3. Ask your team: Analyze the results
‘Ask your team: Analyze the results’ is the third 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 chapter will help you create an actionable plan for your survey data so you can collect data, analyze your results, report your results and take action on your data.

To make your survey data actionable, you need to understand your results. To understand your results, you need to organize your results effectively. This means being selective about how you analyze your data, and creating accessible reports that everyone in your team can understand. A clear, sharable report makes it much easier to make your survey results actionable.

1. Collate your data
Most survey creation software will provide you with a results
spreadsheet. If not, create your own and gather your survey data there.
Make sure to include any relevant info about the people who have
responded (e.g. their department, whether they’re an employee or
applicant and full-time or part-time).
When you’re ready, start with the quantitative data (facts and figures),
as it’s much easier to organize.
Next, tackle the qualitative data (the questions that require
respondents to type in their own answers).
As you can’t just export qualitative data to a spreadsheet (alas), you’ll
need to decide on a standardized way to assess these responses.
Two methods for understanding qualitative data:
• Keyword frequency. This is how often specific terms are used
to answer a question by all respondents. Categorize frequently
used words as positive or negative, then rate overall responses
accordingly. The results you get from tracking negative and
positive keyword frequency can be added to your quantitative
data spreadsheets and help with overall analysis.
• Word clouds. These create a visual representation of your
answers, making it easy to see which words are used most often
by respondents. Tip: word clouds are extremely effective when
displayed in reports and presentations.
2. Look for averages, patterns, and divergence
Once your survey results are organized, it’s time to go through the data.
Be strategic with your analysis:
• Find averages for each question
• Note points of divergence
• Look for patterns
Start by finding the averages for the answers to each question. For a
question that requires people to provide a rating, add all of the ratings
together, then divide the total by the number of responses. Make a note
of whether the average response was positive, negative, or neutral.
For a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question, add all of the ‘yes’ responses together, then
all of the ‘no’ responses, then note whether the majority of responses
were positive or negative.
After finding the average responses, single out questions where the
answers diverge. For example, if half of your respondents rated your
onboarding process as 5/5, but the other half gave it a 1/5, then
despite an okay average, you’ll want to have a more in-depth look into
the data.
This is when patterns come into play. Look for them throughout your
survey data:
• Is there a part of your hiring process that rates highly among one
group, but poorly with another?
• Did the majority of one job category (e.g. developers) surveyed
report that interviewing was a negative experience?
• Are there specific parts of each stage of the hiring process
that get a low rating across the board? (E.g. organization,
representation of employer brand, scheduling.)
All of these will combine to represent the takeaways from your survey.
Willem van Roosmalen, co-founder Homerun:
“Every other Friday we do retrospectives where
everyone take ten minutes to write down what
happened in the last two weeks, whether it’s
at work or at home. It’s become a natural part of
how we communicate and share feedback with each
other.”
3. Pull out individual stories
The responses to open-ended questions are often the most
enlightening. Hopefully specific experiences that have stuck with your
team will emerge to reveal an invaluable human aspect to your survey
results.
You might have to dig deep to get these, so make sure you read through
as many of the written responses as you can, sampling from each
question. Pull out answers that help you summarize or add value to the
takeaways from your data analysis.
4. Create and share a report with insights, key takeaways, and next
steps
Start your report by recapping the goals of your survey, explaining the
process that you followed, and summing up your findings.
Be sure to include these points:
• The survey goals
• How the survey was distributed
• Who was surveyed
• Who responded
• The timeframe for the survey
For each of your goals, write a mini-report that explains the goal, shows
how the survey questions aligned with the goal, and summarizes the
resulting takeaways.
Next, list your key insights, patterns, trends, and unexpected learnings
in a clear, concise way. Make sure you include the interesting responses
you made note of earlier.
Conclude by summarizing your findings and listing the actions you want
to take.
What do I do next?
Share the report with your team, then use all the data you’ve gathered
to improve your hiring and then…. Read the other chapters of Hiring Playbook #1 Understand.
All Images by Studio Spass.




