According to LinkedIn, nearly half of all U.S. employees would refuse to take a job at a company whose reputation they perceived negatively. Their report indicates that a bad reputation could cost your company an additional $4,723 per employee hired.
Since the candidate experience—indeed, the impressions of every single person who comes into contact with your company—creates your reputation in the marketplace, candidate experience matters.
In addition to that per employee salary hike, companies with a bad reputation also face the possibility of higher attrition rates, and must recruit from a smaller pool of qualified applicants.
If your company’s bad reputation is making it difficult to hire top talent, one way to begin to reverse the tides is to create an exceptional candidate experience.
Is there a way to quantify your reputation? How do you find out what candidates think of your company?
The most objective and efficient way for a company to quantify their reputation among potential candidates is by using Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure candidate satisfaction.
This simple survey methodology will help you take the temperature of your company’s reputation through candidate satisfaction surveys. We’ve spent years working closely with staffing companies to integrate NPS surveys into their recruiting process.
Throughout the candidate experience, our software sends out short surveys to track how candidates feel they’re being treated and their opinion of the overall experience and compiles this data into easy-to-digest reports for your hiring managers and recruiters to review.
Why does Net Promoter Score work? Let’s start with a brief history.
Net Promoter Score was invented by Fred Reichheld, a partner of Bain & Company, in 2003. Since it’s conception, the simple, one-question survey system has been adapted and used by thousands of companies.
Traditionally, NPS was used to measure customer satisfaction with a company or product. You’ve likely answered hundreds of NPS surveys without even noticing. The original NPS question was this:
“What is the likelihood that you would recommend Company X to a friend or colleague?”
Respondents rate their likelihood to recommend a company 0 through 10, where zero is the lowest and 10 is the highest.
In the survey’s terminology, anyone who responds with a number between 0 and 6 is a called a Detractor. Those who respond with a 7 or 8 are Passives. A respondent who gives you a 9 or 10 is a Promoter—that means they’re likely to talk positively about your brand to their friends and online (see how this feeds into your reputation?)
Once you have the survey responses, you calculate your NPS score.
NPS Score = Percentage of Promoters - percentage of Detractors
Example NPS Score = 85% Promoters - 15% Detractors = 70
Your job as the person measuring is to get the highest score possible. A 70 is considered excellent.
Since its inception, NPS has been modified for use in many different scenarios and companies. Those kiosks you see at stores, with the happy and sad face buttons to rate service? Yep, those are a modified version of NPS, too.
NPS has become highly regarded as a quick, affordable, and easy way to measure customer satisfaction, as well as other aspects of business’s reputation and performance.
Measuring candidate satisfaction can have a myriad of benefits for your business, including improving your reputation. It can...
1. Improve candidate satisfaction and your reputation
Measuring NPS during the recruitment process allows your hiring team to quickly identify problem areas and design solutions.
Responding to and fixing any problems and negative trends will quickly improve your reputation online and with applicants. Just asking for feedback has been shown to improve a candidate’s perception of a company.
2. Measure the general happiness of the candidate during the process through surveys
You can think of NPS as a general happiness score. Use it to measure candidate happiness, recruitment team happiness, customer happiness — really, any team or aspect you want to measure.
NPS surveys give you a health check on how your company is functioning.
3. Gain access to even higher quality talent when measuring candidate experience
A good reputation makes your company more attractive to higher quality talent. Candidates want to work for companies that show the top five qualities of a great employer: job security, opportunities for professional development, opportunity to work with a better team, a company that shares similar values as the applicant, and a company that is discussed positively by current and former employees.
All companies want high-quality talent, but many don’t know that hiring inferior talent can cost them. If an inferior employee underperforms an average employee at Google by 10%, they lose $115,000. What’s your company’s average revenue per employee? Increase that by 10%. Just imagine what your company could earn if they found better candidates.
4. Discover influencers and brand ambassadors for the recruitment process
When you calculate NPS, you see who rates your company with 9s and 10s. Those are your promoters, brand ambassadors, and influencers.
Advertising works, but it’s better to use the words of your employees and customers to talk about your company. Ask those who give your company a high rating why they like your company and if they’d be willing to share that on social media and review sites. Or, work with your content marketing department to create something of value to give to customers and candidates.
5. Lower the Cost of Recruitment with candidate satisfaction surveys and measures
Good reputation = lower cost recruiting. Great employees want to work for great companies, it’s as simple as that. Build a fantastic reputation recruitment process and you’ll have to do less outreach and cold calling, less posting on advertisement sites, less busy work overall.
A great candidate experience makes it easier to recruit great candidates. To measure your candidate experience, you can use the simple, one question NPS system Sense provides, or implement your own solution.
Once you identify problems, fix them, and you might just be surprised what great candidates start to seek out your business.
If you want to learn more about how Sense can help you continuously measure candidate satisfaction, and increase your profitability, contact us for a demo today.
