How ClearCompany Uses Employee Surveys to Measure Talent Success™

About the Interviewees:

As ClearCompany's VP of People, Angie Wideman-Powell has a keen focus on best practices and serves as a strategic partner to the leadership team by acting as a trusted resource on a wide variety of human resources topics including policy interpretation, creating and recommending enhancements to the HR process, and career development. Angie holds a master's degree with a concentration in Human Resource Management, and she has experience working for the largest PEO in Hawaii.

With 20+ years of experience recruiting for high-growth technology companies spanning corporate, agency, and services consulting, Director of Talent Acquisition Brian Abraham is passionate about connecting A-level talent with pivotal and engaging career opportunities. Within his previous roles before joining ClearCompany, Brian was tasked with developing and executing transformative talent growth strategies in the nation’s top tech hubs and creating programs for veteran and diversity hiring, employment branding, and campus recruiting.

At ClearCompany, we’re no strangers to growth. As you learned in our two-part Q&A series with Director of Talent Acquisition, Brian Abraham, our headcount has grown over 180% since he joined the team in 2017. Vice President of People, Angie Wideman-Powell, has also played a key role in ClearCompany’s growth, taking our workforce 100% remote in 2020 and expanding our team across 37 states.

That doesn’t scratch the surface of the work Brian, Angie, and their talent acquisition and human resources teams have done to reach hiring goals and develop the best possible processes. And they’re far from finished, constantly evaluating and improving workflows to create top-notch candidate and employee experiences. 70% of employees who would say their onboarding experience was “excellent” said they have the “best possible job.”

But how do they know which recruiting and onboarding processes are most effective in the first place? How do they know when to make changes and if those changes are working? How do they know that they’re making good hiring decisions? With the help of our best-in-class software, of course! Brian, Angie, and their teams use ClearCompany’s robust features and tools to recruit, hire, onboard, engage, and evaluate employees.

In today’s post, Brian and Angie are diving into how they use Employee Engagement Surveys to gauge the quality of our recruiting and onboarding processes, refine our strategies, and evaluate new hire success.

The Importance of Employee Surveys

Before we jump into the Q&A, let’s talk about the value of employee feedback. Employees, especially new hires, have a unique perspective on recruiting and hiring. You need their feedback to make impactful, useful strategy improvements.

Employees want to share their thoughts and opinions, too — 58% of employees actually wish their employer sent more surveys. Surveys also help promote engagement: when your employees feel heard, they’re nearly 5x more likely to do their best at work.

ClearCompany’s Employee Engagement Surveys are designed to help you engage employees and gain insight into their thoughts, feelings, and opinions.

We offer several prebuilt, ready-to-use survey templates:

• Employee Engagement
• Employee Net Promoter Score (e-NPS)
• Onboarding
• Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
• Emotional Wellbeing

You can personalize our templates or build your own custom surveys from scratch. Surveys can be sent anonymously so you get honest feedback from employees and measure the quality of your talent management processes to reveal what’s working and what’s not.

Let’s dig into the Q&A and then, download the three Talent Acquisition Surveys we use at ClearCompany to evaluate your own processes:

• Quality of Recruiting Survey for New Hires
• Quality of Onboarding Survey for New Hires
• Quality of Hire Survey for Managers

Q: Can you describe the three Talent Acquisition surveys we use at ClearCompany and why we use them?

Angie Wideman-Powell: We send three surveys to help measure the quality of our recruiting processes, onboarding plans, and hiring choices:

• The Quality of Recruiting Survey is sent to new hires within their first two weeks and asks them to rate different aspects of their recruitment experience, specifically.
• The Quality of Onboarding Survey is sent to new hires after 90 days of employment. It asks questions about their overall onboarding experience, including around their ramp time and training programs.
• The Quality of Hire Survey is sent to managers after their new team member has been on board for 90 days. This survey asks about the new hire’s performance so far and asks managers to rate how well they’re ramping and progressing.

We started sending these surveys because we wanted to create a separate score to measure candidate experience. In the ClearCompany platform, we can already see reports that show our time-to-hire, application completion rates, Interview Scorecards averages — metrics that do tell us a lot about how well recruiting and hiring processes are working.

The new hire and hiring manager perspectives we get from the Quality-of surveys help us better understand those metrics. We look at that feedback and use it to constantly gauge how we’re doing and find ways to improve.

“The new hire and hiring manager perspectives we get from the Quality-of surveys help us better understand those metrics. We look at that feedback and use it to constantly gauge how we’re doing and find ways to improve.”

- Angie Wideman-Powell, ClearCompany VP of People

We also use the Quality of Recruiting Survey as an opportunity to ask for some additional feedback from our new hires. In the survey email, we share a link and invite them to leave anonymous feedback on Glassdoor. So that has served a twofold purpose, helping us both gather feedback on the interview process specifically and grow a positive Glassdoor presence.

With the Quality of Onboarding Survey, we want to know if new hires feel like they’re well-prepared and know what to expect. Are their managers checking in regularly? Did they receive enough training? All new ClearCompany employees are paired with a mentor during onboarding, so we also ask for feedback on their experience with the mentorship program.

The Quality of Hire Survey is sent to managers and asks them to rate new hires’ progress and performance. We can compare the results to their Interview Scorecards to see how well they performed vs. how well we thought they would perform based on their interviews. ClearCompany’s new hires score within .25 points of their Interview Scorecard, which tells us that we’re making excellent hiring choices. 

This survey is really for managers’ benefit. It’s a great tool to help them learn how to recognize top talent early on and reflect on if they hired the best-fit person with the right skill set and apply that to future hiring decisions.

“[The Quality of Hire Survey] is a great tool to help [managers] learn how to recognize top talent early on and reflect on if they hired the best-fit person with the right skill set and apply that to future hiring decisions.”

- Angie Wideman-Powell, ClearCompany VP of People

The Quality of Hire Survey is also a good opportunity for managers to identify either top performers or underperformers early and make the appropriate plan — whether that involves additional coaching or fast-tracking their growth.

Q: What is some positive feedback you’ve heard from ClearCompany new hires?

AWP: One recent new hire who was interviewing with multiple companies outlined the differentiators that made ClearCompany stand out, which I thought was nice to hear. They pointed out that our communication was really fast. There was no lag time and they constantly knew what was going on.

In the Quality of Onboarding Survey, we hear overwhelmingly positive feedback about our mentorship program and new hire one-on-ones. During new hires’ first few weeks, they attend a handful of one-on-ones with employees from different departments so they can start making connections and getting a feel for company culture.

Though it is a lot of time to schedule all the one-on-ones before new hires start, we get tons of great feedback that makes it worth the time. People really like that part of our onboarding program, and these one-on-ones are part of how we maintain strong culture and build relationships even as a fully remote company.

Q: Are other companies measuring these quality scores? If so, how?

AWP: I would venture to say less than 10% — maybe even less than five percent of companies are looking at quality of recruiting, and maybe around 25% are measuring quality of hire and onboarding like we are. At some companies, it might be the recruiter’s responsibility to check in with new hires, ask how the process went, and sort of manually collect that feedback. And I would guess a fair number of companies aren't doing anything at all.

Brian Abraham: Yeah, I think most don't — I haven’t been at any company that does it. Although I do think more and more companies understand the importance of HR and strategic hiring, especially in this climate.

I think getting this feedback is something you want to implement and follow up on, but you might not have enough time, people, or resources to do it. You might have to use survey tools that don’t always work right and probably don’t integrate response data with your other people data.

“The ClearCompany Talent Management Platform is the reason we are able to collect this feedback, measure quality scores, and use what we learn going forward.”

- Brian Abraham, ClearCompany Director of Talent Acquisition

The ClearCompany Talent Management Platform is the reason we are able to collect this feedback, measure quality scores, and use what we learn going forward. Angie and her team use our Employee Engagement Surveys to create and send the surveys. The responses are accessible from our software, which we use daily, and integrated with our existing employee data.

Q: Can you talk about feedback that has resulted in changes to recruiting and onboarding processes?

BA: Recently somebody mentioned they thought that some of our recruiting texts were too long, so we’re paying closer attention to that. We’re using a new ClearCompany feature, texting templates, to create more concise text messages recruiters can send that still communicate all the information we need to share.

With ClearCompany's texting templates, recruiters can send personalized messages to multiple candidates fast.

Quality of Hire scores — and comparing them to Interview Scorecards — have helped us continuously iterate on our sourcing and recruiting strategies. When we’re filling a role, we can look at past hires who have been successful in that role and take cues on where to go to source and what kinds of skills and background to look for.

AWP: One of the changes I remember making based on Quality of Recruiting feedback involved equipment delivery. After we went remote in 2020, we received a lot of feedback about equipment like laptops and computer accessories — when we send it; what comes with it; how it was delivered. We had employees who needed equipment sent to an address that was different from their mailing address, or they had specific delivery instructions.

Of course, it’s essential that equipment gets delivered on time and to the right place. So, we decided to add a separate form for new hires where they could designate an equipment mailing address and add delivery instructions. That feedback helped us fine-tune that process, and now it’s much smoother and employees receive equipment at the right place before their first day. We also use ClearCompany’s Device & Equipment Management feature to keep a record of the equipment we send out, which is really valuable with an all-remote staff.

During onboarding, new employees at ClearCompany take product training courses to learn how to use our software. Based on feedback from the Quality of Onboarding Survey, we’ve made some adjustments to the new hires’ product training schedules and reordered training materials in a way that makes more sense.

Q: Is there any other notable feedback you’ve received from the Talent Acquisition Surveys?

BA: Our interview structure gets positive feedback — we are constantly evaluating the most efficient avenue to a hire and that means shorter interview times, fewer interviews, and fewer team members involved. ClearCompany candidates experience a process that they feel respects their time while our hiring teams feel we are not sacrificing quality of hire. As a result, we are often able to hire faster than other companies.

“ClearCompany candidates experience a process that they feel respects their time while our hiring teams feel we are not sacrificing quality of hire. As a result, we are often able to hire faster than other companies.”

- Brian Abraham, ClearCompany Director of Talent Acquisition

AWP: I've gotten some feedback that new employees would like to repeat the peer one-on-ones after they’ve been with the company for a few months. At that point, they understand people’s jobs a little better and could have more of a conversation about the company and ask more questions. So because of that feedback, I’m looking into how we can do that eventually in a way that’s sustainable for the HR team and our tenured employees.

There is a ton of value to be gained from assessing your recruiting and onboarding processes with an ongoing strategy like employee surveys. Not only are employee surveys a proven engagement-boosting tool, but they also provide direction on how you can improve your processes to attract, engage, and retain top talent.

Get started with your own Quality of Recruiting, Onboarding, and Hire evaluations — download the bundle to use our Talent Acquisition Survey templates.