The candidate experience that your company provides has quite the impact on a variety of factors. First, it affects how a candidate perceives your company and can also influence whether or not they apply for one of your open roles. The candidate experience can even be the jumping off point or foundation for the employee experience when they join your organization.
Candidate experience is tied to many things — and is more important than ever before! — but one aspect that it’s not often thought of going hand-in-hand with is business revenue.
As a Recruitment Marketing or employer branding practitioner, you’re likely not thinking of how candidates turn into customers of your company — i.e., how their experience translates to bringing in money for the organization. It shouldn’t be something high on your priority list. At the same time, it’s an interesting aspect that practitioners should be aware of and it’s an element that helps show how your ongoing Recruitment Marketing efforts are contributing to your company’s success.
The best part? It’s not something that takes up a ton of time and energy! Just ask Andy Edmundson, Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Craft Brew Alliance (CBA). The company, which owns a large portfolio of brewing brands and operates breweries and brewpubs around the country, has about 500 employees and brings on about 200 new hires each year.
Andy and his team wanted to get a better grasp on the impact their recruiting work was having on the overall business. They partnered with workforce survey platform provider Survale to launch several initiatives, one of which was a feedback survey that candidates are prompted to fill out on the CBA careers page.
“We launched this strategy with the Survale platform because we wanted a way to provide actionable data to the HR initiatives that CBA was interested in pursuing,” Andy explained. “We wanted to unlock and tell the story of how important the candidate experience is to a consumer brand, especially one in a niche industry like ours.”
Here’s how Andy and his team at CBA put survey tools to the test and uncovered a better understanding of how the candidate experience helped to create a brand that resonates with both candidates AND consumers.
Feedback is “always on”
Getting feedback at the initial stages of the candidate journey is crucial, but Andy knew that to get a clear picture of the data the team was looking for, they would need to provide opportunities to give feedback at every single step of the candidate journey.
Candidates visiting the careers page are prompted to participate in a survey if they have been on the website for longer than 5 minutes or after they have applied to a job. They can choose to skip certain questions or select “N/A” if it doesn’t apply to them.
Candidates visiting the careers page are prompted to participate in a survey if they have been on the website for longer than 5 minutes or after they have applied to a job.
As they move through the application and interview process, candidates are then asked to complete another survey to rate their experience during the interview and provide their thoughts on the hiring managers they met with. This has given the CBA team more insight into how hiring interviews have an effect on the candidate experience and highlights areas for improvement.
From candidate to consumer
Whether they knew about the CBA brand before considering a job or they only learned of it after looking at open opportunities at the company, candidates have been providing valuable feedback on their consumer habits with the brand. To get talent to spill the details on how they became CBA customers, Andy baked in a question into the candidate survey.
“The typical attitude our team had run into from throughout the company was that our efforts weren’t driving revenue,” he said. “By including this question in the survey, we were able to show the significant impact that a robust employer brand and conscientious candidate experience approach can have.”
Candidates have been providing valuable feedback on their consumer habits with the brand.
And what an impact it is! Here are just some of the results that Andy’s team has seen since measuring how candidates become CBA customers:
- 75% of candidates actually do purchase CBA products when they are considering a job opportunity with the company
- That equates to roughly $150,000 to $200,000 in direct revenue per year for CBA
- This strong consumer brand has not only helped increase sales, but it has also positioned CBA as a Top 4 employer of choice in the Portland, Oregon region — they compete for top talent against powerhouses like Nike, Intel and Adidas
Survey tools can be one of your best assets for measuring the effectiveness of your recruiting efforts. Armed with the right data, you can make a stellar business case for why your strategies are working to attract and encourage top candidates to apply — and in some cases, even turn them into customers who will advocate for both your employer and consumer brand!