to applicants. They also collect the responses in your system, ready for you to analyse. In fact, many have standard reports you can use to get started.

Explore your options with a free, no-obligation demo of the Access platform. See how you can improve the candidate experience through feedback to achieve more successful hiring outcomes and enhanced applicant satisfaction.

You already know the importance of gathering quantitative and qualitative data. Here are some example questions you might include and the types of answers you could expect:

1. How would you rate the ease of navigating our application process?

Use a rating scale from Very easy to very hard and get a steer on whether this is an area that requires improvement

2. Were the job role expectations clearly communicated?

This is a closed question with a yes or no answer, and you need to know if communication is clear. That said, you may also want to add a follow up question to get more qualitative comments about what was missing.

3.How satisfied were you with the timeliness of communication during the recruitment process?

Again, a rating scale is useful here. You need to know if the recruitment team is missing a trick on communication. If you’re rating poorly, you’ll want to review your current process and highlight specific gaps.

4.What suggestions do you have for improving the interview process?

You could ask “do you have any suggestions?”, but that might lead to yes/no answers which aren’t especially helpful here. Asking “what” suggestions people have indicates you’re open to ideas and are looking to make changes for the better.

5.Based on your experience, how likely are you to recommend applying to our company?

Another good opportunity for a rating scale (perhaps extremely likely to extremely unlikely). Get an idea of whether you’re doing a good enough job of marketing the business, even with unsuccessful candidates.

There are obviously hundreds of questions you could ask in your survey, but focus on the areas which are most important for your business. You can always add a question at the end which invites comments on anything you haven’t fully covered.

Start by looking at your quick wins – the quantitative answers for yes and no, or ratings scales. What’s the overall picture? You’ll be able to spot whether it’s generally positive or frequently negative, just by creating a simple chart. Use that to guide your next steps.

Focus first on what’s going well. Look for themes you’re doing the right thing. There might be tweaks required, but those can come later. Right now, you need to keep doing those things.

Now drill into the areas which are less good, and use the comments to build a picture:

• Is communication slow between certain stages of recruitment?
• Are job descriptions unclear when it comes to explaining the role?
• Can you spot common issues all sitting in one department?
• Is there a clear need for interview training and people asking inappropriate questions or ones with no relevance to the role

As you review the information, focus on the positives and the negatives. Keep a balance of the great things which are helping your approach. Over time, you’ll run comparisons to see which aspects of your process are changing. That’s when you look for best practice and great examples of candidate experience you can share across your teams.

Gathering and analysing data may sound like work you don’t have time to do, but using that’s where technology can help you. Using The Access Group’s HR software with integrated recruitment tools, you can streamline the process as it helps you to:

• Create a candidate experience survey template
• Issue it automatically to applicants, interviewees, and successful hires
• Track responses and send reminders to increase your chances of gathering useful data
• Collating and analysing the results to identify where your process works well and where there’s room for improvement

Make candidate experience surveys part of your standard recruitment process, and focus on making the improvements which will lead to better recruitment decisions for your business.

By introducing candidate experience surveys helps you measurably improve your recruitment process. You have reliable data to identify where the gaps are and qualitative comments to help you understand the changes you need to make.

Learning how to improve your candidate experience is easy. So is setting up the template. The hard part is committing to using the results to guide your actions. But start with the first step - start collecting feedback from candidates straight away. Then, once you have the data, it would seem crazy not to use it to create a better experience. 

Download our free Candidate Experience Survey template and discover how The Access Group’s HR software can help you manage and improve your hiring process.