Onboarding: The Perfect Moment for CandE Insights
By Kevin Grossman of Talent Board, written on August 17th, 2020
Most companies are sitting on an unexplored mountain of candidate experience insights, according to our 2019 North American research. A stunning 85% of employers fail to ask new hires about their candidate experience during the onboarding process, and 82% fail to do so even during a new hire’s first month of employment.
Talk about missed opportunities!
Having just lived through your entire candidate experience, new hires possess the freshest possible insights for helping you evaluate and improve your company’s candidate experience. But these insights won’t stay fresh forever. The longer you wait, the less timely and accurate they can become. Your best bet is to survey new hires during onboarding or soon after.
In fact, now that hiring has slowed for many organizations, it’s an ideal time to upgrade onboarding by adding a candidate experience survey or debrief to the process. Employers who do will be perfectly positioned to gather precious candidate insights when hiring ramps up again.
Other Ways To Upgrade Onboarding
If you’re interested in upgrading your onboarding experience, here are three activities that will really set you apart from the crowd:
- Hold candidate experience focus groups/debriefs within the first month of a new hire’s start date. Again, only 18% of employers we surveyed take this crucial step.
- Have recruiters follow up with new hires within six weeks of their start date to confirm that their expectations match up with their new reality. Just 25% of employers currently do this.
- Send specialized marketing and congratulations content/packages to candidates who are selected for jobs—a gesture made by only 37% of companies.
Improving the onboarding experience definitely pays off, as Talent Board’s research has clearly shown over the years. A positive onboarding experience makes new hires more productive in their first few weeks and increases the odds they’ll stay with your company beyond their first year of employment.
If you’d like to know how your candidate experience stacks up against other employers, there’s still plenty of time to participate in our 2020 benchmark research, which you can do here.
Be safe and well.
—Kevin Grossman, President, Talent Board
