Send a short survey after every closed search, asking about shortlist quality, speed, communication and whether the manager would work the same way again. Three or four questions, sent within a week, with a free-text field. Segment results by recruiter and role family, and treat repeated low scores as a process finding rather than a performance verdict.
Because it captures the part of recruiting that speed and cost numbers miss. A search can close inside target and still leave the manager feeling that the shortlist was thin, the communication was patchy or the recruiter never understood the role. That impression determines whether they engage properly with the next requisition, whether they push for an agency, and whether they trust your screening enough to interview who you send. It is also an early warning. Managers usually notice a deteriorating process before it appears in conversion data, because they experience the friction directly while the metrics take a quarter to show it. It is also cheap to run, which matters when the alternative is another measure nobody has time to collect.
Keep it to three or four rated questions plus one free-text box. Was the shortlist strong enough to hire from. Did the process move at a reasonable pace. Were you kept informed without having to chase. Would you run your next search the same way. Then ask what one thing would have made it better. Longer surveys get abandoned, and the free text usually contains the most useful material anyway. Send it within a week of the offer being accepted, while the experience is fresh, and automate the trigger through your [hiring software](/hiring-software) so it does not depend on someone remembering. Survey every closed search, including the ones that went well.
Segment before drawing conclusions. Look at results by recruiter, by role family and by whether the search was easy or hard, because scores fall predictably on difficult searches regardless of how well recruiting performed. A manager who waited three months for a scarce skill will rate speed poorly even when the process was faultless. What you are looking for is a pattern that persists across comparable searches. Read the free text closely, since the same complaint phrased differently by four managers is your real finding. Then close the loop: tell managers what changed because of their feedback. Surveys that produce no visible response stop being answered within two cycles. Share aggregate results with the recruiting team openly and individual comments privately.
It measures perception, and perception is influenced by things recruiting does not control: the pay band, the specification, the manager's own availability and the state of the market. A manager who was slow to give feedback often rates process speed poorly, which is a real finding but not the one they intended. So pair it with objective data. When a manager reports a slow process, check time in stage in your [recruitment analytics](/recruitment-analytics-software) and see where the days actually went. That conversation, held with evidence rather than defensiveness, tends to be more productive than the score itself. Never use the survey as the sole measure of recruiter performance, since it rewards agreeableness over holding a bar.
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