Always Collect Feedback
From Candidates Anonymously

As I have written in this article one of the key components to get a high response rate is to collect it anonymously. I will give you the full story so that if you are going to collect feedback, Candidate Net Promoter Score or any other feedback from candidates, please read this first to understand the importance of anonymity.

Setting the parameters for A/B testing

At first we needed to define a clear cut goal with this A/B testing. A goal here has to be focused around only answering one thing. We set the goal to be:

Will the response rate go down if the part about being anonymous is not mentioned?

So the test A is: sending 1000 emails not mentioning anonymity (it still is anonymous, but just not mentioned).

The test B will then be: sending 1000 emails mentioning the anonymity two times.

We will choose the A/B that produces the highest response rate. One last important thing is that all else has to be equal.

The results

The results were actually better than I thought! In test A we got 343 that submitted feedback and in test B we got 24,2% more landing at 426 submitting feedback.

As you can see in the graph above the winner was test B mentioning the anonymity and today we send all forms mentioning anonymity.

Other things we started thinking about along the way

This was the first A/B tests we conducted and it got us started thinking about other areas important to do some research on. I will just mention them below. Some has been A/B tested already and some are on its way.

• How will it affect the candidate if the sender is not the company you visited? For example, if IKEA conducted an interview and sends a form from IKEA, how will the response rate change if it is sent from Feedback Inc on behalf of IKEA?
• Further elaborating around the sender, how will the sender being IKEA vs. Feedback Inc affect the validity and honesty of the feedback submitted?
• Does the length of the e-mail effect response rate?
• Does including logo of IKEA affect response rate/validity/honesty?
• Does including the Feedback Inc logo effect response rate/validity/honesty?

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As always I am more than happy to discuss recruiting and the possibilities with CNPS further so feel free to hook up with me on Linkedin here or send me an email: simon@trustcruit.com 👋