In recent years, attracting candidates has become increasingly challenging, prompting organisations to seek ways to enhance their employer’s reputation and attract highly qualified individuals. Among these strategies, Candidate Net Promoter Score (cNPS) has emerged as a powerful metric that measures the likelihood of a candidate recommending your company to others. By understanding cNPS, businesses can identify areas for improvement in their candidate experience and gain valuable insights into their employer brand. This blog post will delve into the concept of cNPS, explaining its significance and providing practical guidance on calculating, leveraging, and measuring it for effective candidate feedback and recruitment success.

What is Candidate NPS and Why It Matters

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a well-known measurement used by companies to gauge customer loyalty and engagement. However, it can also be applied in the recruitment field. As with NPS, Candidate Net Promoter Score (cNPS) can assess the satisfaction of candidates and their overall experience with your hiring process. This score reflects how likely a candidate is to recommend your company as a place to apply for others. By gaining insight into candidates’ perceptions of your company, procedures, and recruiters, you can enhance your hiring strategies by identifying strengths and weaknesses.

Calculating cNPS is relatively straightforward. It involves subtracting the percentage of detractors (candidates who would not recommend your company) from the percentage of promoters (candidates who would recommend your company). A high cNPS score indicates that you are providing a positive candidate experience, while a low cNPS score suggests the need for improvement.

How to Calculate Candidate Net Promoter Score

To calculate your cNPS, you will need to create a survey and send it to your candidates. The survey should include a question that asks candidates how likely they are to recommend your company to others on a scale of 0 to 10. Candidates who respond with a score of 9 or 10 are considered promoters, while those who respond with a score of 0 to 6 are considered detractors.

Once you have collected the responses to your survey, you can calculate your cNPS by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. For example, if 40% of your candidates are promoters and 20% are detractors, your cNPS would be 20%.

It’s important to note that cNPS is not a perfect metric. It can be influenced by various factors, such as the size of your sample size, the timing of your survey, and the specific questions you ask. However, cNPS can still provide you with valuable insights into the candidate experience and help you identify areas where you can improve.

It is crucial to remember that the total number of responses should only consist of passive responses. It is desirable for a company to have a high cNPS, as it means that there are more promoters than detractors. An excellent cNPS is 50 or higher.

The Benefits of Using NPS for Candidate Feedback

There are numerous advantages to utilising NPS for candidate feedback. Firstly, it provides valuable insights into the candidate experience, enabling organisations to identify areas for improvement and enhance their recruiting and hiring processes. By understanding the factors that influence candidate satisfaction, organisations can make informed decisions to improve their employer brand and attract top talent.

Secondly, cNPS serves as a benchmark for assessing the effectiveness of recruiting and hiring practices. By tracking cNPS over time, organisations can monitor the impact of changes to their recruitment strategies and make necessary adjustments to optimise the candidate experience. This data-driven approach ensures that organisations are making informed decisions based on real-time feedback from candidates.

Furthermore, cNPS helps build stronger relationships with candidates, fostering a positive employer brand. When candidates feel valued and have a positive experience during the recruitment process, they are more likely to recommend the organisation to others, enhancing the organisation’s reputation as an employer of choice. This can lead to a larger pool of qualified candidates and reduced recruitment costs.

In addition, cNPS enables organisations to make data-driven decisions about their recruiting and hiring practices. By analysing the feedback provided by candidates, organisations can identify trends and patterns that inform their recruitment strategies. This data-driven approach ensures that organisations are making decisions based on concrete evidence rather than subjective opinions.

Ultimately, cNPS serves as a powerful tool for attracting and retaining top talent. When organisations consistently deliver a positive candidate experience, they become more attractive to potential employees. Top talent is more likely to be drawn to organisations with a strong employer brand and a reputation for providing a positive candidate experience.

Tips for Measuring Candidate Net Promoter Score

Having gained a better understanding of the calculation and advantages of cNPS, let’s explore ways to improve it! It involves more than simply including a single question in your candidate survey, and here are some tips to help you get the most out of measuring cNPS.

Distribute cNPS Surveys to Candidates Who Were Not Selected

One way to measure cNPS is by distributing surveys to candidates who were not selected for the job. This allows organisations to gather feedback on their recruitment process from candidates who did not have a positive experience. By asking for their feedback, organisations can gain valuable insights into what areas of the process may need improvement. Additionally, this also shows a level of care and consideration for candidates, even if they were not ultimately chosen for the position. Rejected candidates offer valuable insights into your process and ways to enhance their experience. It is preferable to allow them to express their thoughts through an anonymous feedback survey rather than through a Glassdoor review. This approach gives you greater influence over the public’s perception of your brand, the specific questions you ask, and the ability to take immediate action on the review. By following up and addressing the concerns raised by individuals who gave a low score, you can gain a better understanding of the necessary improvements.

Break Down Your cNPS into Smaller Parts

The Candidate Net Promoter Score (cNPS) is a valuable metric for measuring the overall satisfaction and likelihood of candidates to recommend your company to others. However, to truly understand and improve this score, it is important to break it down into smaller parts. This can include analysing the specific areas where candidates gave high or low ratings, such as the application process, interview experience, or communication with the hiring team. For example, the experience of a marketing manager candidate will differ from that of a backend developer, and separating them will provide more detailed insights to tailor experiences for different types of candidates. Additionally, you can also categorise cNPS data by recruiter. This will allow you to measure how each recruiter is perceived by candidates and identify areas where they can improve. Just be sure to collect some identifying information, such as a department or recruiter, so that you can conduct more detailed analyses. Check out our blog, “How to Gather Valuable Feedback from Candidate Surveys,” for tips on how to include identifiers while still maintaining anonymity.

Establish Achievable Improvement Goals

The primary purpose of measuring cNPS is to continuously enhance the candidate’s journey, but it is important to understand that this will not happen immediately. By establishing SMART objectives, you can establish specific goals with deadlines. Additionally, utilising past cNPS information can help you monitor your progress and outcomes. Your SMART goals can concentrate on enhancing overall cNPS, such as: Achieve a 15% increase in cNPS by the end of the year. Alternatively, you can further break down your goals to target specific categories that contribute to cNPS. For example: Decrease the percentage of detractors from 30% to 20% by the end of the third quarter.

Once these SMART goals are established, you can further divide them into actionable tasks. For instance, if you discover that candidates become detractors because they didn’t have sufficient time to complete their case, you can make a plan to incorporate more time between case distribution and second interviews. If you notice that you have promoters among early-rejected candidates, it is a positive sign that your initial screening process is effective. By investigating the reasons behind detractors and promoters, you can create specific initiatives to capitalise on or address immediately.

In conclusion, measuring cNPS is a valuable way to track the success of your recruitment process and gain insight into how candidates perceive your company, procedures, and recruiters. By calculating the cNPS score, you can identify promoters, passives, and detractors and make necessary improvements to your recruitment practices. Furthermore, cNPS can be used to compare performance with competitors and establish SMART goals to enhance the overall candidate experience.

Gain insights into understanding Candidate Net Promoter Score and how it can improve your hiring process. Our experts will guide you through measuring and leveraging this crucial metric to enhance candidate experience and satisfaction. Write to us today!