Think about how a job candidate navigates the hiring process: Job descriptions, social media posts and your careers page are often the first experience a candidate has with your company. From there, they may submit an application and be selected for a phone screen. This may lead to a round of on-site interviews, skills assessments, reference checks and, if you’re lucky, a happy new hire.
All of these instances encompass and affect the candidate experience, which can ultimately determine how a candidate decides to associate with your company.
What Is Candidate Experience?
Candidate experience describes how a job candidate perceives an employer and its brand when engaging with its hiring process, from applying to receiving a job offer.
Each of the touch points a candidate interacts with during the hiring process can serve as an opportunity for you to wow them, or for you to leave them unimpressed. It all depends on how prepared you are. In this article, we break down what candidate experience is, why it’s critical to your recruitment efforts and .how you can create a positive candidate experience.
What Is Candidate Experience?
Candidate experience refers to the experience a candidate has when applying for a position with your company. It is their perception of your company — good, bad or indifferent — after having experienced your hiring process.
It starts with the first interaction a candidate has with your company as an employer and encapsulates everything up until they are either rejected or accept a job offer. And more importantly, it’s the part of the recruitment process that can either lead to a wonderful candidate-employer relationship or end in a slippery HR scandal.
While the concept of candidate experience may seem a bit abstract, there are several recruitment metrics you can use in order to track and measure a candidate’s experience, such as application completion rate, time to hire, offer acceptance rate and employee retention rate. For more direct feedback, there are also a host of employee review sites that allow candidates to anonymously share their experiences with others.
Why Is the Candidate Experience Important?
Now that you have a better understanding of what the candidate experience encompasses, we’re going to dive into the importance of creating a great candidate experience.
1. Candidates Commonly Decline Job Offers Due to Negative Interview Experiences
A negative candidate experience can cost employers their greatest asset — their talent. In a 2023 candidate experience report by CareerPlug, 22 percent of job candidates decline an offer due to having a negative experience with people in the interview process, while eight percent decline due to feeling the interview process was slow and disorganized.
2. Most Job Candidates Never Finish Online Job Applications
When a majority of job candidates are abandoning applications, they are sending a clear message. SHRM reported some of the reasons only 92 percent of candidates complete their online job applications may include excessive clicking, having to create user accounts and confusing branding between redirected sites during application. Try applying to a role yourself to see how the process is, and take a look at your application completion rate metrics to improve this area of your process.
3. Negative Company Reviews Deter Lots of Candidates
A company’s brand online greatly affects the candidate experience — if a previous employee or applicant notes that they had a negative experience with the company, this will also influence others’ candidate experiences. In a survey by Fractl, one in three respondents stated that they have turned down a job offer based on a company review they read online. In order to combat these negative reviews, you should aim to respond to both negative and positive feedback so that future candidates know that you care and are working to improve the candidate experience moving forward.
4. Candidates Prefer a Short Hiring Process
The hiring process taking too long is one of the top reasons for job seekers having a negative candidate experience, according to a 2022 report by Talent Board. To improve the length of your process, look into your time to hire to see how long it takes candidates to get through your overall hiring process.
5. Candidate Experience Affects Employee Retention and Performance
Companies that provide positive candidate experiences were found to be three times more likely to improve employee retention and two times more likely to improve employee performance, according to Aptitude Research. A positive candidate experience not only helps recruit talent, but also ensures they stay for longer and bring their best to the team.
How to Create a Positive Candidate Experience
It’s one thing to understand what a good candidate experience is. It’s another thing to actually create a candidate experience that will leave your top candidates wanting more from your company as an employer. To better understand how companies create a positive candidate experience, we talked with six experts to get their tips on the matter.
1. ALWAYS BE TRANSPARENT WITH CANDIDATES
“We have a very friendly and open company, and we try to make sure that the culture is replicated in the interview process. Candidate experience is always top of mind; we go to extra lengths to make sure each person has a positive experience. By being transparent about the process, as well as remembering the small things — a glass of water for their in-person interview, walking candidates to and from each interview, etc. — we are constantly looking to make the process as friendly and open as our culture is.”
— Tabitha Upton, recruiter at Datadog
2. HUMANIZE YOUR CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE
“Yello’s software enables the world’s largest brands to humanize the candidate experience. We strive to uphold these same principles during our interview process, by treating every candidate with respect, transparency and incorporating our technology at every possible step. After a recruiter phone screen and conversation with the hiring manager, the candidate is invited to the office. Candidates tour our collaborative, open space and take in our Lake Michigan views before meeting several members of the team. Through every step of the hiring process, the candidate is in touch with a member of the talent acquisition team who is available to answer questions, provide updates and share next steps.”
— Heather Redisch, vice president of talent acquisition at Yello
3. ESTABLISH CLEAR COMMUNICATION AMONG HIRING TEAMS
“I’ve done a lot of interviews in the past year. I’ve been involved in two specific ways: aligning the question areas to be consistent across all candidates and positions, as well as improving the candidate experience.
“We have lots of open roles, and sometimes we get candidates applying for one position only to realize they are a better fit for a different role. So we shored the process of moving candidates from one path to another through clear communication. We also decided to align interview themes with our company values. This creates a consistent experience centered on our core values and ensures we are comparing apples to apples.”
— Liz Yuhas, director of technology at VillageMD
4. GET CANDIDATES EXCITED ABOUT YOUR COMPANY
“Whether a candidate is hired or not, we want them to walk away feeling equally excited about the experience as well as the company. Our senior recruiter ... does an incredible job ensuring candidates are treated thoughtfully and have a comfortable experience. Rather than looking for a ‘culture fit,’ we operate by assessing across the same core values we hold our team accountable to. We look to hire people who will contribute to, and complement, the MeUndies team in their own authentic way.”
— Ellen Sweeney, director of people operations at MeUndies
5. UTILIZE HR TECH TO ENSURE A SEAMLESS EXPERIENCE
“A lot of changes are taking place in HR tech. The use of intelligent bots in HR and recruiting is a very hot topic. While the applications are still in a nascent stage, several innovative companies have already begun implementing them to improve candidate engagement and enhance the information gathering process. This significantly reduces mundane, time-consuming tasks and facilitates better communication between the job seeker and recruiter.”
— Ian Jaffrey, co-founder at Wade & Wendy
6. INCORPORATE A DIVERSE RECRUITMENT TEAM
“Our interview process consists of three things that make it unique: a culture interview, a hiring committee review and post-interview feedback. All events are designed to focus on a great candidate experience, reduce unconscious bias and to expose candidates to the rich diversity of perspectives at Newsela. The first interview involves a call with our talent team, where we learn more about a candidate’s skill-set, employment history and career goals.
“The second interview is a call with the hiring manager, where they share details about what success looks like and dive into what’s important to each candidate. In the third interview, the candidate meets the team they’d be working with. The onsite interview gives the candidate an opportunity to speak with a diverse panel of interviewers, including leadership.”
— Q Hawkins, senior technical recruiter at Newsela
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a candidate experience?
Candidate experience is how a job candidate perceives a company and its brand throughout the hiring process. Every stage of a hiring process — including encountering a company's website, filling out a job application, participating in interviews and receiving a job offer — has an impact on candidate experience.
How do you measure candidate experience?
Candidate experience can be measured by conducting surveys at the end of the hiring process that ask job candidates to provide their feedback.
Candidate experience surveys may ask candidates about how quickly it took recruiters and hiring managers to respond to communication, how informed they felt during the hiring process or what could be improved about the process.