Talent Management Processes

Methods of Careers Site Feedback

by Taleo Research

The corporate Careers website has been the keystone in the staffing strategy of many large, Fortune 500 companies. Recruiters are finding the Careers website to be a significant source of candidates. Best practices for attracting, convincing and capturing candidates are becoming widely adopted. The focus for many companies has moved to improving and optimizing the Careers website, within current resources. Like any project, efforts towards optimization of the Careers website must be made with informed decisions based on objective data. One valuable source of data for improving a Careers site is getting feedback from the candidates themselves.

Gathering candidate feedback can alert you to basic problems and issues, or it can help quantify what your candidates actually think about the Careers site. These are two distinct functions, calling for two different approaches. On the one hand, it is a relatively simple matter to allow those candidates who have experienced a problem on your site to let you know about it. However, if you would like answers to questions concerning candidates’ likes and dislikes about the Careers site, their informational needs, or related topics, a more careful approach using good survey design and sampling methods is required.

The simplest form of candidate feedback mechanism is an email link. Email links on Careers websites often attract unsolicited resumes by attachment, so companies typically include a request not to send resumes to the feedback email address. Measures such as these will not prevent some candidates from using the email link to ask if a particular position is still open, whether the candidate’s resume was received, or other general recruiting inquiries. Though easiest to implement, an email link on the Careers website for candidate feedback is the least efficient. Analyzing and quantifying feedback received by email is laboriously slow, since each email must be read and classified according to the type of feedback.

The feedback mechanism on a Careers website may be a simple “suggestion-box” Web form. Comments typed into a Web form typically are delivered to the email inbox of someone within the company, so in this regard a comment form is no more efficient than an email link. A Web form, though, can include a drop-down menu with which the candidate selects from a pre-set list of feedback issues as a way of labeling or summarizing comments. Guiding candidates to limit their feedback to one of a list of predefined topics helps them to understand and follow the intentions of the feedback mechanism. The comments come pre-categorized, which removes from the corporation some of the burden of having to read and interpret the comments, in order to classify them. However, the actual comments themselves require interpretation, which slows down the process.

An improvement upon a simple online suggestion-box is to provide candidates with a feedback mechanism in which the topics and possible responses are in large part pre-determined. A question with the set of possible answers predefined is known as “closed-ended.” Closed-ended questions include multiple-choice or yes/no responses, and answers on a numerical scale (e.g. 1 = not at all important; 5 = extremely important). An “open-ended” question, by contrast, is one for which the respondent writes his or her answer in text. Closed-ended questions are much easier to summarize than open-ended questions, and in the end are more useful for making decisions.

Open-ended questions do have their uses, especially when the full list of possible answers to a question is not known. It is a good practice to allow respondents to answer an otherwise closed-ended question with the open-ended “Other, Specify”. Open-ended questions also work well for ensuring that your survey captures all of the relevant issues, as in “Is there anything else you would like to tell us about our Careers site?” Never make open-ended questions mandatory. Although open-ended questions can elicit some important insight, they also require a lot of time and effort on the part of the respondent.

Taleo Research has found that just under ten percent of Fortune 500 companies currently provide candidates on the Careers website with some sort of feedback mechanism. Through feedback, you may uncover unforeseen technical problems, unclear navigation or instructions, or unintuitive interface design. Gathering candidate feedback should go hand-in-hand with other forms of Careers site monitoring, such as measuring traffic flow patterns. By soliciting candidate feedback, you can gain valuable insights into what is working and what is not on the Careers website, from its most important users.