Insights from Candidate Experience Webinar

Welcome to this long-awaited Candidate Experience Benchmarks webinar. I will give you guys a bit of time to settle into the room. I can see the attendees are trickling in. So to make sure you are not missing out on anything, I will give you some time. But first, I would like to start by... Putting a little poll in the chat, you will see it on the right. And since we are looking back at 2024, in order to be able to look ahead into 2025, I would love to know how was 2024 for you? How was hiring? Was it challenging? Were you able to meet your hiring goals or not? If you would like to also add... your two cents in the chat, please do at any point of the presentation. But I think I will go on with the scheduled program because we have a lot that we have packed into the session. So hopefully as more of you join over time, you will be able to catch up. Do not worry, the recording of this will be sent to you tomorrow. So if you miss any of the information, don't worry. And also your own copy of the long-awaited Candidate Experience Benchmark Report will also be sent to you today after the webinar. So today we are here for two reasons, and I am super excited to be able to be leading today's webinar. And the two reasons are, as I mentioned, the benchmark report and the findings that we have discovered in there, but also the discussion that we will be having. with our Candidate Experience Champions from Pedidos. So just a little introduction before we get started so you know who we are. We are here from start and we help companies worldwide improve hiring based on insights. So we provide top employers around the world with a first-class candidate experience survey and analytics platform that allows companies to get a better understanding of their employees collect the data and insights they need in order to improve both the candidate experience but also their hiring efficiency, internal alignment, hiring manager satisfaction and much more. And I am Claudia Lawrence, I am here representing STAAD and I will be guiding you through all of the findings from today's report. And I am also joined here by Gert who is my fellow colleague from STAAD. who will guide the conversation with our champions. So, Gert, would you mind sharing a little bit about yourself? Of course, thank you so much. Hi everyone, my name is Gert, I'm the team lead for Customer Success here at Start. I'm in charge of the day-to-day operations for our Customer Success team. And next to that, I'm also the dedicated Customer Success manager for some of our customers, of which Pedidocia is also one. Great. Sorry, I had an issue with my microphone. I'm so excited and looking forward to the conversation you're going to have. So, Victoria, could you also tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Vicky. I lead the talent acquisition team from Pedido Chat. I'm from Argentina and I'm really excited to be here today to share our experience with you. Great. And Denise? Yes. Hi, hi everyone. So glad to be part of this webinar. I'm Denise. I'm also working in the talent acquisition team in Payal Shah. I'm based also in Argentina, so it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Perfect. And Yanni, what about you? Hi everyone. Based in Argentina too, just as Denise and Vicky. I'm the... culture and people experience manager for pedidasha and i'm really happy to be joining this conversation to cover the culture part of this process and how important is it so thank you for having me Perfect. As you can see, we have all the different angles of the recruitment process and employee engagement and experience and pedagogy here. And so that conversation will be super, super interesting. But to start, I would like to actually give some insight into what we're going to talk about. And the agenda here is packed. So. First, you can see all the speakers disappearing because I will take over the stage for the next 15 minutes, where I will give you a little bit of an intel into the context of candidate experience in 2024, because we cannot talk about the trends without understanding the labor market last year. Then I will show you and explain the top 10 or the 10 findings of our report. that I am so, so happy to share with you because you guys are the first ones who will see the findings externally. So there's a lot of pressure, but a lot of also very, very interesting insights there. And then after we understand the context, we will have a very, very interesting conversation with Pedirossia and how they managed to score so highly in the CNPS for 2024. Of course, as always, at the end we'll also have a Q&A, where you can ask all your questions. And if you have any questions at any point of this chat, whether that's during my presentation or whether that's during the conversation with Pedidocia, please just put them in the chat. We will get to them at the end. Okay, so let's get started. What is the context of candidate experience in 2024 without mentioning the talent shortage. And the talent shortage is not something new. That's why I mean, maybe it's got a new meaning. It got a new meaning because it is just so present in our lives. And the Manpower Group prepares this report every single year where they show how many, what is the percentage of companies that struggle with hiring specialized talent for the open roles. And as you can see, since 2021, this has really flatlined. And even though it's not growing, it's not dangerously growing, it's also not going down, which means that we have had to really get used to living with this new norm of always struggling to find the top talent. What's also interesting here is that the unemployment is super low, which means that when somebody does become available on the labor market, it is literally a fight. to get that top talent in your company. That's why candidate experience is so, so important for you to have that differentiator in your recruitment process. Another thing I cannot not mention in this presentation when talking about 2024 is that AI-powered solutions really took reign. And 39% of recruitment professionals have reported that they have used AI powered solutions in 2024 and that has made them feel a bit less stressed. So here you can see a little breakdown of what are the reasons why recruiters are using AI and for what kind of tasks and you will be able to see this explained and a lot bigger in the report after you receive it after the webinar. It's things as small as generating the job description and even as specialized as helping recruiters judge the performance of a candidate at an interview. So AI is really, really present and it's becoming more and more present in our lives. But number three is also something that I feel like we've been repeating in our reports for the past at least two years, is doing more with less as companies start to consolidate and reduce. and become more sustainable and just achieve more results with less. And this is something super interesting because the amount of CVs that a recruiter has to process every year or in a year has now increased to 2,526 applications per one recruiter. And just for context, two years ago, this was around 500. So it has grown a lot. And here I just wanted to show you this super interesting graph, which are the reasons for increased stress in 2024. And the paradox of the top three reasons. Number one is that there are not enough qualified candidates. Well, number two is that there are more open requisitions to fill. And number three is that there is more competition from other employers. So, again, this speaks to the fact that. Yes, talent shortage is just so present and it's there and we need to find ways to stand out from the crowd. And candidate experience, spoiler alert, should be the thing that differentiates us. So this was the context. But how do we then measure candidate experience? How do we ensure that what we are doing and how our process is doing is contributing to us being able to hire that top? talent. So at STAAD, we have implemented the NPS framework. And the NPS framework is simple and similar across all fields. But in terms of candidate net promoter score, we ask this question. Based on your experience, how likely are you to recommend others to apply for a job at a company? And then the candidates can rate this answer from 0 to 10. And here you see that All the answers that are above nine are considered promoters. All those between seven and eight are passives. And all those below seven are considered detractors. Underneath, you can see the calculation that you have to do in order to calculate the net promoter score. And this you do, obviously, with all the data that you collect from your surveys. But it is scary to see that six and below is already considered a detractor. And it... They are considered detractors because they are the ones who will actively go out and say to their friends and family that you should not apply for a job at this company because I had such a terrible experience. So those are the ones that you really, really want to convert into at least passives, but in the best case scenario, promoters. So, yes, you are measuring surveys. You are sending them out. But how do you know what is a good? candidate net promoter score response rate. How many people should be responding to your surveys? As you can see at the top, we've got the hired candidates and they, at least half of those hired will respond to a survey, while the withdrawn and rejected candidates are hovering around the 20% rejection mark. So here, sorry, response rate mark. And here, what's important to think about is the positivity and negativity bias. Obviously, a recruitment process is a very emotional process. And those who are hired are more inclined to be positive about their experience, even if it wasn't perfect. While those who are rejected are more inclined to be negative, even if the recruitment process wasn't perfect. And that's why here I will later show you. why the quantity matters. Because the CNPS over time has not increased or decreased drastically. As I said at the beginning, 2024 was not a year of extreme change. And in CNPS, we also have not seen any extreme changes. And there might be multiple reasons for that. But that is maybe also because we have just had so many... things going on in the labor market and in the world where candidate experience was not the top priority. We have had mass hirings, mass layoffs, we have had AI. So recruitment teams have really had to juggle a lot of challenges. And so candidate experience was not being as prioritized as maybe it should have been. And maybe now is the time. So here we move on to our first finding. And our first finding may be for some. is obvious, but we obviously have found that candidate experience impacts your overall hiring success. And on the left here, you can see the ratio of candidates who have been rejected, who have been withdrawn, and who have been hired. And evidently, and I know that all of you know this, the largest amount of people who you will collect responses from are rejected, simply because you cannot hire all the people that apply. for your open roles. But what's key to notice here are the withdrawn category. Even though they are only 10%, if you extrapolate this example to, say, a thousand candidates, and you end up hiring 80 of them, or the 8% of them, all those 82% that are rejected will potentially speak negatively about their experience because they didn't get the job. But withdrawn candidates are important to take into consideration here because they choose to exit the recruitment process on their own accord. They are the most painful ones to lose because they are the ones you cannot control in the same way. You don't decide that they leave the recruitment funnel at that point. They decide by themselves and often this happens to your favourite candidates. Or think about the amount of times in which you lost your top candidate that you've been trying so hard to hire. And they left the recruitment process or said no to your offer because the process was not what they expected. So withdrawn candidates are the ones that you should be really, really paying attention to. And they are also the ones that are maybe the low hanging fruits that you could really, really influence your overall CNPS and hiring success if you prioritize those. Then. Number two is also quite obvious, but yes, rejected candidates will talk negatively about your company. As you can see, rejected candidates have the lowest average CNPS score in 2024, and they have shown that for the past, ever since we started doing this report, and hired candidates have the highest. But let's go back to the response rates. Obviously, hired candidates have the highest. CNPS, but there are also the smallest group of people. There are the least hired candidates, while there are also the most rejected candidates. So when you look at your CNPS score, you have to take into account that rejected candidates make up a large portion of that, and those are also the ones that you should be looking at when evaluating your performance. Here, when you look at the sentiment analysis for rejected candidates and withdrawn candidates, You can see that the company category at the top shows 17% of negative opinions of rejected candidates on your company and 21 of withdrawn candidates. And what that means is that 17% of those who are rejected will go out and negatively speak about your company as an employer or as a business to their friends and family. And those friends will speak to their friends and their friends will speak to those friends. So this snowball effect is something that you should really, really try to control while you can at the beginning or at the source when you can influence the recruitment process. Now, what's also interesting is the withdrawn category. I have told you that these are the most interesting ones and they are the most interesting ones because they have the most balanced opinion of your recruitment process. And so 64 percent of those who withdraw do so due to bad communication. We have analyzed the unhappiest 25% of our withdrawn candidates in our datasets. And we have found that 64% of them do so because of communication. And when I just explained to you why withdrawn candidates are so important and so painful to lose, why are we letting our candidates withdraw when it's only because of communication? And you can improve communication by making it more transparent, by making it more clear, by making it more timely, in order to prevent your best candidates leaving before accepting your offer. And that is something that I think you can easily do. It's also a very, important part of the recruitment process in total. And David, I can see you are asking about communication about what? Communication about the recruitment process, about how fast they are advancing, about what they should expect, about when will be their next interview. Just in general, communication around the process and around how they are doing. What is the next step? Because the longer you wait and the worse your communication is, the more likely they are going to go to other competitors. And the assessment framework is also something that you should look at. Most companies include some form of assessment, whether that's a case interview or a personality assessment or a cognitive test. We have looked here at the CNPS per rejected assessment or per rejected touchpoint. So candidates rejected after assessment have the lowest CNPS. And this is also a very, very low hanging fruit. And here we have also dove deep into understand why they are so unhappy when they are rejected after assessment. Again, communication here around the assessment is the number one topic that is being discussed. Also lengthy and inefficient assessment process, poorly structured assessment, assessments or misalignment between the job description and assessment. So just communicating about the assessment and letting the candidate understand why they are doing it and just making them see that it's not a waste of time. Whether that means that you shorten. your assessments or you make them a little bit more concise or a bit more relevant, looking at your assessment stage might increase your overall CNPS and the overall candidate experience that you are providing. And speaking on that, almost half of all rejected candidates don't understand why. I have shown you this graph before when I was talking about the company, but here I would like you to look at the second from last. point, which is feedback. And here when we say feedback, we mean the reason why somebody is rejected. So I know that scaling feedback is not always possible, especially for those larger companies. So when you are communicating your rejection, even though it's not always possible to give such a personalized feedback message as you would like to, it is Important to make sure that all the steps before leading up to that rejection kind of help the candidate understand at the end why they would be rejected. Whether that's making sure that your job descriptions are clear, that the expectations are set properly. These are the things that you should take care of in order to avoid candidates not understanding why they are rejected. Now, candidate net promoter score. is not only about candidate experience, it can also tell you a little bit about the efficiency of your hiring. So we can also slice and dice your data based on department, source, company size, things like that. So here you can see on the left the total number of candidates who are applying into each department and you can see that Engineering product and data are number three in terms of the number of applications, while marketing is number four. But what's interesting here is that engineering products and data has also a relatively high hiring rate, but also the highest withdrawn rate. And this again speaks to the talent shortage. The engineering products and data candidates know that they are in high demand. They also have the highest expectations and they will also be the ones who are not afraid to withdraw from a process because they know that another company is out there ready to give them what they want. So there is a lot of competition for those roles specifically across different companies. While for marketing, life is a bit more difficult for the candidates themselves, because as you can see, they are the fourth highest number of applications in terms of value. But they are. also the ones with the least hiring success with only 1%. And you can also see that the CNPS corresponds here because engineering product and data as well as marketing have scored the lowest on the CNPS score, which means that marketing, obviously, they are unhappy because there is a lot of competition that they are experiencing. But engineering product and data applicants are really, really, they have really, really high expectations. The bar is very, very high there. So in order to make them feel happy, you really, really need to go above and beyond. Finding number seven is diving a bit deeper into the sources that our customers have been using. And here you can see, it's probably to nobody's surprise, that internal and referred candidates are the most successful source of hire. And that is because you can see that 45% of internal applicants are hired and they are also probably the highest quality, even though they are one of the lowest amount of candidates who are in the recruitment funnel. So, Maybe 2025 should be the year where you really, really revamp your internal mobility and your referral schemes, because they are the ones that are bringing you the most successful hires. On the other hand, we look at the career page, which is great for quantity, but not so much for quality. As you can see on the left, candidates coming through the career page make up half of all the candidates that apply into the InforJobs. However, there is only 5% of them who are successful. And that goes to show that maybe having a bit more of a personalized approach is the way to go forward in 2025. And that is also supported by company marketing. Company marketing is LinkedIn posts, just social media presence and promoting your jobs over there. With that only having a 1% success rate. That probably shows that trying to get the most amount of candidates in your net, but not doing so in a personalized way is not the best way to go forward. The ninth finding is about the recruitment agency, which could be damaging your brand. The recruitment agency has by far the lowest CNPS score. And by recruitment agency, I mean the candidates who have come into your process from a recruitment agency. And the reason for that is simple. It's that a recruitment agency is not hired to boost your employer brand. It's not there to translate your EVP. It's there to get the job done, to hire the candidates that you have paid them to hire. So maybe you can take this graph and take this report internally and help build a case internally that in-house recruitment is the way to go in 2025. or at least to nudge you a little bit to evaluate how effective your sources are. And my last finding is that small and medium businesses have created way better candidate experiences than large enterprises. And this has been the case for three years in a row since we've started publishing this report. And here you can see that enterprises with over 5,000 full-time employees are really behind in terms of CNPS at only 25. And this could be for a number of reasons. It could be due to bureaucracy. It could be due to extensive processes, lack of alignment internally, or bad scalability during growth. But what I'm so excited about is to hear from Pedidos. Yeah, because they are in this company bracket or in this company size bracket, but they have scored a whole 68 CNPS in 2024. So this conversation is really, really going to bring a lot of insights to us. So I would like to welcome back on stage Jani, Vicky, Denise and Gert and I will exit the stage so that they can have a great conversation all about the best practices. Thank you so much, Claudia, for sharing those key insights. and to Vicky, Janina, Denise. Again, thank you so much for being here today. We do have a lot of ground to cover, so I suggest we just jump straight in with our very first question. And then maybe before we dive back into the insights and best practices, would you briefly tell us a bit about Lush as a business, what you do as an organization, and also what kind of talent is important to you as an organization? Okay, for sure. PedidoSai is a leading delivery and quick commerce platform platform in Latin America, connecting users with restaurants, markets, and more across 15 countries in the region. As part of Delivery Hero Group, a global leader in the delivery industry, we are committed to building a strong, talented, and diverse team. We value talent that is eager to learn, humble, and customer-focused, and we especially seek individuals with strong teamwork skills and who love what they do and want to make a difference. life easier for our users. At PedidoXia, we hire talent across all levels and areas of the business, from entry level to senior leadership roles. Also, we recruit both operationals and non-operationals profiles. Okay, thanks so much for providing the context, Vicky. Given that you operate on such a large scale, you mentioned across 15 countries, what was the biggest recruitment challenge for PedidoXia in 2024? And how did you overcome that? Okay, looking back, 2024 was a year full of challenges for us, from quickly filling a high volume of operational roles to higher senior level positions across multiple markets. Managing 3,000 hires naturally brought many obstacles along the way, but the one that had the biggest impact on candidate experience was our ATS migration. We made this change to standardize our recruiting process growth. globally. We improve visibility for leaders with better reporting and insight and we enhance our short posting site for more seamless candidate experience. However, one challenge that we didn't anticipate was the impact on candidate feedback. In our previous system, feedback links were in bed directly on candidate communications. With the new system, surveys were sent one or two days later from a different email address. which lead to a significant drop in the responses rate for a few months. And as Claudia said, quantity matters. It took us time and analysis to identify that this change was the root case. Once we understood the issue, we collaborate closely with your team to assess the survey timing and align it with our communication flow. And as a result, we were able to reverse the trend and significantly increase the response rate, restoring the feedback volume we had before the migration. Yeah, thank you, Vicky. Hi. As you might, of course, remember, I was myself part of that migration process from Start's perspective, obviously, only. And I'm really happy that we managed to turn that around, obviously. But moving on, why is it that Canada Experience is so important to you at... particular show? I will take this one. At the Diocha, our culture is the core of everything that we do, and that extends on to how we engage with candidates. We see the hiring process as the first touch point where people can experience our dynamic, fast-paced, and collaborative environment. So, candidate experience is crucial because it It shapes the perception that candidates have of all the company. So it will impact our employer brand. And if we do our best here, it will help us attract the right talent to build the best team possible. So we are constantly looking for ways to improve the way we connect with candidates, the way we gather feedback, and trying to ensure a process that really reflects our values and the way we work. I think that we can say that the candidate experience is that first impression that you don't want to make wrong in any way possible. So we really put our best there so people can have a really good first impression of how we live the culture and how we promote it and experience in the everyday work. So I think that candidate experience is like that moment that we really need to take care. uh to make that happen thanks much annie i couldn't agree more obviously but maybe i'm a bit biased in that but okay so what i'm hearing is that culture employer brand and then attracting the right talent basically it plays a key part in all of this thank you um so that was uh what are your goals for 2025 around canada experience so we talked challenges for 2024 but looking ahead is there anything you did in 2024 that you would bring forward with you to this year as well Okay, so in 2025, we aim to continue improving the experience of every candidate by making our processes more seamless, transparent and engaging. We've made adjustments to better understand the opportunities that we have at each stage, allowing us to implement more targeted and effective actions throughout the process. This is a journey that we've been on since 2024. And while we always have opportunities for improvement, Our focus and objectives are very clear. As Shani said before, culture is the core of everything that we do. Sharing our values and our culture for us is the key for candidates to understand what makes us unique as a company, as area and the role, and how this can add value to their experience. Also, maintaining a very close, fluid and transparent communication, generating clear expectations, providing timely follow-ups. and offering meaningful feedbacks and of course apply a diverse and inclusive perspective across all processes actively evaluating the candidate experience and taking action based on the different feedbacks that we receive I think that one concrete improvement from 2024 that we will carry into 2025 is how we handle candidate communication. Even when we don't have any updates to share, instead of going silent, we prioritize keeping candidates informed, leaving always the door open for future opportunities and maintaining a very close connection. And we also introduce post-interview check-ins to ask candidates how they felt after each stage. even if we don't have like any immediate feedback to provide but this helped us strengthen engagement and reinforce our commitment to this very positive candidate experience. Okay thank you so much. So what I hear coming back here from what Claudia was mentioning before is also communication again is key not just whenever you spoke to the kids but also throughout even if there's no real updates to share. But now taking all of what you've just mentioned as goals for 2022. 2025 into consideration, if there would be only one piece of advice that you could give to a recruitment team prior to our experience in 2025, what would that be? That's an interesting question. I will say focus on fundamentals. Make sure that candidates know what to expect, when to expect it, and feel value throughout the process. As Denise mentioned before, clarity, transparency and consistent communication can make a huge difference and they are often overlooked. In a fast-moving and competitive market like ours, candidates who aren't the right fit today may be the strong candidate in the future. So that's why every interaction matters. The experience they have during the hiring process must reflect our culture and values regardless of the outcome. always about big innovations. Sometimes it's just the biggest impact comes from getting the basics right. Okay, that makes so much sense. I think that, well, if there's something that the audience will for sure take away from today's conversation is that focus on fundamentals or getting the basics right. Thank you so much for that. Now, maybe referring back to some of the 2024 trends that Claudia shared earlier. So rejected candidates tend to have the lowest CNPS candidate promoter score that we know. This year, the benchmark there was minus six. But you scored a whopping plus 35 across your rejected touch points for last year. So what do you think makes a good rejection? And how do you make sure that you avoid deep trap in those stages? Yeah, I mean, well, for us, a good rejection is always very clear and personalized. And to achieve this, we first need always like strong interviews where both talent acquisition and hiring managers gather concrete evidence to provide meaningful feedback. So as candidates progress through our processes, we always aim to give them insights along the way so they can understand why they were not selected. Of course, our process isn't perfect. We have some detractors and that's why we see a big opportunity to keep improving on how we deliver feedback. and ensure candidates live with this very positive experience that we want to even if they don't get the role so as we said before our culture is very people-centric so we will always prioritize like the human side of the process and this is why we highly value fostering strong and very close connections with with all the candidates along all the all the way thank you so much so human centricity is what they hear here and then looking at the numbers it seems like that candidate centricity or human centricity seems to be really paying off for you. So kudos for that, obviously. Now looking also at the quality feedback from candidates, as mentioned earlier, the three most prevailing topics in comment analysis on the Star platform were communication, yet again, the hiring process, and then also the recruitment team. What would your advice be on keeping your recruitment teams and your hiring teams aligned throughout the hiring process? I think I can take this one. At the IdaShop we have one of our values which is we play as a team in Spanish is jugamos en equipo and that's not an empty motto for us. In this case this means that the TA team and the hiring managers are aligned because we are and we work as one team. So as they were mentioned before both Benny and Vicky the key is we continuously are in communication, we are all trying to get everyone on the same page, we set clear expectations and we ensure that both sides have the right tools to make the informed decisions. are needed to be made. So what we do to make this happen, basically we have three things that I can see that is something they see to the people that is listening to this webinar can implement in their own organizations. We have training sessions if needed to develop the capabilities that we need in hiring managers. We have regular things as part of the process between TA team and the hiring managers and we have structured feedback loops. So that helps us to stay agile and improve the process and the kind of experience. And maybe to summarize, the bottom line here is we should be aligned that this is our shared responsibility. This is not the TA team making like a favor to the hiring managers or the hiring managers being good to the TA team. Everyone's have a really key role to play in attracting and hiring the best talent possible. So I think that. they as a team is the the thing that we we can summarize this one okay cool so like you said it's all as one team and then communication not just internally but also towards candidates seems to keep a key factor here as you might remember from earlier candidates who are referred or who are internal applicants tend to have the highest candidate promoter score and then conversely recruitment agencies score, I believe the lowest team was scored. Was there a specific candidate source that's announced in 2024, either in a good or a bad way? Okay, as per ILOSA, almost all of our hiring is managed by our internal team. With agencies, we only remain below 5%. This is due to cost efficiency, but mainly because we believe that managing the process ourselves allow us to better care the candidate experience and ensure greater traceability. While we do not have our data directly linked to recruitment sources or focus on making sure, our focus is to make sure that every candidate where they come from referral, internal application or external tenant has a consistent and positive experience. That being said, the one source where we do have direct feedback is from internal applicants and it's one of our highest MPS scores. This reinforces not only the importance of providing a great experience across all channels but also highlights the value of developing our internal employees. Okay so it seems like you're seeing the same as in the benchmark reports the same seems to be true for you as well. and then keeping internal control seems to be playing a key part in that. Thank you so much for that. As Claudia mentioned earlier, we found that larger organizations like yourselves had a much lower candidate promoter score than small and medium-sized businesses, but for a company of your size the average CNPS was 25 in 2024, but you scored 68. So what do you think makes you so successful in comparison? Okay, we discussed a bit around this answer and it might sound repetitive, but the key differentiator for us is the culture. Our team's deep commitment to delivering a great experience, regardless of the hiring volume, is what helps us stand out. We know why larger companies often struggle with bureaucracy or impersonal processes. As my colleague Denise said. a few minutes ago. I don't want to be repetitive, but we make a conscious effort to maintain a human touch in everything that we do. And that helps us stay true to our culture and the way we work. So I think we take care of people, no matter the volume. And that's, in my opinion, what drives our success in this area. Okay. That makes sense. I also like that you mentioned regardless of or no matter the volume, as we usually see, usually the candidate promoter score tends to suffer a lot under higher application volumes. So I like that you mentioned that as well. Now, the final maybe data trend that we want to look at for today is the two departments, as you might remember, with the lowest promoter score by far were marketing and tech engineering. And the highest ones. operations and finance. Do you approach your recruitment strategy differently depending on departments or is that the same across the board? Well, while our recruitment approach is consistent across all departments, we do recognize that specific processes like maybe case studies or technical assessments play a bigger role in departments like marketing or engineering. For example, we know that in today's job market engineering roles are in a very high demand, creating an environment where competitiveness is at its peak and engineers often find themselves maybe with multiple offers to choose from as companies compete for their skills and expertise. So reviewing this one area where we see room for improvement is in how we communicate with candidates about what to expect before and after this type of exercise. This isn't something that we are consistently doing at this moment, but it's an opportunity to refine our process. And of course, as part of our culture, we aim to identify these areas and learn from them, ensuring a clear and more transparent experience for candidates which can ultimately improve our MPS scores. Okay, I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much, Denise, and thanks for elaborating on that one. Now maybe briefly circling back to something you mentioned at the very beginning, the Delivery Hero group is a global business with many different brands under its wings, of which Pedido Shy is one. How does the company ensure that it delivers top quality experiences to all candidates, regardless of which brand or region they are applying to? Okay, here I think we learn from our own business. So as a business, we operate globally, but we always recognize the power of the local flavor of everything we do. So this is I think the basic, the key is understanding the needs and preferences of each local demographic. And for the talent acquisition purposes, we follow the same approach. So we try to understand the local needs and try to develop processes that focus on that. So we have obviously a standardized process, but we try to put the people on the center of everything that we do. So, Pellido Cha. operates in Latin America, but we operate in 15 countries. So we are a brand in a global system, but we also have diversity in our own scope. So we have a lot of challenges, but our success lies on the understanding of which are the local particularities that we need to attend. So I think we can sum it up in one word, which is empathy. We put people at the center of everything we do, and we ensure every action has... this human touch and I think that's the way that we can like put what we do on the on this, I mean in this, the thing that I'm sorry I'm very smart, I'm smart in Spanish that's a standout aspiration in this global operation. Thanks so much, Jan. So I think, well, keeping a streamlined approach, basically, while respecting, as you said, local flavors, is what I'm hearing here. Thanks so much. Now, my final question, before handing it back over to Claudia. So you're using Start to measure different touch points and stakeholders in your recruitment process, including, obviously, candidates, but also hiring managers. Why is capturing, in the end, why is capturing all of that data so important to you? Yeah, of course, I mean, having data from all touch points in our hiring process give us a complete picture of what is working and where we have some room to improve. But we think that it's not just about metrics, it's about creating a hiring experience that is efficient, transparent, and meaningful for everyone that is involved. So maybe we see like this from different perspectives. At first, enhancing candidate experience, as we said before. This means understanding how candidates perceive our processes and will make and help us make it smoother, clearer and more engaging because every interaction should add value regardless of the outcome. Then of course making data-driven decisions instead of relying on assumptions we use a 360 view to make informed improvements that drive real impact both for the business and for the people going through our processes. And beyond hiring, there is even a bigger focus for us. It's our brand perception. Every candidate is either a current or a potential user of our platform, and their experience with us in the hiring process shapes how they perceive our brand. This year we want to better understand and measure this impact to ensure we are making a lasting impression. And at the end, talent acquisition isn't just about filling roles. It's about building connections, elevating our brand and making sure that every touchpoint reflects who we are as a company. Thank you so much. I think that is a great wrap to a great discussion as well. So thanks so much, Denise, Vicky and of course, Gianni as well. for your time and for sharing these insights with us. Claudia, I think back to you now, which is already jumping on. I could see we had quite some interesting questions in the chat. So let's let's head over to those. Yes, thank you so much. This was a super, super valuable information, especially following all the all the insights. And so we are also a little bit over time. So I think we only have maybe time for one or two questions. So if you have, if there are any more questions you want to ask to our speakers or to us, please tell us anyway. We will reach out to you with the answers via email after this webinar. But maybe let's start with this one. So I know, and you have also mentioned that you are also serving your hiring managers to make sure that there is internal alignment. But how does that help you with? accountability and how does it promote this alignment? Okay, I take that one. Getting feedback from our hiring managers is a key part of keeping everyone aligned and accountable. It gives us insight into what's working well and where we might need to make adjustments. After closing each individual position, we send a survey to all hiring managers to capture the feedback and identify opportunities to improve our processes. Their feedback has helped us to clarify the process and set clear timelines, improve overall visibility so everyone is on the same page, and provide additional training to help hiring managers make accurate, effective evaluations. In the end, it's just one thing. In the end, it's all about ensuring positive, consistent experience for both candidates and internal teams. Yeah. The process is really like the stakeholders in it are so important at all stages. So it's really, really important to involve all of them. And maybe I will jump to some earlier questions and maybe I will take one of them. David has asked if we will be sending the slides. We will you will see the slides in the recording. but all of the graphs that I shared in the slides are present in the report, so you can also see them there. And we are running out of time, and I see that you have a lot of really, really, really good questions, and I really don't want to rush the answers, so we will take some time off camera with our champions here, and we will answer all of your questions thoroughly. and send them over to you via email. So expect that soon. So sorry that we went over time. We just had so much important information to talk about. And here I just wanted to round off by saying, what shall we expect in 2025? And I will just call out the headlines here. Of course, AI is not going anywhere. And I will jump to the last point that maybe... Because AI is not going anywhere, candidate experience should become more of a priority. Because, yes, we are giving more of our tasks away to AI. But do we know how AI is doing and how it's making candidates feel in the process if AI will take over interviewing or if AI will take over the communication? And something that was really, really transparent in all the data is that internal mobility and learning and development is here also. coming to the rescue that maybe the secret to fixing the talent shortage is looking within. So prioritizing good development structures and making sure that your current employees have the skills that they need. And as a last, last thing, I just wanted to invite those who are interested in the next few weeks, we will be holding a series of deep dive sessions where you will be able to learn about how to integrate start into your ATS, how to build surveys, how to master hiring manager satisfaction or how to analyze all the data that I've shown here. without being an analyst, because it can be very, very overwhelming to see all of those numbers. But getting the most out of the data is also key. So thank you so much. You can expect your report coming to you in the next 10 minutes, I think. And happy reading. If you have any questions, you know where to find us. Thank you again so, so much to all my great speakers. and for all of the value that you have provided us here and also to Gert who has come off stage. But yes, thank you so so much. This has been a pleasure to have you here and have a lovely rest of your day. Thank you. Thank you.

Putting a little poll in the chat, you will see it on the right. And since we are looking back at 2024, in order to be able to look ahead into 2025, I would love to know how was 2024 for you? How was hiring?

Was it challenging? Were you able to meet your hiring goals or not? If you would like to also add...

your two cents in the chat, please do at any point of the presentation. But I think I will go on with the scheduled program because we have a lot that we have packed into the session. So hopefully as more of you join over time, you will be able to catch up.

Do not worry, the recording of this will be sent to you tomorrow. So if you miss any of the information, don't worry. And also your own copy of the long-awaited Candidate Experience Benchmark Report will also be sent to you today after the webinar. So today we are here for two reasons, and I am super excited to be able to be leading today's webinar. And the two reasons are, as I mentioned, the benchmark report and the findings that we have discovered in there, but also the discussion that we will be having.

with our Candidate Experience Champions from Pedidos. So just a little introduction before we get started so you know who we are. We are here from start and we help companies worldwide improve hiring based on insights.

So we provide top employers around the world with a first-class candidate experience survey and analytics platform that allows companies to get a better understanding of their employees collect the data and insights they need in order to improve both the candidate experience but also their hiring efficiency, internal alignment, hiring manager satisfaction and much more. And I am Claudia Lawrence, I am here representing STAAD and I will be guiding you through all of the findings from today's report. And I am also joined here by Gert who is my fellow colleague from STAAD. who will guide the conversation with our champions. So, Gert, would you mind sharing a little bit about yourself?

Of course, thank you so much. Hi everyone, my name is Gert, I'm the team lead for Customer Success here at Start. I'm in charge of the day-to-day operations for our Customer Success team. And next to that, I'm also the dedicated Customer Success manager for some of our customers, of which Pedidocia is also one. Great.

Sorry, I had an issue with my microphone. I'm so excited and looking forward to the conversation you're going to have. So, Victoria, could you also tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. Hi, everyone.

I'm Vicky. I lead the talent acquisition team from Pedido Chat. I'm from Argentina and I'm really excited to be here today to share our experience with you. Great. And Denise?

Yes. Hi, hi everyone. So glad to be part of this webinar.

I'm Denise. I'm also working in the talent acquisition team in Payal Shah. I'm based also in Argentina, so it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Perfect. And Yanni, what about you? Hi everyone.

Based in Argentina too, just as Denise and Vicky. I'm the... culture and people experience manager for pedidasha and i'm really happy to be joining this conversation to cover the culture part of this process and how important is it so thank you for having me Perfect.

As you can see, we have all the different angles of the recruitment process and employee engagement and experience and pedagogy here. And so that conversation will be super, super interesting. But to start, I would like to actually give some insight into what we're going to talk about.

And the agenda here is packed. So. First, you can see all the speakers disappearing because I will take over the stage for the next 15 minutes, where I will give you a little bit of an intel into the context of candidate experience in 2024, because we cannot talk about the trends without understanding the labor market last year.

Then I will show you and explain the top 10 or the 10 findings of our report. that I am so, so happy to share with you because you guys are the first ones who will see the findings externally. So there's a lot of pressure, but a lot of also very, very interesting insights there.

And then after we understand the context, we will have a very, very interesting conversation with Pedirossia and how they managed to score so highly in the CNPS for 2024. Of course, as always, at the end we'll also have a Q&A, where you can ask all your questions. And if you have any questions at any point of this chat, whether that's during my presentation or whether that's during the conversation with Pedidocia, please just put them in the chat. We will get to them at the end.

Okay, so let's get started. What is the context of candidate experience in 2024 without mentioning the talent shortage. And the talent shortage is not something new. That's why I mean, maybe it's got a new meaning. It got a new meaning because it is just so present in our lives.

And the Manpower Group prepares this report every single year where they show how many, what is the percentage of companies that struggle with hiring specialized talent for the open roles. And as you can see, since 2021, this has really flatlined. And even though it's not growing, it's not dangerously growing, it's also not going down, which means that we have had to really get used to living with this new norm of always struggling to find the top talent.

What's also interesting here is that the unemployment is super low, which means that when somebody does become available on the labor market, it is literally a fight. to get that top talent in your company. That's why candidate experience is so, so important for you to have that differentiator in your recruitment process.

Another thing I cannot not mention in this presentation when talking about 2024 is that AI-powered solutions really took reign. And 39% of recruitment professionals have reported that they have used AI powered solutions in 2024 and that has made them feel a bit less stressed. So here you can see a little breakdown of what are the reasons why recruiters are using AI and for what kind of tasks and you will be able to see this explained and a lot bigger in the report after you receive it after the webinar.

It's things as small as generating the job description and even as specialized as helping recruiters judge the performance of a candidate at an interview. So AI is really, really present and it's becoming more and more present in our lives. But number three is also something that I feel like we've been repeating in our reports for the past at least two years, is doing more with less as companies start to consolidate and reduce. and become more sustainable and just achieve more results with less. And this is something super interesting because the amount of CVs that a recruiter has to process every year or in a year has now increased to 2,526 applications per one recruiter.

And just for context, two years ago, this was around 500. So it has grown a lot. And here I just wanted to show you this super interesting graph, which are the reasons for increased stress in 2024. And the paradox of the top three reasons. Number one is that there are not enough qualified candidates.

Well, number two is that there are more open requisitions to fill. And number three is that there is more competition from other employers. So, again, this speaks to the fact that. Yes, talent shortage is just so present and it's there and we need to find ways to stand out from the crowd. And candidate experience, spoiler alert, should be the thing that differentiates us.

So this was the context. But how do we then measure candidate experience? How do we ensure that what we are doing and how our process is doing is contributing to us being able to hire that top?

talent. So at STAAD, we have implemented the NPS framework. And the NPS framework is simple and similar across all fields. But in terms of candidate net promoter score, we ask this question.

Based on your experience, how likely are you to recommend others to apply for a job at a company? And then the candidates can rate this answer from 0 to 10. And here you see that All the answers that are above nine are considered promoters. All those between seven and eight are passives. And all those below seven are considered detractors.

Underneath, you can see the calculation that you have to do in order to calculate the net promoter score. And this you do, obviously, with all the data that you collect from your surveys. But it is scary to see that six and below is already considered a detractor.

And it... They are considered detractors because they are the ones who will actively go out and say to their friends and family that you should not apply for a job at this company because I had such a terrible experience. So those are the ones that you really, really want to convert into at least passives, but in the best case scenario, promoters.

So, yes, you are measuring surveys. You are sending them out. But how do you know what is a good?

candidate net promoter score response rate. How many people should be responding to your surveys? As you can see at the top, we've got the hired candidates and they, at least half of those hired will respond to a survey, while the withdrawn and rejected candidates are hovering around the 20% rejection mark. So here, sorry, response rate mark.

And here, what's important to think about is the positivity and negativity bias. Obviously, a recruitment process is a very emotional process. And those who are hired are more inclined to be positive about their experience, even if it wasn't perfect.

While those who are rejected are more inclined to be negative, even if the recruitment process wasn't perfect. And that's why here I will later show you. why the quantity matters.

Because the CNPS over time has not increased or decreased drastically. As I said at the beginning, 2024 was not a year of extreme change. And in CNPS, we also have not seen any extreme changes. And there might be multiple reasons for that. But that is maybe also because we have just had so many...

things going on in the labor market and in the world where candidate experience was not the top priority. We have had mass hirings, mass layoffs, we have had AI. So recruitment teams have really had to juggle a lot of challenges. And so candidate experience was not being as prioritized as maybe it should have been. And maybe now is the time.

So here we move on to our first finding. And our first finding may be for some. is obvious, but we obviously have found that candidate experience impacts your overall hiring success. And on the left here, you can see the ratio of candidates who have been rejected, who have been withdrawn, and who have been hired. And evidently, and I know that all of you know this, the largest amount of people who you will collect responses from are rejected, simply because you cannot hire all the people that apply.

for your open roles. But what's key to notice here are the withdrawn category. Even though they are only 10%, if you extrapolate this example to, say, a thousand candidates, and you end up hiring 80 of them, or the 8% of them, all those 82% that are rejected will potentially speak negatively about their experience because they didn't get the job.

But withdrawn candidates are important to take into consideration here because they choose to exit the recruitment process on their own accord. They are the most painful ones to lose because they are the ones you cannot control in the same way. You don't decide that they leave the recruitment funnel at that point.

They decide by themselves and often this happens to your favourite candidates. Or think about the amount of times in which you lost your top candidate that you've been trying so hard to hire. And they left the recruitment process or said no to your offer because the process was not what they expected. So withdrawn candidates are the ones that you should be really, really paying attention to. And they are also the ones that are maybe the low hanging fruits that you could really, really influence your overall CNPS and hiring success if you prioritize those.

Then. Number two is also quite obvious, but yes, rejected candidates will talk negatively about your company. As you can see, rejected candidates have the lowest average CNPS score in 2024, and they have shown that for the past, ever since we started doing this report, and hired candidates have the highest. But let's go back to the response rates. Obviously, hired candidates have the highest.

CNPS, but there are also the smallest group of people. There are the least hired candidates, while there are also the most rejected candidates. So when you look at your CNPS score, you have to take into account that rejected candidates make up a large portion of that, and those are also the ones that you should be looking at when evaluating your performance.

Here, when you look at the sentiment analysis for rejected candidates and withdrawn candidates, You can see that the company category at the top shows 17% of negative opinions of rejected candidates on your company and 21 of withdrawn candidates. And what that means is that 17% of those who are rejected will go out and negatively speak about your company as an employer or as a business to their friends and family. And those friends will speak to their friends and their friends will speak to those friends. So this snowball effect is something that you should really, really try to control while you can at the beginning or at the source when you can influence the recruitment process. Now, what's also interesting is the withdrawn category.

I have told you that these are the most interesting ones and they are the most interesting ones because they have the most balanced opinion of your recruitment process. And so 64 percent of those who withdraw do so due to bad communication. We have analyzed the unhappiest 25% of our withdrawn candidates in our datasets.

And we have found that 64% of them do so because of communication. And when I just explained to you why withdrawn candidates are so important and so painful to lose, why are we letting our candidates withdraw when it's only because of communication? And you can improve communication by making it more transparent, by making it more clear, by making it more timely, in order to prevent your best candidates leaving before accepting your offer.

And that is something that I think you can easily do. It's also a very, important part of the recruitment process in total. And David, I can see you are asking about communication about what?

Communication about the recruitment process, about how fast they are advancing, about what they should expect, about when will be their next interview. Just in general, communication around the process and around how they are doing. What is the next step? Because the longer you wait and the worse your communication is, the more likely they are going to go to other competitors.

And the assessment framework is also something that you should look at. Most companies include some form of assessment, whether that's a case interview or a personality assessment or a cognitive test. We have looked here at the CNPS per rejected assessment or per rejected touchpoint.

So candidates rejected after assessment have the lowest CNPS. And this is also a very, very low hanging fruit. And here we have also dove deep into understand why they are so unhappy when they are rejected after assessment.

Again, communication here around the assessment is the number one topic that is being discussed. Also lengthy and inefficient assessment process, poorly structured assessment, assessments or misalignment between the job description and assessment. So just communicating about the assessment and letting the candidate understand why they are doing it and just making them see that it's not a waste of time.

Whether that means that you shorten. your assessments or you make them a little bit more concise or a bit more relevant, looking at your assessment stage might increase your overall CNPS and the overall candidate experience that you are providing. And speaking on that, almost half of all rejected candidates don't understand why. I have shown you this graph before when I was talking about the company, but here I would like you to look at the second from last. point, which is feedback.

And here when we say feedback, we mean the reason why somebody is rejected. So I know that scaling feedback is not always possible, especially for those larger companies. So when you are communicating your rejection, even though it's not always possible to give such a personalized feedback message as you would like to, it is Important to make sure that all the steps before leading up to that rejection kind of help the candidate understand at the end why they would be rejected.

Whether that's making sure that your job descriptions are clear, that the expectations are set properly. These are the things that you should take care of in order to avoid candidates not understanding why they are rejected. Now, candidate net promoter score. is not only about candidate experience, it can also tell you a little bit about the efficiency of your hiring. So we can also slice and dice your data based on department, source, company size, things like that.

So here you can see on the left the total number of candidates who are applying into each department and you can see that Engineering product and data are number three in terms of the number of applications, while marketing is number four. But what's interesting here is that engineering products and data has also a relatively high hiring rate, but also the highest withdrawn rate. And this again speaks to the talent shortage. The engineering products and data candidates know that they are in high demand.

They also have the highest expectations and they will also be the ones who are not afraid to withdraw from a process because they know that another company is out there ready to give them what they want. So there is a lot of competition for those roles specifically across different companies. While for marketing, life is a bit more difficult for the candidates themselves, because as you can see, they are the fourth highest number of applications in terms of value. But they are. also the ones with the least hiring success with only 1%.

And you can also see that the CNPS corresponds here because engineering product and data as well as marketing have scored the lowest on the CNPS score, which means that marketing, obviously, they are unhappy because there is a lot of competition that they are experiencing. But engineering product and data applicants are really, really, they have really, really high expectations. The bar is very, very high there. So in order to make them feel happy, you really, really need to go above and beyond.

Finding number seven is diving a bit deeper into the sources that our customers have been using. And here you can see, it's probably to nobody's surprise, that internal and referred candidates are the most successful source of hire. And that is because you can see that 45% of internal applicants are hired and they are also probably the highest quality, even though they are one of the lowest amount of candidates who are in the recruitment funnel.

So, Maybe 2025 should be the year where you really, really revamp your internal mobility and your referral schemes, because they are the ones that are bringing you the most successful hires. On the other hand, we look at the career page, which is great for quantity, but not so much for quality. As you can see on the left, candidates coming through the career page make up half of all the candidates that apply into the InforJobs.

However, there is only 5% of them who are successful. And that goes to show that maybe having a bit more of a personalized approach is the way to go forward in 2025. And that is also supported by company marketing. Company marketing is LinkedIn posts, just social media presence and promoting your jobs over there. With that only having a 1% success rate.

That probably shows that trying to get the most amount of candidates in your net, but not doing so in a personalized way is not the best way to go forward. The ninth finding is about the recruitment agency, which could be damaging your brand. The recruitment agency has by far the lowest CNPS score. And by recruitment agency, I mean the candidates who have come into your process from a recruitment agency.

And the reason for that is simple. It's that a recruitment agency is not hired to boost your employer brand. It's not there to translate your EVP. It's there to get the job done, to hire the candidates that you have paid them to hire. So maybe you can take this graph and take this report internally and help build a case internally that in-house recruitment is the way to go in 2025. or at least to nudge you a little bit to evaluate how effective your sources are.

And my last finding is that small and medium businesses have created way better candidate experiences than large enterprises. And this has been the case for three years in a row since we've started publishing this report. And here you can see that enterprises with over 5,000 full-time employees are really behind in terms of CNPS at only 25. And this could be for a number of reasons.

It could be due to bureaucracy. It could be due to extensive processes, lack of alignment internally, or bad scalability during growth. But what I'm so excited about is to hear from Pedidos.

Yeah, because they are in this company bracket or in this company size bracket, but they have scored a whole 68 CNPS in 2024. So this conversation is really, really going to bring a lot of insights to us. So I would like to welcome back on stage Jani, Vicky, Denise and Gert and I will exit the stage so that they can have a great conversation all about the best practices. Thank you so much, Claudia, for sharing those key insights. and to Vicky, Janina, Denise. Again, thank you so much for being here today.

We do have a lot of ground to cover, so I suggest we just jump straight in with our very first question. And then maybe before we dive back into the insights and best practices, would you briefly tell us a bit about Lush as a business, what you do as an organization, and also what kind of talent is important to you as an organization? Okay, for sure. PedidoSai is a leading delivery and quick commerce platform platform in Latin America, connecting users with restaurants, markets, and more across 15 countries in the region.

As part of Delivery Hero Group, a global leader in the delivery industry, we are committed to building a strong, talented, and diverse team. We value talent that is eager to learn, humble, and customer-focused, and we especially seek individuals with strong teamwork skills and who love what they do and want to make a difference. life easier for our users.

At PedidoXia, we hire talent across all levels and areas of the business, from entry level to senior leadership roles. Also, we recruit both operationals and non-operationals profiles. Okay, thanks so much for providing the context, Vicky.

Given that you operate on such a large scale, you mentioned across 15 countries, what was the biggest recruitment challenge for PedidoXia in 2024? And how did you overcome that? Okay, looking back, 2024 was a year full of challenges for us, from quickly filling a high volume of operational roles to higher senior level positions across multiple markets.

Managing 3,000 hires naturally brought many obstacles along the way, but the one that had the biggest impact on candidate experience was our ATS migration. We made this change to standardize our recruiting process growth. globally. We improve visibility for leaders with better reporting and insight and we enhance our short posting site for more seamless candidate experience.

However, one challenge that we didn't anticipate was the impact on candidate feedback. In our previous system, feedback links were in bed directly on candidate communications. With the new system, surveys were sent one or two days later from a different email address.

which lead to a significant drop in the responses rate for a few months. And as Claudia said, quantity matters. It took us time and analysis to identify that this change was the root case. Once we understood the issue, we collaborate closely with your team to assess the survey timing and align it with our communication flow.

And as a result, we were able to reverse the trend and significantly increase the response rate, restoring the feedback volume we had before the migration. Yeah, thank you, Vicky. Hi.

As you might, of course, remember, I was myself part of that migration process from Start's perspective, obviously, only. And I'm really happy that we managed to turn that around, obviously. But moving on, why is it that Canada Experience is so important to you at...

particular show? I will take this one. At the Diocha, our culture is the core of everything that we do, and that extends on to how we engage with candidates.

We see the hiring process as the first touch point where people can experience our dynamic, fast-paced, and collaborative environment. So, candidate experience is crucial because it It shapes the perception that candidates have of all the company. So it will impact our employer brand. And if we do our best here, it will help us attract the right talent to build the best team possible. So we are constantly looking for ways to improve the way we connect with candidates, the way we gather feedback, and trying to ensure a process that really reflects our values and the way we work.

I think that we can say that the candidate experience is that first impression that you don't want to make wrong in any way possible. So we really put our best there so people can have a really good first impression of how we live the culture and how we promote it and experience in the everyday work. So I think that candidate experience is like that moment that we really need to take care. uh to make that happen thanks much annie i couldn't agree more obviously but maybe i'm a bit biased in that but okay so what i'm hearing is that culture employer brand and then attracting the right talent basically it plays a key part in all of this thank you um so that was uh what are your goals for 2025 around canada experience so we talked challenges for 2024 but looking ahead is there anything you did in 2024 that you would bring forward with you to this year as well Okay, so in 2025, we aim to continue improving the experience of every candidate by making our processes more seamless, transparent and engaging. We've made adjustments to better understand the opportunities that we have at each stage, allowing us to implement more targeted and effective actions throughout the process.

This is a journey that we've been on since 2024. And while we always have opportunities for improvement, Our focus and objectives are very clear. As Shani said before, culture is the core of everything that we do. Sharing our values and our culture for us is the key for candidates to understand what makes us unique as a company, as area and the role, and how this can add value to their experience. Also, maintaining a very close, fluid and transparent communication, generating clear expectations, providing timely follow-ups. and offering meaningful feedbacks and of course apply a diverse and inclusive perspective across all processes actively evaluating the candidate experience and taking action based on the different feedbacks that we receive I think that one concrete improvement from 2024 that we will carry into 2025 is how we handle candidate communication.

Even when we don't have any updates to share, instead of going silent, we prioritize keeping candidates informed, leaving always the door open for future opportunities and maintaining a very close connection. And we also introduce post-interview check-ins to ask candidates how they felt after each stage. even if we don't have like any immediate feedback to provide but this helped us strengthen engagement and reinforce our commitment to this very positive candidate experience. Okay thank you so much.

So what I hear coming back here from what Claudia was mentioning before is also communication again is key not just whenever you spoke to the kids but also throughout even if there's no real updates to share. But now taking all of what you've just mentioned as goals for 2022. 2025 into consideration, if there would be only one piece of advice that you could give to a recruitment team prior to our experience in 2025, what would that be? That's an interesting question. I will say focus on fundamentals. Make sure that candidates know what to expect, when to expect it, and feel value throughout the process.

As Denise mentioned before, clarity, transparency and consistent communication can make a huge difference and they are often overlooked. In a fast-moving and competitive market like ours, candidates who aren't the right fit today may be the strong candidate in the future. So that's why every interaction matters.

The experience they have during the hiring process must reflect our culture and values regardless of the outcome. always about big innovations. Sometimes it's just the biggest impact comes from getting the basics right. Okay, that makes so much sense.

I think that, well, if there's something that the audience will for sure take away from today's conversation is that focus on fundamentals or getting the basics right. Thank you so much for that. Now, maybe referring back to some of the 2024 trends that Claudia shared earlier. So rejected candidates tend to have the lowest CNPS candidate promoter score that we know.

This year, the benchmark there was minus six. But you scored a whopping plus 35 across your rejected touch points for last year. So what do you think makes a good rejection? And how do you make sure that you avoid deep trap in those stages?

Yeah, I mean, well, for us, a good rejection is always very clear and personalized. And to achieve this, we first need always like strong interviews where both talent acquisition and hiring managers gather concrete evidence to provide meaningful feedback. So as candidates progress through our processes, we always aim to give them insights along the way so they can understand why they were not selected. Of course, our process isn't perfect.

We have some detractors and that's why we see a big opportunity to keep improving on how we deliver feedback. and ensure candidates live with this very positive experience that we want to even if they don't get the role so as we said before our culture is very people-centric so we will always prioritize like the human side of the process and this is why we highly value fostering strong and very close connections with with all the candidates along all the all the way thank you so much so human centricity is what they hear here and then looking at the numbers it seems like that candidate centricity or human centricity seems to be really paying off for you. So kudos for that, obviously. Now looking also at the quality feedback from candidates, as mentioned earlier, the three most prevailing topics in comment analysis on the Star platform were communication, yet again, the hiring process, and then also the recruitment team. What would your advice be on keeping your recruitment teams and your hiring teams aligned throughout the hiring process?

I think I can take this one. At the IdaShop we have one of our values which is we play as a team in Spanish is jugamos en equipo and that's not an empty motto for us. In this case this means that the TA team and the hiring managers are aligned because we are and we work as one team.

So as they were mentioned before both Benny and Vicky the key is we continuously are in communication, we are all trying to get everyone on the same page, we set clear expectations and we ensure that both sides have the right tools to make the informed decisions. are needed to be made. So what we do to make this happen, basically we have three things that I can see that is something they see to the people that is listening to this webinar can implement in their own organizations.

We have training sessions if needed to develop the capabilities that we need in hiring managers. We have regular things as part of the process between TA team and the hiring managers and we have structured feedback loops. So that helps us to stay agile and improve the process and the kind of experience.

And maybe to summarize, the bottom line here is we should be aligned that this is our shared responsibility. This is not the TA team making like a favor to the hiring managers or the hiring managers being good to the TA team. Everyone's have a really key role to play in attracting and hiring the best talent possible. So I think that.

they as a team is the the thing that we we can summarize this one okay cool so like you said it's all as one team and then communication not just internally but also towards candidates seems to keep a key factor here as you might remember from earlier candidates who are referred or who are internal applicants tend to have the highest candidate promoter score and then conversely recruitment agencies score, I believe the lowest team was scored. Was there a specific candidate source that's announced in 2024, either in a good or a bad way? Okay, as per ILOSA, almost all of our hiring is managed by our internal team. With agencies, we only remain below 5%. This is due to cost efficiency, but mainly because we believe that managing the process ourselves allow us to better care the candidate experience and ensure greater traceability.

While we do not have our data directly linked to recruitment sources or focus on making sure, our focus is to make sure that every candidate where they come from referral, internal application or external tenant has a consistent and positive experience. That being said, the one source where we do have direct feedback is from internal applicants and it's one of our highest MPS scores. This reinforces not only the importance of providing a great experience across all channels but also highlights the value of developing our internal employees. Okay so it seems like you're seeing the same as in the benchmark reports the same seems to be true for you as well. and then keeping internal control seems to be playing a key part in that.

Thank you so much for that. As Claudia mentioned earlier, we found that larger organizations like yourselves had a much lower candidate promoter score than small and medium-sized businesses, but for a company of your size the average CNPS was 25 in 2024, but you scored 68. So what do you think makes you so successful in comparison? Okay, we discussed a bit around this answer and it might sound repetitive, but the key differentiator for us is the culture.

Our team's deep commitment to delivering a great experience, regardless of the hiring volume, is what helps us stand out. We know why larger companies often struggle with bureaucracy or impersonal processes. As my colleague Denise said. a few minutes ago.

I don't want to be repetitive, but we make a conscious effort to maintain a human touch in everything that we do. And that helps us stay true to our culture and the way we work. So I think we take care of people, no matter the volume.

And that's, in my opinion, what drives our success in this area. Okay. That makes sense.

I also like that you mentioned regardless of or no matter the volume, as we usually see, usually the candidate promoter score tends to suffer a lot under higher application volumes. So I like that you mentioned that as well. Now, the final maybe data trend that we want to look at for today is the two departments, as you might remember, with the lowest promoter score by far were marketing and tech engineering.

And the highest ones. operations and finance. Do you approach your recruitment strategy differently depending on departments or is that the same across the board? Well, while our recruitment approach is consistent across all departments, we do recognize that specific processes like maybe case studies or technical assessments play a bigger role in departments like marketing or engineering.

For example, we know that in today's job market engineering roles are in a very high demand, creating an environment where competitiveness is at its peak and engineers often find themselves maybe with multiple offers to choose from as companies compete for their skills and expertise. So reviewing this one area where we see room for improvement is in how we communicate with candidates about what to expect before and after this type of exercise. This isn't something that we are consistently doing at this moment, but it's an opportunity to refine our process.

And of course, as part of our culture, we aim to identify these areas and learn from them, ensuring a clear and more transparent experience for candidates which can ultimately improve our MPS scores. Okay, I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much, Denise, and thanks for elaborating on that one. Now maybe briefly circling back to something you mentioned at the very beginning, the Delivery Hero group is a global business with many different brands under its wings, of which Pedido Shy is one. How does the company ensure that it delivers top quality experiences to all candidates, regardless of which brand or region they are applying to?

Okay, here I think we learn from our own business. So as a business, we operate globally, but we always recognize the power of the local flavor of everything we do. So this is I think the basic, the key is understanding the needs and preferences of each local demographic.

And for the talent acquisition purposes, we follow the same approach. So we try to understand the local needs and try to develop processes that focus on that. So we have obviously a standardized process, but we try to put the people on the center of everything that we do. So, Pellido Cha.

operates in Latin America, but we operate in 15 countries. So we are a brand in a global system, but we also have diversity in our own scope. So we have a lot of challenges, but our success lies on the understanding of which are the local particularities that we need to attend. So I think we can sum it up in one word, which is empathy. We put people at the center of everything we do, and we ensure every action has...

this human touch and I think that's the way that we can like put what we do on the on this, I mean in this, the thing that I'm sorry I'm very smart, I'm smart in Spanish that's a standout aspiration in this global operation. Thanks so much, Jan. So I think, well, keeping a streamlined approach, basically, while respecting, as you said, local flavors, is what I'm hearing here. Thanks so much. Now, my final question, before handing it back over to Claudia.

So you're using Start to measure different touch points and stakeholders in your recruitment process, including, obviously, candidates, but also hiring managers. Why is capturing, in the end, why is capturing all of that data so important to you? Yeah, of course, I mean, having data from all touch points in our hiring process give us a complete picture of what is working and where we have some room to improve.

But we think that it's not just about metrics, it's about creating a hiring experience that is efficient, transparent, and meaningful for everyone that is involved. So maybe we see like this from different perspectives. At first, enhancing candidate experience, as we said before.

This means understanding how candidates perceive our processes and will make and help us make it smoother, clearer and more engaging because every interaction should add value regardless of the outcome. Then of course making data-driven decisions instead of relying on assumptions we use a 360 view to make informed improvements that drive real impact both for the business and for the people going through our processes. And beyond hiring, there is even a bigger focus for us. It's our brand perception. Every candidate is either a current or a potential user of our platform, and their experience with us in the hiring process shapes how they perceive our brand.

This year we want to better understand and measure this impact to ensure we are making a lasting impression. And at the end, talent acquisition isn't just about filling roles. It's about building connections, elevating our brand and making sure that every touchpoint reflects who we are as a company. Thank you so much. I think that is a great wrap to a great discussion as well.

So thanks so much, Denise, Vicky and of course, Gianni as well. for your time and for sharing these insights with us. Claudia, I think back to you now, which is already jumping on.

I could see we had quite some interesting questions in the chat. So let's let's head over to those. Yes, thank you so much. This was a super, super valuable information, especially following all the all the insights.

And so we are also a little bit over time. So I think we only have maybe time for one or two questions. So if you have, if there are any more questions you want to ask to our speakers or to us, please tell us anyway. We will reach out to you with the answers via email after this webinar. But maybe let's start with this one.

So I know, and you have also mentioned that you are also serving your hiring managers to make sure that there is internal alignment. But how does that help you with? accountability and how does it promote this alignment? Okay, I take that one.

Getting feedback from our hiring managers is a key part of keeping everyone aligned and accountable. It gives us insight into what's working well and where we might need to make adjustments. After closing each individual position, we send a survey to all hiring managers to capture the feedback and identify opportunities to improve our processes. Their feedback has helped us to clarify the process and set clear timelines, improve overall visibility so everyone is on the same page, and provide additional training to help hiring managers make accurate, effective evaluations.

In the end, it's just one thing. In the end, it's all about ensuring positive, consistent experience for both candidates and internal teams. Yeah. The process is really like the stakeholders in it are so important at all stages.

So it's really, really important to involve all of them. And maybe I will jump to some earlier questions and maybe I will take one of them. David has asked if we will be sending the slides.

We will you will see the slides in the recording. but all of the graphs that I shared in the slides are present in the report, so you can also see them there. And we are running out of time, and I see that you have a lot of really, really, really good questions, and I really don't want to rush the answers, so we will take some time off camera with our champions here, and we will answer all of your questions thoroughly. and send them over to you via email. So expect that soon.

So sorry that we went over time. We just had so much important information to talk about. And here I just wanted to round off by saying, what shall we expect in 2025? And I will just call out the headlines here. Of course, AI is not going anywhere.

And I will jump to the last point that maybe... Because AI is not going anywhere, candidate experience should become more of a priority. Because, yes, we are giving more of our tasks away to AI.

But do we know how AI is doing and how it's making candidates feel in the process if AI will take over interviewing or if AI will take over the communication? And something that was really, really transparent in all the data is that internal mobility and learning and development is here also. coming to the rescue that maybe the secret to fixing the talent shortage is looking within.

So prioritizing good development structures and making sure that your current employees have the skills that they need. And as a last, last thing, I just wanted to invite those who are interested in the next few weeks, we will be holding a series of deep dive sessions where you will be able to learn about how to integrate start into your ATS, how to build surveys, how to master hiring manager satisfaction or how to analyze all the data that I've shown here. without being an analyst, because it can be very, very overwhelming to see all of those numbers.

But getting the most out of the data is also key. So thank you so much. You can expect your report coming to you in the next 10 minutes, I think.

And happy reading. If you have any questions, you know where to find us. Thank you again so, so much to all my great speakers. and for all of the value that you have provided us here and also to Gert who has come off stage. But yes, thank you so so much.

This has been a pleasure to have you here and have a lovely rest of your day. Thank you. Thank you.

Transcript for:Insights from Candidate Experience Webinar

Transcript for:
Insights from Candidate Experience Webinar