How one tech company achieved candidate experience scores 33% better than industry average

5 mins, 39 secs read time

When your company is experiencing hypergrowth, you might feel like one of those street performers who’s juggling multiple plates, apples, knives (and maybe a chainsaw or two!). There’s so much going on, and your attention is being pulled in multiple directions at once – especially when it comes to recruiting team priorities.

But there is a way to take your company through hypergrowth without dropping the ball. When you put the right processes and tools in place, you’re setting your company up for success as you scale.

One global technology company quintupled its workforce in five years while also building a rock-solid candidate experience in the process. How? A combination of a smooth and simple application process, prioritizing personal connections at in-person events and tracking candidate engagement and satisfaction.

Full disclosure: We’re not going to reveal their name, but the company in question delivers security and data services to an expanding customer base. They have over 1,000 employees at offices in the United States, Europe, and APAC. And since 2016, they’ve used Greenhouse to optimize their recruiting and onboarding practices while making candidate experience a top priority. Here’s how they prioritized candidate experience.

Smooth and simple application process

One of the easiest ways to lose a candidate is with a clunky or needlessly repetitive hiring process. This includes every touch point a candidate has with your company, from viewing a job listing and applying online to coming onsite for an interview and receiving an offer. According to our Workplace Intelligence Report, 20% of survey respondents revealed that hiring is completely unstructured in their companies.

Setting up a smooth and simple application process is essential to creating a positive candidate experience. And when you ramp up the number of hires you’re making, this becomes increasingly important since there will be greater numbers of people applying. We all know job applications can sometimes be cumbersome time-consuming, with difficult-to-navigate career sites, logins and even unnecessary steps or information that dissuade the candidates from ever even hitting “submit” on that application. Easing that process goes a long way to instill goodwill with your prospective hires.

One member of the Talent Acquisition team at the tech company says, "We chose Greenhouse Recruiting because we wanted candidates to have the best possible candidate experience and allow them to apply as quickly as possible." By deliberately making the process efficient, easy and quick, this global tech company put candidate experience at the forefront of their strategy for hiring the best talent.

Investing in Greenhouse Recruiting didn’t just improve the tech company’s online application – it had an impact on every stage of the hiring process. A member of the Talent Acquisition team puts it this way: "Without a doubt, we're making better hires. Greenhouse allows us to set up jobs, provide a structured interview experience, and direct hiring managers and their teams on exactly what to look for in candidates.”

Prioritizing personal connections at in-person events

When hiring at scale, in-person events can be a great way to discover new candidates – but only when you have the right tools and processes in place to get their attention and sustain a relationship with them. Former university recruiter and Greenhouse Product Manager Lauren Allanson shares her experience of being an on-campus recruiter:

During on-campus events, recruiters are overwhelmed with logistical details, trying to set up their booth, making sure they have the right swag on display, and preparing company reps with talking points.The process of manually collecting and categorizing resumes is time-consuming – there would often be times when 20 or 30 students were standing in line waiting to have the chance to talk with someone at our table – and it’s so easy to misplace or mis-categorize a resume in this situation.

The right recruiting events app addresses these concerns, allowing event attendees to submit information from an iPad or their own devices. Recruiters can also collect resumes simply by snapping a photo that will be attached to a prospect’s profile as a fully searchable PDF. And event-specific URLs allow Talent Acquisition teams to track the ROI of specific events. This way, you and your team can spend time focusing on the conversation happening in the moment and really get to know a candidate.

Using the Greenhouse Events App at this particular tech company was key to ensuring the employees working at recruiting events could maximize the time they spent meeting with potential candidates and reduce or eliminate the need to handle paper resumes, administrative tasks and manual work.

Prioritizing personal connections at in-person events was another key factor in creating a positive candidate experience.

Tracking candidate engagement and satisfaction

How will you know how your candidate experience stacks up? Data, of course. Specifically, by tracking candidate engagement and satisfaction throughout the process.

Greenhouse’s Director of Talent Acquisition, Jacqui Maguire, recommends thinking about all the tools a candidate will interact with, from your ATS and scheduling to skills assessments or background check tools to ensure that nothing is clunky or confusing. “All the interactions candidates have with tools will impact their opinion of your company,” says Jacqui.

After rolling out Greenhouse, the tech company was able to determine that they had strong candidate engagement rates with Greenhouse’s automated candidate satisfaction survey. Drop-offs during the application process were not an issue for the company. Plus, by surveying candidates about their experience, they found that candidate satisfaction rates were also high. Four out of five candidates consistently rate their experience as good or very good, which is 33% higher than the industry standard for this metric.

The positive candidate experience at the tech company was reflected in other ways, too. Since implementing Greenhouse, one-third of hires are referrals from the company's existing talent pool, including employee referrals and past candidates through Greenhouse Recruiting and CRM. This saves the company $137,500 in third-party recruiting costs each year (a 25% reduction in costs associated with third-party recruiting efforts!). It’s also a testament to the improved candidate experience. When employees feel confident in an application process, they’ll be more open to making referrals. And people who’ve had a positive candidate experience with a company in the past will be much more likely to engage with its recruiters when a new role opens up in the future.

Investing in Greenhouse hasn’t just helped the tech company with recruiting candidates today – it’s building a foundation and pipeline of engaged and enthusiastic candidates for the future, too.

Want to learn more about how this tech company built a strong foundation of hiring best practices and supported positive candidate experience through a period of hypergrowth? You can read the case study here.