Large-Company Spotlight: Building an award-winning candidate experience

We’ve run Q&As with the teams inside cord’s Hiring Leaders Awards winners, to understand the challenges, initiatives, and top tips they recommend to improve your candidate experience.

Read the full answers from Starling Bank & Houseful below, or read our summary of the key action points from all the companies involved.

Myriam Kouidri, Houseful

Myriam is a Senior Talent Acquisition Partner with a solid background in tech recruitment. She has 9 years of experience working within leading tech companies, including Codat, Yapily, and Vonage.

Houseful is the leader in residential property software, data and insight - owning and operating a family of trusted and established brands, including Zoopla, Hometrack, Prime Location, Mojo, Alto and Calcasa.

1) How do you measure the success of your candidate experience?

We have a very holistic approach when it comes to measuring the success of our candidate experience. First and foremost with the basics, we send out surveys to both the successful and unsuccessful candidates - we want their direct, honest feedback on the entire application process, from start to finish. On top of that, we also encourage the candidates to share their thoughts and impressions directly with our interviewers and talent partners. We’re quite keen on that real-time feedback, it helps us pinpoint areas where we can improve. And of course, we keep a close eye on Glassdoor as well. By gathering intel through all these different channels - the surveys, the direct candidate input, and Glassdoor, we’re able to build up a really comprehensive understanding of how our candidate experience is being perceived. That allows us to identify any aspects that may need a bit of work. It’s all about continuously enhancing the experience for the talent that engages with us.

2) What are the biggest challenges you face in being able to provide an excellent candidate experience? How did you overcome these?

One of the biggest challenges we face in providing an excellent candidate experience is the huge number of applicants we receive for each role - it’s not uncommon at Houseful to have over 300 applicants per open position. With figures like that, it becomes extremely difficult for our Talent team to offer personalised feedback to every single applicant, even though that is something we are very keen to do. However, our focus remains on ensuring that we provide a response to every single person who takes the time to apply, even if they don’t make it through to the interview process. We believe this is an essential part of the candidate experience, particularly in the current competitive job market.

When we do need to reject a candidate, the email comes directly from the individual talent partner’s inbox, not an impersonal “no-reply” address. This allows the candidate to respond directly and request further feedback, which we aim to provide as much as reasonably possible.

We’ve also been exploring the use of AI within our talent acquisition processes. For example, we use the AI rejection email solution from Cord, that helps us craft tailored rejection messages based on the specific reasons a candidate was disqualified at an early stage. This has proven to be quite an effective way to give applicants more meaningful feedback, even when we can’t progress their application further. Whilst the volume of applications we receive presents a challenge, we remain committed to continually enhancing the candidate experience.

3) What are the key initiatives you’ve implemented that have had the biggest impact on candidate experience?

When it comes to the key initiatives we’ve implemented to have the biggest impact on our candidate experience, there are a few that really stand out. Firstly, we made a concerted effort to seek direct feedback from candidates themselves, both successful and unsuccessful, on how we could improve the overall experience. This was invaluable in helping us identify areas that needed work. Based on that feedback, we took a close look at various aspects of our employer brand and recruitment processes. This included reviewing our EVP messaging, strengthening our DE&I networks, highlighting our ESG community initiatives, and enhancing our talent development programs and benefit offerings.

One initiative that’s been particularly impactful is our focus on emphasising behaviours over abstract values during the recruitment process and also in our everyday life at Houseful. We found that by talking about the specific and achievable behaviours that we expect from our people, we’re better able to create a truly inclusive environment from the very start of the candidate journey.

Also, we’ve worked hard to ensure our recruitment process is as inclusive as possible. This has involved things like removing unnecessary barriers, providing more transparency around progression, and offering additional support to underrepresented groups. At the end of the day, our goal is to make sure that every single person who engages with us, whether they are ultimately successful or not, feels valued and respected and that they’ve had a positive experience. The initiatives we’ve implemented are all geared towards achieving that.

4) What are the top tips you’d give to other companies looking to improve their candidate experience?

First and most important piece of advice I would give is to have an honest, transparent culture that truly reflects who you are as an organisation. There’s nothing worse for a candidate than going through a recruitment process only to find the reality doesn’t match the promises. Be upfront about your values, your ways of working, your challenges - no surprises!

Being open and transparent throughout the entire journey is extremely important. Provide clear communication, set expectations, and give candidates visibility from the very beginning. This helps build trust and shows that you respect their time.

Another crucial element is to be proactive when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. This could involve things like partnering with relevant networks, reviewing your job ads, and offering additional support to underrepresented groups.

Finally, make sure your EVP and benefits package are truly reflective of the breadth of backgrounds and experiences represented in your candidate pools. Consider the needs of different backgrounds, age groups, family situations etc… Show candidates you understand what matters to them, show that you care about their experience, not just getting them through the door. It’s all about building long-term relationships, not just filling short-term roles.

Alex Yeates, Starling Bank

Alex is an experienced Talent Acquisition Specialist with 7 years of experience recruiting in the tech industry. He's been with Starling Bank for over a year and focuses on hiring Data, Product, & Testing.

Starling Bank is a leading digital bank on a mission to disrupt the banking industry. They've built an app with smart money management tools to help our customers live a healthier financial life. They also offer groundbreaking B2B banking and payments services.

1) How do you measure the success of your candidate experience?

We send out a candidate survey to everyone who interviews with us and review responses on a monthly basis. We ask quantitative questions including thoughts on information provided, speed and communication levels, as well as a Net Promoter Score (NPS). We use the NPS to assess how well we’re doing overall, and the other scores for more targeted improvement.

In addition, we ask for qualitative feedback to help us identify trends. This helps us to continuously develop and improve our candidate experience.

We are able to break down the data by department which is key in helping us identify which areas do well and which don’t. Ultimately, this helps us make improvements across all teams and improve our candidate experience.

2) What are the biggest challenges you face in being able to provide an excellent candidate experience? How did you overcome these?

At Starling, we're lucky to have a strong brand and reputation in the market. This leads to an extremely high number of applications. Whilst it can be difficult to give detailed feedback to all of our applicants we do make an effort to inform all candidates of our decision on whether to progress their application or not. We also give feedback to everyone who has an interview with us in as timely a manner as possible.

When you have such large volumes, it is critical to ensure you have some standardisation and consistency in all interview processes. To do this, we have built scorecards for each role and department with set key success criteria. These are based on technical elements and also Starling values, such as Listen and Aim for Greatness.

Finally, interviewing is a two-way process and it's important for the candidate to feel comfortable in an interview environment – they're working out if we're a fit for them too.

3) What are the key initiatives you’ve implemented that have had the biggest impact on candidate experience?

We recently introduced information packs at various stages of the process for candidates. These go out as emails. We send one at the beginning of the process, one at the first interview and one at the offer stage. The packs provide transparency and answer common questions candidates ask at certain stages of the process.

We also make tailored interview templates for all our interviewers here at Starling Bank and schedule check-ins so that interviewers feel supported which has also contributed to a positive candidate experience.

4) What are the top tips you’d give to other companies looking to improve their candidate experience?

Share as much information as you can with the candidates upfront. You could give them a breakdown of each stage of the recruitment process, who it will be with and what it's likely to involve, along with expected timescales and when they can expect updates. We have candidate packs for each department with key information about the structure, focuses/priorities as well as the standard interview process for that area. We also share a candidate pack if an offer is made and another if they accept. We know that we won't always be the first choice for every candidate so we try to showcase our working environment as much as we can.

Feedback is critical- it is extremely helpful to candidates to understand why they were or were not successful. Our scorecard system helps us provide written feedback, especially in terms of sharing what went well and what could be improved.

Ask your candidates what they think! Collect, review and action data from a candidate survey. Not only is the data useful, but it also demonstrates to the candidates that we aim for continuous improvement and value their thoughts. Candidates are likely to be interviewing for multiple companies so it is always useful to get suggestions on what we could do better, especially from candidates who aren’t successful. If you only have feedback from successful candidates, you'll have a distorted view – patting yourself on the back all day won't move things forward.

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