Talent Management Processes

Designing for Careers Site Feedback

by Taleo Research

Most companies have made recruitment on the corporate website a core component of the staffing strategy. Taleo Research has tracked adoption of a corporate Careers website by the Global 500 (the largest 500 companies in the world, ranked by revenue) from 29 percent in 1998 to 91 percent in 2002¹. Clearly, the practice has entered the mainstream, with many companies marking the second or third anniversary of the corporate Careers website. For these companies, the focus has moved to improving and optimizing the Careers website, within current resources. My article, Methods of Careers Site Feedback, demonstrates the central importance of candidate feedback to Careers site optimization. This article provides tactical tips for gathering candidate feedback and putting the insight gained to best use.

How you get candidates to provide feedback or answer a survey has an impact on the results. Although unobtrusive, a link on the site to a survey form is passive by nature, requiring the candidates to self-select. This may lead to responses with subtle biases. If your intention is simply to identify issues, a site link may be sufficient, so long as you bear in mind that it mostly likely will attract the disgruntled.

If you are trying to come to conclusions about the state of mind of your candidate population as a whole, then sampling matters, and randomness is the key. Sending an email invitation to respond to a user survey can work well. Since you are asking candidates to respond to the survey at their convenience, email sampling likely will not work well for gathering opinions about the actual website experience. Other sampling techniques include website pop-ups and other intercepts, such as those triggered when a candidate quits the site, or even abandons a job application before completing it.

Good survey design is essential to attain unambiguous and useful responses. Keep in mind these three principles when writing questions on a candidate feedback form:

1. Singularity: make sure each question addresses one and only one issue. Don’t lump together two issues, such as in “Were the job description and job application instructions well written?”
   
2. Clarity: candidates should read questions only once to understand and answer them. Avoid complex sentence structure, double negatives, and technical jargon. Read questions aloud to see if they read naturally.
   
3. Neutrality: never ask questions that bias the candidate towards a particular answer.

To act intelligently upon candidate feedback, it is important to take into consideration the manner in which it was gathered, to place the feedback in an overall perspective. If your sampling clearly encourages those with complaints to voice them, then an analysis of the feedback would paint a bleak picture of your Careers site. However, such complaints would not be representative of the total population of visitors to the site.

Of course, explicit reports of obvious errors such as dead links and server errors ought to be acted upon immediately. Beyond that, it is important to place complaints within the context of the overall volume of traffic on the Careers site. Making changes to satisfy an apparently vocal minority may alienate the mainstream. You must assess whether changes to site navigation, user interface or candidate instructions will improve usability for some without negatively impacting usability for others.

Optimizing a Careers website is an exercise that should be carried out to include well-analyzed input from jobseeker feedback. Candidates are the most important users of a Careers website, which makes it critical to know their opinions. With well-designed feedback methods in place, you can benefit from valuable candidate insights and learn from users how to optimize your corporate careers website.

¹Global 500 Web Site Recruiting, 2002 Survey, iLogos Research, available at www.ilogos.com