Almost everyone I speak to who works in talent acquisition clearly recognizes the importance of a high-quality candidate experience. However, despite this overwhelming consensus, providing even an acceptable level of candidate experience is still a challenge for a lot of employers.
You can’t improve something if you don’t measure it and the lack of data employers have historically collected about their candidate experience is disappointing, to say the least. However, it finally looks like things are changing for the better.
My guest this week is Hayke Tjemmes from Dutch e-commerce giant Wehkamp. Wehkamp has spent the last 12 months building a framework that measures the right data for them to be able to continuously improve their candidate experience in an effective way.
In the interview we discuss:
- Wehkamp’s recruiting challenges
- Why candidate experience is so important to them as a business
- The limits of using NPS in isolation
- Measuring candidate velocity
- Combining data points to generate actionable insights
- Feedback response rates from candidates at different stages of the process
- The strategy behind their new careers site
Hayke also shares some of the surprising insights their data has revealed and talks about their move towards predictive recruiting.
Subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Smart Recruiters, the hiring success company. Smart Recruiters offers enterprise grade recruiting software designed for hiring success. Move beyond applicant tracking with a modern platform that provides everything you need to attract, select and hire the best talent. From candidate relationship management to programmatic job advertising, recruitment, marketing, collaborative hiring and embedded artificial intelligence Experience. A talent acquisition suite with intuitive user experience that candidates, hiring managers and recruiters all love. Leading brands like Bosch, IKEA, LinkedIn and visa use Smart Recruiters to future proof talent acquisition and expand their businesses globally. Visit smartrecruiters.com to find out how you can achieve hiring success as well.
Matt Alder [00:01:14]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 186 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Almost everyone I talk to in Talent Acquisition clearly recognizes the importance of a high quality candid experience. But despite the overwhelming consensus, providing even a decent candidate experience seems to be a big challenge for many employers. You can’t improve something if you don’t measure it. And the lack of data employers have historically collected about their candidate experience is disappointing to say the least. However, it finally looks like things are changing for the better. My guest this week is Hayke Gemmes from the Dutch e commerce giant Wehkamp. Wehkamp have spent the last 12 months building a framework that measures the right data for them to continuously improve their candidate experience. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:02:16]:
Hi Hayke, and welcome to the podcast.
Hayke Tjemmes [00:02:16]:
Thanks Matt. Great, great being here.
Matt Alder [00:02:18]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Hayke Tjemmes [00:02:24]:
Yeah, for sure. So my name is Hayke Tjemmes. I am a lead recruiter at Wehkamp. So basically I’m responsible for finding the right talent for our company. And Wehkamp is very known in the Netherlands. It is a household brand, but for the international audience we are the top three e commerce company in the Netherlands and if you look at our business, you can compare it to to something in between Amazon and asos. So we are selling fashion, furniture, home accessories, all these kind of stuff for household families?
Matt Alder [00:03:01]:
Absolutely. I mean I’ve seen quite a lot of your advertising when I’ve. When I’ve been over in the Netherlands. So could you tell us a bit about the types of recruiting challenges that you have?
Hayke Tjemmes [00:03:13]:
Yes. So we are looking for a lot of different people and I think most of challenges are in finding people in technology and product development. And there it is very important to attract these People to connect them to your brand and to be sure that you have this brand experience and candid experience that really suits their expectations and what they expect to be literally on top of market for E commerce.
Matt Alder [00:03:47]:
So I know you’ve done a lot of work on your candidate experience recently. Why was it such a priority for you? And what was the, what was the issue you were looking to address?
Hayke Tjemmes [00:03:57]:
Yeah, so what we really want is that all people, because this talent is really scarce in the market. So what we are aiming for is that all the people that have been in contact with Wacom as a customer or as a potential colleague must become an advocate for the Wacom brand and for future, future hires. Even so, the candidate experience is key. It must be on point to make sure that people that apply to some position at Wehkamp will become our future advocates for the brand. So to do so, we, we want to be able to tweak the process and we want to have the process on a top level. But to do so, you want not only your own idea, but you really need feedback from the audience, from these candidates about what we’re doing and we want to see and we want to measure that we’re doing the right stuff. So this is what we have been working on. It is a process of, I think, more than a year now that we are diving into this. And we’ve learned a lot in this process.
Matt Alder [00:05:30]:
You’ve been working on it for a year. Take us back 12 months. How did this sort of process start?
Hayke Tjemmes [00:05:39]:
Yes, So a year ago, we had this bright idea of starting to measure the candidate experience. And we thought, well, as our customers are being asked for an NPS every once in a while, why shouldn’t we use the NPS score, the net Promoter score, for our candidates as well? So we made up a questionnaire with a lot of questions in it. And one of them was the famous NPS question. And we started sending out these questionnaires to candidates that were rejected or hired. And we’ve got a lot of feedback, but it was really, really random information that we couldn’t relate to anything. And we didn’t really know what this came from. So we’ve. Well, we’ve used a couple of months to gather more information, to get more insights. And at some point we found out that basically because we didn’t really know to what extent we as a recruitment team were in control of our own processes, we didn’t really know what this gunnant experience came from. So what we decided to do is stop with this separate NPS questionnaire and really start over. And we kept the idea of this NPS thing because we really think that it is an interesting measurement, but we connected it to our process information that we could extract from our recruitment system. So we started to measure the velocity, the candidate velocity in recruitment screen stage, in interview stage, in offer stage. And we connected this to a very brief, very short NPS questionnaire. We basically put two questions in the questionnaire. One was the NPS question, the other one was an open question for improvements. So it was just to get a bit more feedback. And what we saw was that we’ve got some correlation between the quality of a process and the quality of the answers in the open questions. So for the time that we were less in control of our recruitment process, we’ve got really random response that we not really could learn anything from, from the candidates. But now we are a bit further down the line, we are in full control of our process because we have the numbers and we can steer on it. And what we see now as a result is that because we know what is actually happening with all these candidates is that the feedback that we are getting from the candidates in the OpenMPS question is giving us a lot more insight and more valuable response that we can instantly use to further improve our process. So what we learned and what is really helpful for us is that we need to combine this process information, this internal process information, and this needs to be on point first and then we can add these more subjective candidate input from a questionnaire. And this is sort of a combination of insights that is really helping us in driving this candidate experience.
Matt Alder [00:09:30]:
So I’ve got a couple of follow up questions on that because I think that sounds like a fascinating process and something that all employers should be doing. First, sort of very practical question, so you’re asking candidates for feedback, what point during the process were you asking them and what kind of response rates were you getting?
Hayke Tjemmes [00:09:55]:
Yeah, so overall is the response rate around 10%. And we are asking for feedback basically at the end of the process for this candidate. So in each phase that the candidate goes through, so recruiter screen, interview screen, interview, interview stage, offer stage and higher stage in the end. So as soon as a candidate leaves the process, we ask for feedback. So this is potentially at the recruiter screen rejection or the interview stage rejection or when an offer gets rejected or when a candidate gets hired.
Matt Alder [00:10:43]:
So was there, because I know this is something that comes up quite a lot as potentially a misconception when, when people are talking about collecting candidate feedback, was there kind of Were people who were rejected from the process, were they, were they as likely to give feedback to people who’d gone sort of further through the process? How did you find, how did you find that kind of drop off?
Hayke Tjemmes [00:11:04]:
Well, I don’t see much difference, to be honest. There’s only a difference between people who are hired and people who are not hired. And people who are hired are really into wake up and are delighted to start soon and want to contribute in every possible way. So when we put a questionnaire to them, we will get the questionnaire answered. So the feedback there is higher, but it is biased more towards wake up. So the learning materials for us is a bit less oddly. And in the rejection stage, we see that right now it’s around 10%. And I would love to see it a bit higher than that. But this is what we are working on right now.
Matt Alder [00:11:52]:
And that, you know, and compared to, you know, standard sort of percentages for survey responses, that’s, you know, that’s still pretty good.
Hayke Tjemmes [00:11:59]:
It’s pretty okay. Yeah, it’s pretty okay.
Matt Alder [00:12:01]:
So you also mentioned that there were sort of parts of the recruitment process you had control of and there were things that were outside of your control. Can you sort of expand on that and tell us the types of changes that you made based on this data and these learnings?
Hayke Tjemmes [00:12:16]:
Yes. So what we saw was that most feedback was on speed and on setting expectations. And for example, during interview stage, the hiring team was a bit ambiguous on whether or not there was actually a position open or not. Well, there was, but there were some other candidates. And I think what we saw in feedback was that this felt insecure or at least it felt a bit weird to the candidate. And it’s very easy to fix by training the hiring managers and interview teams a bit more and explaining that being really clear about expectations on both sides is really helpful for us as a company as well as for the candidate candidates looking for clarity as well. The other thing is speed. I don’t know how it is in other countries, but in the Netherlands you see in a lot of companies that it feels a bit decent to wait a bit with feedback. Like maybe it’s more decent to give your feedback tomorrow or the day after tomorrow instead of, let’s say, an hour after the interview. And what we are finding out is that many candidates don’t mind getting feedback sooner, but do mind getting feedback later. So why shouldn’t we fasten this a bit more?
Matt Alder [00:14:04]:
Absolutely. And, you know, that’s a, you know, that’s a great example of data Sort of going against decades of, decades of kind of recruiter, recruiter law in terms of what, what happens. Yeah, really interesting. And so for you guys, I mean the candidate, the whole kind of experience, does, does that start at the recruitment process or does it start, you know, for example, with things like your careers website? Because I kind of understand that you just, you’ve just redesigned that. Can you tell us about that?
Hayke Tjemmes [00:14:34]:
Yeah, we did, yes. It starts on the career side or even before the career site. So we relaunched our career site a few months ago and we really wanted a different angle. What you see on many career sites is that it’s really conversion driven. So most companies start with a search box and a list of vacancies where we chose a bit of a different angle. We don’t want most people to instantly apply. We want visitors of our career site to get to know Wacom a bit more, to learn about how we act as a company, how we think as a company, what our company culture is, what our values are. And when this is sparking you, then it must be very easy to find a relevant position for you. But it is not the first thing that you need to do on this website. And what we see is that people are coming back, people are applying, people are revisiting later to learn more, to read interviews, to see what we call wake up moments. What are really short images, a little bit of text of real events that are happening in the company. These are like sort of Instagram pictures on our website basically.
Matt Alder [00:16:07]:
I mean, I think for a lot of organizations that’s kind of sort of, you know, their nirvana in terms of how their career site should work. But you know what I see a lot of the time is, you know, people visit, their interest isn’t converted and they, and they never come back. Is it the quality of the content or the fact that you’re such a well known brand? What is it that sort of brings people back to your career side?
Hayke Tjemmes [00:16:29]:
I don’t think that being a well known brand makes you come back after you’ve seen it. I think that the quality of the content and then in terms of being real and being relevant is key in this story. So what we did is we started with the company North Star. So we have this company goal that we are aiming for and there are a lot of teams in the company and each team has their own North Star that they are aiming for and this is aligned with the company goal. And each person in the team has a personal North Star that is more or less aligned with the team North Star that’s more or less aligned with the company North Star and basically all people that are on the website are sharing their North Star and how this is helping Wacom grow, how they grow in the company. So it’s really about unleashing your potential in a company and learning, leading your own, your personal growth, leading Wakeamp as an e commerce company. And these are true stories, those are real stories. And when you read it, you feel that this is not some marketing rubbish, but it’s really what we are doing. And by refreshing this content and making sure that there is more to see when you return to the website, it stays relevant. And I think this relevance and genuinity and basically the combination of it is what drives people back to the website.
Matt Alder [00:18:15]:
So, final question. You’ve spent sort of 12 months evolving your measurement and your candidate experience. What’s next? What are your plans for the next 12 months?
Hayke Tjemmes [00:18:27]:
So what we’ve done so far is basically improving the quality of the process and next step is that we want to use data to make our recruitment more predictive. So we are moving a bit internal again, let’s put it that way. And what we want to do is use data to predict not only how long it will take to fill candidates, to fill open position with candidates, but also we want to use the data to be on the right place, on the right moment to actually attract them. And we want to use our own data for it and combine our own data set with public data that’s available with LinkedIn data, with basically every data point that we can, that we can grab our fingers behind and really start working on data driven recruitment.
Matt Alder [00:19:31]:
Hayke, thank you very much for talking to me.
Hayke Tjemmes [00:19:33]:
You’re very welcome. Thanks for being here.
Matt Alder [00:19:36]:
My thanks to Hayke Tjemmes and also my thanks to the lovely people at Smart Recruiters for helping to organize the interview. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
