Team update: A lot has happened since this blog - all great things! We’re now in the United States and our new product launched in November 2021, helping teams in fast-growing organizations find and hire their best-fit junior and mid-level talent in Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Customer Success. Try it here for free. This means some of our articles before this date may have product shots that look a little different. That’s all from us, enjoy the blog.

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Applying to roles can feel like you're sending your CV into a black hole. Will they even look at it, let alone assess whether you’d be a good fit for a role?

Days and weeks can go by, and you hear nothing. If you’re lucky, months later you’ll get an automated email saying “We were overwhelmed with so many high quality applications. Unfortunately yours has not progressed to the next round.”‍

We’ve all been there - how did it make you feel?

For candidates, applying to a role can be a vulnerable experience. They’re expressing an interest in your company, often investing time and effort into your application experience and tailoring their CV or cover letter to your job description. So when there’s radio silence from your end - no feedback or update on the outcome - it’s disheartening. Unfortunately, it’s also currently the norm.

We’re changing that. We know it can genuinely be overwhelming to receive 100s of applications. And we know in the post-Covid landscape, now more than ever before, you’re being inundated with CVs, making it difficult to respond to them all. We've taken this task off our customer's plate and built feedback responses into our candidate experience.  

How we think about feedback

We believe feedback is important. It’s a superpower when it comes to self-awareness and growth, and is an integral part of our culture.

We’ve always ensured that our product experience is transparent; once there is an outcome for a role, we let candidates know over email. Now, we’re taking that one step further, to help applicants understand the key reason that they a) made the shortlist, or b) didn’t make the shortlist.

Here’s a few of our feedback principles:

• Timely: candidate's know the outcome of their application as soon as it has been finalised.
• Transparent: we explain to candidate’s why their application was successful or unsuccessful, according to our assessment framework 
• Trust: employers and candidates understand our matching science. Both parties have confidence in our assessment process to be equal and unbiased.

Here’s how we apply it.

How it works

As part of our Matching process (you can find out more about it here!), our team of Organisational Psychologists assess written and video tasks responses using Behaviourally Anchored Rating Scales (BARS). We create these with subject matter experts in the capability field.

Each candidate’s response is given a rating according to our definition of the capability being assessed. All responses are de-identified, e.g. removing gender, CV and age, to prevent bias for creeping in. This means we see past the CV, and only assess true, transferable strengths and experience.

At the end of the assessment process, our algorithm finds each candidate’s main fit, or main gap, for the role according to this assessment. We’re then able to send this to the candidate over email as feedback, and also to let them know the outcome of their application.

This new product feature is a big step in the right direction - but we’re not done yet! We're now working on how we can guide candidate's to develop each skill, to help them improve for the next time they apply.

If responding to every applicant and providing them with feedback is important to your candidate experience, you can try Hatch for free for a limited time. Find out more here.