Quantifying great candidate experiences in Kalibrr
From the founding of Kalibrr and through its multiple pivot points, the design philosophy of our product was always on giving a Great Candidate Experience — and by extension, to help recruiters create that great candidate experience.
We explored this idea vigorously during my first few months at Kalibrr. Though we were excited by this focus, we had no idea where to start.
What we did know was how helpless being a jobseeker felt being totally dependent on how fast or recruiters work. From that, we definitely wanted to create a feature that would empower jobseekers.
1. Creating a Solution
Inspiration from Net Promoter Score
A measure common to most products and companies is the NPS, or the Net Promoter Score.
Originally created as a means to measure customer loyalty and how likely a user will promote your product to their social circles, the NPS uses a scale of 1–10 to create a numerical statistic for these intangible variables.
When someone gives a score of 9–10, they’re considered promoters, respondents with a 0–6 are called detractors, 7–8 are passives. These are then placed into a formula that creates a score.
Though NPS does have its shortcomings and criticisms, we used it as a starting point not for the promotion of Kalibrr but to measure something else— the jobseeker’s experience.
2. Creating our jobseeker experience scale
We left the scale very much the same, but in our case, we ask the question “From a scale of 1–10 how would you rate your experience applying for <company name>”.
We then ask them three questions, What they liked, What they disliked and what could the company improve on. This survey is given at certain points during a jobseeker’s journey in his application, giving them a chance to give feedback to companies they’re applying for.
These ratings are then placed into a formula to create an actual score that is presented to employers during their meetings with our account managers.
Along with this score, we give them common feedback that appears in the survey to create actionable items for their recruitment and HR departments.
3. The Results
What Jobseekers are saying
The actual score, though a very tangible number, isn’t as important as the actionable qualitative feedback that we can get and cascade to our clients. This feedback also helps us look forward to what we can focus on and what kind of behaviours we can design for.
The interesting thing we found from creating this feature is that an 80–90% of detractor feedback comes from slow or no recruiter feedback. A common experience is people applying for a job and getting zero feedback from recruiters, and this is something that has fed our other product innovations moving forward.
This also tells us that recruiters need to be more attentive to applicants, even if its just to say “we’re still waiting for approvals or feedback form the hiring manager.”
Jobseeker feedback impacts our recruiters and clients positively
Insights and stories gathered a year since this feature’s release has informed our ideas on a great candidate experience. A jobseeker had specifically mentioned that a specific recruiter had been rude to her and this was something the client took note of. This also leads into our product decisions and strategy, which I’ll write more about in a future article.
4. The Future
Our long term goals are to improve employers’ candidate experience and to make them care about the candidate’s journey. By quantifying the candidate experience and making it more tangible, we’ve taken the first steps in making employers focus on how they make applicants feel. Soon, we plan to take a step further by incentivising good behaviour.
