One of the more exciting developments we’ve been watching in the past 2-3 years is the emergence of data visualization dashboards designed to help talent acquisition teams, well, visualize data from candidate experience and employer brand health surveys. Many offer robust functionality, including integration with popular ATS’s, customizable questions by audience, and the ability to automatically trigger a survey or poll when certain milestones in the candidate’s or employee’s journey have been reached.
As data nerds, we love the idea of getting our clients closer to their candidate experience and brand insights, yet depending on your organization’s size, many of these tools come with five-figure annual price tags. Clients often ask us whether the investment is worth it, or how to make the case when vying for their annual budgets, so we thought we’d take a moment to share the questions we ask to help them weigh the pros and cons.
Do You Have a Clear Employer Brand Value Proposition?
In our experience the best candidate and employee feedback programs begin with clear employer brand value propositions. Employers with a clear sense of their authentic brand messages are better poised to measure themselves against clearly defined employer brand performance and image attributes in a survey setting. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re likely to get out predictable (and generic) results like: Candidates and employees both find “compensation” and “benefits” very important. Not terribly exciting or actionable.
If you don’t have a clear idea of your EBVP, conducting a baseline survey of your current employees and candidates can be a great way to collect an initial read on where you stand among these audiences, and offer valuable inputs for TA teams trying to define (or refine) their value proposition. This is often a better and cheaper first step before investing in a full-scale dashboard solution.
Do You Have a Strategy for Which Questions (Metrics) to Ask and When?
While data visualization dashboards often come with survey “templates” and pre-defined moments in the candidate or employee journey to ask them, the devil is in the details. Can you ask for an NPS score after every single interview and step in the candidate journey? Many tools advertise their ability to do just that. Should you? Maybe not. Asking for feedback too often can itself be a detriment to the candidate experience, and many organizations are better served by asking fewer questions at the very specific points in the journey they can effect change most easily (e.g., low hanging fruit). Having data across ten different points of the journey is nifty, but unless your organization is prepared to act across all of these dimensions, you may have simply burned valuable candidate attention-span and goodwill by surveying too often.
Is Your Organization Ready to to Ingest this Amount of Data?
Dashboards make it easy to visualize large volumes of data, which is great. But when considering the investment, we remind our clients to consider whether their organization is ready to ingest, interpret, and act upon this volume of data. From ATS’s to partner portals, TA teams are often already swimming in more data than they can practically ingest and use on a daily basis, so it’s prudent to ask how often folks will be logging in and actually using it.
Does your team have the bandwidth to incorporate another dashboard into its workflow and make practical use of its outputs? If so, the investment is unlikely to disappoint. If not, you may be better off conducting ad hoc candidate experience or employee surveys a couple times a year using a more affordable platform like Survey Monkey. This not only saves money, but also encourages the organization to focus on these surveys and their outputs at pre-selected sampling windows.
We’re Here to Help
Do you have questions about how to best implement an employer brand or candidate experience program in your organization? We always love to hear different use cases are are happy to lend our ears and expertise with a free, no-strings consultation. Contact us today.
