What is Candidate Net Promoter Score (CNPS)?
Candidate Net Promoter Score (CNPS) is a key metric that organizations use to measure how job candidates experience a recruitment process, with the intention to improve recruiting and to strengthen the employer brand.
I will in this article tell you the story behind CNPS, how to use it, and how organizations use it to benchmark their performance.
This article is just a short text that explains what Candidate Net Promoter Score is in brief, if you want the whole story, read our full guide here.
Candidate Net Promoter Score was born from Net Promoter Score
CNPS was born from the research behind Net Promoter Score (NPS) which concludes that the question:
How likely is it that you would recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?
…is the closest you can get to measure customer loyalty. A higher NPS equals higher loyalty from customers which is (through research) connected with word-of-mouth and other factors driving growth. So the final connection states that:
A higher NPS, compared to your competitors, is connected to higher growth. This is a fact.
Let us move on to CNPS (Candidate Net Promoter Score) and with the experiences, I have as a founder of Trustcruit (a feedback and analytics tool that automatically measures candidate experience and CNPS). I will try to give you the full picture of what CNPS is and how to use it? (as the headline promises 😉)
What is CNPS?
Candidate Net Promoter Score is a numerical measure ranging from -100 to +100 and is calculated with the candidate's answers on a 0–10 scale to the question ”How likely…” question, explained above.
How is CNPS calculated?
CNPS is calculated by dividing the 0–10 answers from the candidates into three groups;
- 0–6 are called Detractors ☹️
- 7–8 are called Passives 😐
- 9–10 are called Promoters 😀
Now you need the percentage of the groups to calculate your CNPS(which shall always be 100% when summed). An example would be 15% Detractors, 35% Passives, and 50% Promoters. Let’s ignore the passives and calculate: Promoters minus (-) Detractors
This gives the CNPS of 50–15=+35
When do you measure CNPS?
CNPS is measured directly after a candidate’s first interview and directly after rejection. This helps you find out the number of candidates that are promoters of your brand after they have experienced your services.
How to compare your Candidate Net Promoter Scores?
It is important to know that both measures (CNPS after interview vs. after rejection) never can be compared with each other! An example of how to compare CNPS correctly is internally between recruiters, departments, or roles. The fundamental role of CNPS is that it is a relative measure to the exact same question asked at the exact same time in the exact same way.
You can also compare your CNPS against competitors to get the relative measure of how you are performing compared to competitors.
How can I benchmark my score to competitors/industry standards?
You get hold of this information through the use of the industry standard for measuring CNPS that we, for example, provide in our tool Trustcruit. Learn more about how it works here.
As always I am more than happy to discuss recruiting and its possibilities further so feel free to comment, add me on Linkedin here, or send me an email: simon@trustcruit.com 👋.
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