2. Ask your team: Find out what they really think

Homerun.co
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

‘Ask your team: Find out what they really think’ is the second chapter of Understand, the first book of The Hiring Playbooks, 5 ebooks that will turn all your hires into wins. Created by the Homerun team.

This article will help you hire people with the right soft skills, culture fit, and motivations.

Image by Studio Spass

Who knows the most about your hiring process? Easy: the people who have been through it, possibly on both sides of the employer/employee divide. Employee surveys help you learn how to hire your best fit by revealing what makes make your best people tick. Picking your current team’s brains about their ambitions, concerns and company culture will also help you focus on the person you want to join the team.

How do I effectively survey my team?

1. Identify specific goals

Always decide on a few specific goals before you start compiling questions for an employee survey. The best insights into your hiring process come from well-crafted employee surveys that yield specific, actionable data. If you’re not sure what your hiring goals should be, then have another look at the takeaways from your latest hiring process review.)

2. Ask questions that align with your goals

Write clear, pointed questions that relate directly to your hiring goals. These will make the survey experience clear, short, and focused, while making the answers easy to take action on.

Every question should aim to extract information that will help you achieve your hiring goals. For example, if one goal is to improve candidate experience, then asking recent hires questions like: “How easy, on a scale of 1–5, was it for you to apply to work here?” will reveal exactly what you need to improve to reach your goal.

Make sure you follow questions up by asking for details about particular times, actions, and experiences, as precise questions are much less likely to be misinterpreted by respondents.

Willem van Roosmalen, co-founder Homerun:

“Your company culture isn’t what you say it is, it’s what the people in your company make it. It’s a collective living organism that can only be captured together by working as team — and surveys are a great way to do that.”

3. Choose a survey tool that does the hard work for you

You’ve got a lot of work on your hands, so don’t miss any opportunity to lighten the load. When selecting a survey tool, make sure you first look at how each one treats the output of data. Lots of tools make creation and distribution easy, but fall down when it comes to results.

Also check for:

  • Attention to data security
  • How long your results are stored
  • Data storage
  • Distribution features
  • Ease of use
  • Survey experience features.
  • Export options (and make sure they don’t add sneaky charges for exports too!)

We recommend using either Typeform or Survey Monkey . Typeform is beautiful, but their analytics are pretty basic. Survey Monkey isn’t beautiful, but the data organization and analytics options are first rate.

4. Get buy-in, then distribute

The most beautifully written survey is nothing without answers. And to get those answers, you’ll need to get buy-in from your team.

Research has shown that attempts to gather intel and feedback fail for two key reasons:

  1. A fear of consequences (embarrassment, isolation, low performance ratings, lost promotions, and even firing).

2. A sense of futility (the belief that saying something won’t make a difference, so why bother?)

The solution? You guessed it: be totally transparent with your team about the entire survey process from start to finish.

Meet with the people you’ll be surveying and tell them:

  • Why you want their feedback
  • The goals for the survey
  • When you’ll be sending out the survey
  • How the survey will be shared
  • How long the survey will take to complete
  • Who will be participating

Start off by sharing some sample questions, then inviting feedback. To encourage people to join in, make it clear that you don’t expect anyone to offer solutions, just honest answers, and finish by acknowledging any fear or discomfort they might have.

After your meeting(s) reflect on the concerns that people had and the ideas they put forward, then write an introductory message for your survey based on their feedback.

Include:

  • Instructions
  • Time estimate
  • Deadline
  • Contact information
  • A sincere thank you for your teammates’ time and energy

Click send… and schedule a reminder to send a follow-up message, or two.

Next steps

Be patient. Once your survey results are all in, analyze them and create a report with important takeaways and ideas for taking action. And then… Read the other chapters of Hiring Playbook #1 Understand.

All Images by Studio Spass.

The Hiring Playbooks

A step by step guide that will turn all your hires into wins, created by the Homerun team

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Homerun.co

Written by

Hiring is a team sport. Companies like Wetransfer, Bugaboo & Tidal use Homerun to hire great people. Follow us for inspiration on The Art of Work.

The Hiring Playbooks

A step by step guide that will turn all your hires into wins, created by the Homerun team

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