Streamline recruitment processes with surveys. Find out the information about candidates even before the interview.
Who is this article useful for?
Are you looking for suitable candidates to fill positions in your company? Don't just rely on resumes. Use a job seekers survey to ask what you are really interested in. Discover employee potential yet before personal interviews, avoid redundant recruitment activities and make the hiring process more efficient.
Make surveying of potential job candidates a part of your workflow. Integrate the data in your system and access it whenever a new vacancy is about to be filled. Use the surveys repeatedly, customize them to your needs. Take advantage of the opportunity to compile job seekers’ profiles in an effortless way.
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With clearly formulated and comprehensible questions, your respondents will get an exact idea of what you want from them. It will be easier to fill in your recruitment questionnaire and the data they provide will be of much higher quality. At the same time, your questionnaires will achieve a rise in the response rate.
Try to maintain a clear structure of each recruitment questionnaire. When questions naturally follow each other, the respondents hardly get lost incoherently jumping from one topic to another. We recommend considering this layout to keep respondents still in the loop:
Tip: This part of the recruitment questionnaire can be taken as a quiz. It will help you confirm the knowledge and expertise of candidates presented in their professional resumes. The questions can also be worded as a description of a specific situation for which the applicant is to propose a solution.
When finding out the factual data that should bring you objective facts and the possibility of straightforward comparison between individual job candidates, use closed-ended questions.
It is also advisable to include open-ended questions in the questionnaire. By means of a text answer, you encourage the job candidates to express their subjective view of a given issue (e.g. expectations regarding the employer, the ability to organize time during working hours, their own contribution to the position, etc.).
Although open-ended questions are more complex to evaluate and do not provide the possibility of automation, they can help you discover a number of topics that a candidate could not point out from the list of answers that you suggest in the closed-ended questions.
To make your surveys more engaging and interactive, you can choose from a selection of 19 question types that Survio offers at your disposal. Asking the right way will encourage respondents to provide accurate answers that reflect reality and therefore deliver relevant data to make your decisions upon.
Practical examples of how to properly use specific types of questions in a survey are available on our blog. For more information on questionnaire structure, pagination and settings, see the article on How to create a survey.
With regard to the Labor Code and changing cultural norms, it is not appropriate to ask questions related to areas of life such as:
While some of these facts may be of great interest to you, and their influence on the subsequent decision as to whether or not a job candidate will fit into a team may be indisputable, it is better to follow established cultural rules and applicable laws. Try to find out as much as you can about the job candidates during a personal interview, by using tactful and non-aggressive questions about their personal interests and leisure activities.
Tip: By changing the question settings to a “quiz” mode, it is possible to easily turn your survey into a knowledge test. Each correct answer is assigned with a point, wrong answers get zero. Achieved score, which is calculated automatically in Survio, shows you if the candidate’s awareness of your domain is sufficient to invite them for the personal interview.
Imagine a situation that you are filling a vacancy in your company and plan to address internal personnel first. After then, you will address the public to maximize the chances of finding the most suitable candidates to invite for a personal interview. There are a number of distribution channels to share your surveys and collect responses. Use one channel, combine just a few or all of them at once to target as wide a range of applicants as possible.
Survio allows you to display questionnaires directly on a particular web page. The form is threefold and it is a matter of your choice and preference, which of them best suits the given purpose.
An important note worth mentioning at this point is that using any of the previous three options, your survey needs to contain a question asking for the respondent’s e-mail address, otherwise you won’t be able to identify the sender. Iframe as well as pop-up window and pop-over widget collect responses anonymously by default.
Do you employ workers who don’t sit in the office but make their living in a warehouse, assembly shop or on a construction site? Print out a QR code which contains a link to the questionnaire and display it in a canteen, inside a portakabin or any other visible location. All Survio questionnaires are mobile-friendly, so the workers can simply scan the QR code with their cell phones and answer your questions this way.
Assuming that you already have a list of potential candidates, copy a link from Survio that opens the questionnaire with additional questions asking about visions, personal values, achievements, etc. and paste it to the e-mail you are about to send out. Using your own e-mail agent is perfectly fine but there’s one more option that makes the distribution easier and super comfy.
On condition that you have the contact data to the applicants, add their e-mails in Survio, formulate a common introductory text and let Survio be the “mailman”.
Tip: As a subscriber to one of Survio’s Premium plans, you don’t need to check your mailbox every once in a while to see if there is a new reply. Simply switch on notifications by e-mail and Survio will keep watch to make sure that you don’t miss anything.
We in Survio definitely value your time, which is why all respondents’ answers are analyzed automatically and in real time into aggregate results and individual responses. You can filter the obtained data by answers, by date, by source, by completion time and other parameters. Generated reports can be exported with a single click into the most common formats (PDF, .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .csv or Google Sheets). Editable formats are open for additional editing so that the documents meet the goal of the presentation you are preparing for.
At the beginning, you set the evaluation criteria that the job candidate shall meet. You create a set of questions accordingly and share the survey through the most convenient distribution channels. As Survio continuously evaluates the answered surveys and it is up to you to make a qualified decision with the help of this output, which of the job candidates will be shortlisted for a personal interview.
For job seekers questionnaires, you can use the comparison “the candidate meets – does not meet the prerequisites” in the initial phase of the selection. Simply export a table from Survio with an overview of responses related to the candidate’s professional experience. Filter out candidates whose experience meet your requirements and approach them with an invitation to the next round. Send thanks for participating in the hiring process to those who failed.
It is also worth considering a more detailed breakdown of requirements into necessary, desirable, welcome and marginal. In addition to questions comparing professional experience, professional knowledge and practical skills, you can also include questions in the form of model situations in the recruitment questionnaire, where job candidates show a sense of analytical thinking, propose a solution or options of implementation.
Personal interviews offer job candidates the opportunity to specify details to the proposed solutions. It will give you a space to ask additional questions to complete their professional profiles.
Search and recruitment can take place among existing employees (internal resources) or on the labor market (external resources). In both cases, the recruitment questionnaire makes it possible to ascertain the interest in the given position, as well as the initial prerequisites and professional competence of the candidates to hold the vacant position. Whether you decide to target your colleagues or reach the public via expansive job candidate search, here are some helpful tips on how to approach the recruitment questionnaire creation:
Remember that the survey process does not end with the recruitment of the employee. Quite the opposite. Onboarding of new employees is usually costly. Therefore, to have happy and loyal employees who will help your company achieve great results, profitability, productivity and overall success, you need to keep asking. Survio comes up with dozens of ready-made, but fully editable survey templates.
Save your company the expenses associated with the recruitment of new employees and time you can devote to other activities related to human resources. Use our survey templates focused on various topics and let your HR management rely on Survio.
