A new era of hiring: How we create a world class candidate experience

The world of hiring has drastically changed over the past few years. The employer-driven market has shifted to a candidate-led market, where to attract the best people for the job, companies have had to adapt and adopt new practices. Here at Preply, delivering a world-class candidate experience has been a core part of our talent attraction methodology from the very beginning, making sure every stage of the candidate journey is delicately intertwined with all our core company values.

Why is candidate experience important to Preply?
Preply is a human-to-human learning platform, and this means that our talent acquisition processes also center around creating personalized learning experiences for our candidates. Moreover, as one of our company values is to be human, treating people with kindness, respect and compassion is at the core of everything we do. Every decision we take focuses on elevating how applicants feel moving through our hiring process and ensuring they get a good return on their time invested interviewing with us. The benefit is obvious: Research shows that 58% of surveyed candidates feel that a good recruitment process increases the likelihood of them accepting the role. But in addition, we also believe that every candidate that speaks to Preply could be a potential customer (or already is!), so a bad candidate experience can also have a negative business impact. Therefore, as a Talent Acquisition (TA) team, our goal is to ensure that candidates can have a positive interaction with Preply from start to finish, regardless of the application outcome.

How we elevate the candidate experience inspired by our core values:

🔷 CURIOUS:
As a company we are humble enough to know that our TA process is not perfect. We understand that there is always room for improvement. Our curious nature never allows us to settle, as we’re always looking for ways to do things better. Our curiosity has enabled us to:

• Dive deep into candidate experience insights
  Data is at the heart of change at Preply. Last year we implemented a tool which has enabled us to send feedback surveys to candidates who have been in the process with us. We currently have a response rate of ~40% which is slightly above industry average and proves our hypothesis: candidates want to talk about their experiences! Thanks to the combination of qualitative and quantitative insights (we look into all available metrics in our ATS: time to hire, drop-out rates, time in stage, referral rates, scorecard completion, and offer acceptance) we are able to build a data-led understanding of the experience we’re currently delivering to our candidates. This allows us to identify strengths in our process to double down on, and pinpoint the areas of improvement.

🔷 HUMBLE:
We keep our egos low and relentlessly pursue growth and learning. This is the ethos of the company and the attitude of our recruitment process. As lifelong learners, we always aim to take in as much as possible from our candidates. Amongst others, we noticed that we had an opportunity to improve in the following two areas:

• World-class interviewers
  Interviewing is a skill — It’s a muscle we can develop and improve. It is also a two-way street where candidates are simultaneously assessing you versus other opportunities on the market. We saw in the data that “experience with the interviewer” was an opportunity to improve in order to deliver an amazing experience to candidates. To improve this we have implemented targeted interviewer training programs and workshops focused on building and understanding behavioral and situational interview questions. Another good example is our pre-interview briefs for interviewers and personalized feedback documents with areas they need to improve. The goal is to never stop upskilling our interviewers by educating them on the optimal process, structure and evidence based questions to create a world-class Preply interview experience.
• Diversity and inclusion
  We have learners and tutors in more than 150 countries. Our product mission is to connect human beings all over the globe for a good cause — to learn and develop together. We feel strongly that our team working on a global product should also reflect the diversity of our customers, and we’re proud to have already more than 50 nationalities among 450+ employees at Preply. That’s why when we build our interviewer panels, we ensure that candidates will meet a range of Preplers from as many different backgrounds (from location, to race, to gender) as possible. In addition, we’re not afraid to challenge our hiring teams to do what is right, for Preply and for the candidate.

🔷 HUMAN:
At Preply, we see the people behind the numbers. In TA, we see the person behind the CV. We take the time to understand every candidate, and more importantly humanize our hiring process to set applicants up for success by building a strong professional relationship from the start. This is how we do it at Preply:

• Personalized feedback
  Through our surveys we learned that our candidates wanted deeper feedback. Without it, they aren’t able to improve for future interview processes; at Preply or otherwise. We see our roles as talent advisors and, therefore, we rolled out a number of initiatives to improve how we deliver feedback. One was to personalize our feedback emails to give as much detail as possible. We also commit, where possible, to going the extra mile to jump on a call and give constructive, transparent feedback, especially when the candidate has already advanced to a stage where they’ve built relationships with business stakeholders.
• Revamped job descriptions
  Another area that candidates felt could be improved was the quality and content of our job descriptions. Our TA team worked on a number of initiatives from partnering with our internal copy teams to make sure our job descriptions were both engaging and inclusive to encourage candidates from different backgrounds and walks of life to apply to Preply where they see a potential fit. We also use tools where we can to advance the inclusivity of all our talent related communications.

🔷 HUNGRY:
Being “hungry” at Preply means setting a high bar and aiming to be 10x better every day. This means focusing on business growth and outcomes. We do not settle for mediocrity and our TA process is a reflection of this:

• Candidate experience OKRs
  Objectives with measurable outcomes are the Preply recipe for success across the business. Our engineering, product and marketing teams ran over 700 experiments on our product in 2021. We are no different in our approach to experimentation-driven talent acquisition. To ensure that we follow through on our promise to deliver high quality candidate experience, we set quarterly OKRs which tie candidate experience focused projects to tangible, measurable metrics. In order to continually improve the experience for our candidates, we have scaled multiple TA experiments such as: candidate engagement packs, Preply pitch decks, new feedback call structures, anti-bias training, feedback calls with the business, condensed case studies and refreshed offer letter templates. Next, we’re already working on: values training for our TA team, scaled engagement packs for all roles, “meet the team” decks and much more. Watch this (candidate experience) space!
• Process speed
  Momentum is an interesting element in TA. We can see clearly in the data that as the ‘time in stage’ increases, so does dissatisfaction with the process as well as candidates pulling out of the process to accept other offers. Your TA process is a reflection of the speed your business moves at; a slow moving recruitment process points to a slow moving business. We put in place Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) with the business to hold ourselves accountable for process speed. These SLAs include: hiring managers to provide feedback within 48 hours, TA team members replying to applicants within 5 days, and offer decisions made within 3 days. And the most impressive part is that we managed to implement these fresh TA processes with just a small team of 9 colleagues, directly contributing to helping us hire over 250 people from February till the end of 2021.

🔷 HACKERS:
Our hackers value means moving fast, keeping it simple, learning by doing and challenging the status quo. We are constantly looking for ways to improve within TA for the benefit of the people in our interview process.

• Case study options
  For many roles at Preply, the technical assessment comes in the form of a case study, which candidates need to present to a panel of members of a respective team. The truth is, case studies divide opinions. One argument is that they’re an excellent situational interview technique that tests problem solving and other key competencies. The counter argument is that they’re time consuming and potentially stressful. Upon speaking with candidates, we learned that some candidates preferred the time and space to prepare at home, while others would like the option to work through a problem on the spot. Therefore, we built two options: a revamped, more condensed, shorter take-home case study, and an on-the-spot challenge where candidates would have 1.5 hours before the interview to build their approach to a specific problem. This was a very successful experiment which we’ve begun to scale to other areas of the business.

🔷 LEARNERS OBSESSED:
Learners obsession means building the best possible product for our learners. Everything we do at Preply has the learner in mind. This is a value that we test throughout the interview process as well:

• Focus on the customer
  Our interview process places a very high emphasis on gathering evidence that someone is driven to solve customer problems and deliver magical experiences to their customers. At every stage, including the TA screening call, we focus heavily on understanding the impact of a candidate’s work on the end customer (whoever that may be to their business/role). We stay away from hypothetical, abstract scenarios and focus on getting real life examples of customer/learner centricity. All the content and information decks we share contain lots of information on the Preply business and what we’re building for our learners. We want our process to be a reflection of the learner focused environment candidates will walk into once they join!

We’d like to hear from you! 👂
As hungry learners, we’re always looking for ways to improve and raise the bar. So we’d like to hear from you about ways we could enhance our candidate experience even further. Leave your thoughts in the comment section below and let’s talk!

Our Talent Acquisition team is actively growing! 🚀
If you’re driven by going the extra mile to deliver world class candidate experience, hungry to have a visible impact on the business, and would like to join a data-driven company where growth and learning go hand in hand, then check out our open positions here.