By Ruth Ritzema, Marketing Director, Daxtra
Candidate experience is more than a recruiting buzzword – it’s a vital factor in attracting and retaining top talent. Recruitment is a two-way process and, while you want to attract the best talent to your organization, candidates are looking for companies that are the best fit for their skills, needs and values.
Creating a great candidate experience will allow you to attract the best applicants, convert them into successful hires, retain their skills, and benefit from word-of-mouth referrals.
In this article, we’ll look at why improving candidate experience is important, cover some common pain points in the candidate journey, offer actionable tips to improve the candidate experience and examine the changing role that technology can play.
Candidate experience is how job seekers feel about an organization, based on their interactions during the recruitment process.
The candidate journey provides multiple steps: from searching for a job, reading a job posting and applying for a role to communicating during the application process, interviewing and being offered (or not being offered) a job – right through to onboarding. These interactions will affect how a candidate feels about your organization – whether you’re an employer or a recruitment or staffing agency.
Creating a positive candidate experience is an essential part of recruiting. To hire and retain top talent, you need to attract quality candidates and ensure that they remain engaged throughout the process.
Gartner’s Voice of the Candidate Survey in May 2023 found that, of the candidates surveyed:
Your employer brand is key to attracting the best talent – 75% of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before applying for a job. Improving your candidate experience will help you build a strong employer brand.
If a candidate has a great experience (whether or not they end up being hired) they're more likely to advise people in their network to apply to your organization in future. ERE’s 2023 Global Candidate Experience (CandE) Benchmark Research found that 74% of candidates were willing to share positive candidate experiences with their network. This word-of-mouth recommendation is an invaluable part of your talent acquisition strategy. And, these candidates will also look more favorably on your brand - and so are more likely to become customers or even brand advocates in future.
The benefits of improving candidate experience start at the talent attraction stage but continue far beyond. You will see improvements in:
The advantages of creating a good candidate experience can be lost if candidates have a negative experience at one of the touchpoints on the candidate journey. Some common pain points include:
If candidates experience these pain points, they may feel that they’ve wasted their time and are unlikely to apply to your organization again.
It's highly likely that they will also tell other people not to apply. It's now even easier for them to share their experience – not only with close friends and family, but also across social media and online forums. For many companies, their candidates are also their customers, so if they have a negative experience, they're more likely to take their business elsewhere and advise others to do the same.
If you’re looking to attract the very best candidates, you don’t just want them to have a good experience – you want to wow them with a great experience, making them more likely to apply to your organization, and to accept your job offer. Here are some actionable tips to help you improve your candidate experience:
Daxtra’s US Market Research Report found that 31% of candidates expected the application form to take no more than 10 minutes to complete, and most candidates will give up filling out an application form if it takes longer than 27 minutes.
To enhance your candidate journey, you should avoid:
Make sure every touchpoint in the application process is user-friendly (and mobile-friendly).
Keep application forms as short as possible, with clear questions – and ensure that you tell candidates how long it should take to complete the form before they start. This shows respect for your candidates’ time.
Be transparent about what the hiring process will look like, including how many rounds of interviews there will be and when you expect to make a decision. This will give candidates more confidence about how to operate as a company.
One of the best ways to improve your application process is to ask candidates for feedback. ERE’s 2023 Global Candidate Experience (CandE) Benchmark Research found that 67% of employers asked for feedback compared to only 40% in 2022. If you make changes to your process based on candidate feedback, check your key success metrics before and after (more on this later).
Candidates have invested time and effort in applying to your organization and feel frustrated when this effort is not reciprocated. To keep them engaged, you should:
If in doubt, communicate, and use technology to help improve your candidate engagement.
Make sure you’re setting your candidates and your interviewers up for success by creating a structured interview process.
Ensure that candidates know what to expect from your interviews and what they should do to prepare by providing clear instructions, including how long the interview will take, what the format will be, who they will be meeting, how to access your office and (for in-person interviews) what the dress code is. Send a calendar invitation containing the information they need.
Ensure that your interviewers also know what is expected of them and how they can provide the best experience to candidates.
Thank candidates for attending interviews and provide feedback on their performance as soon as possible afterwards. Ask them for any feedback that they might have and use it to improve your interview process in future.
The candidate journey doesn’t end when you make a job offer. Try to make the transition from candidate to employee as smooth as possible, since a positive onboarding experience will give your new hire the best possible start at your company.
If you need the candidate to complete onboarding paperwork, aim to make this digital and send it to them before they start, so that all their systems are set up ready on this first day.
Make sure candidates know in advance what is expected of them on the first day and over the first couple of weeks in the job – ideally ask their hiring manager to call them before their start date to make sure they have everything they need.
You should use every touchpoint on the candidate journey as an opportunity to present your employer brand and prove that candidate experience is important to your organization.
Some ways to showcase your employer brand include:
It's vital to ensure that the candidate experience is aligned with your brand and company values. Does what candidates experience when they interact with your organization match how you promote yourself externally? For example, if your values state that your employees are the most important part of the business, ensure that you treat your candidates as equally important – communicating regularly and providing updates on their application. You need to ensure that this experience is consistent across all candidate touchpoints.
There are many ways to use technology to improve candidate experience – and the options are increasing all the time.
Today’s technology can enable both greater automation and increased personalization for each stage of the candidate journey. You can:
The more information you can collect from a candidate’s application and the more information you can provide them, the better your interactions – and their overall candidate experience – will be.
While it seems obvious that improving the candidate experience will benefit not just your hiring but also your organization, you need to be able to understand what is working and what is not.
Having a clear set of metrics will allow you to see whether the changes you are making are having an impact. Some important candidate experience metrics to track include:
There are many more metrics you can track, such as those detailed by AIHR. You need to make sure that the metrics you track are the ones that reflect your candidate journey. You should review the key touchpoints in your hiring process to see which additional metrics would be helpful – but also gather feedback from candidates on each of these touchpoints so that you can improve.
Improving candidate experience is no longer optional – it's a crucial component of any successful recruitment strategy.
A positive candidate experience not only allows you to attract and retain top talent but also strengthens your employer brand, reduces time-to-fill, and fosters a culture of inclusivity and engagement. When candidates feel valued and respected throughout the hiring process, they are more likely to accept job offers, remain committed to your organization, and refer other high-quality candidates to your company.
Addressing common pain points – such as lack of communication and lengthy application processes – is essential to creating a more effective candidate journey. By implementing actionable strategies like streamlining the application process, improving communication, providing a positive interview experience, enhancing onboarding, and showcasing your authentic employer brand, you can significantly elevate the overall candidate experience.
Technology also plays a vital role in optimizing candidate experience by enabling automation, personalization, and data-driven decision-making. From chatbots that guide candidates through the application process to AI-driven tools that match candidates to suitable roles, leveraging the right technology can help ensure a more engaging and efficient recruitment process. And, to continuously improve your candidate experience, it's essential to measure and optimize key metrics like application abandonment rate, offer acceptance rate, time to hire, and candidate satisfaction. Regularly gathering feedback and making data-informed changes will help you refine your approach and build a more robust, candidate-centric hiring strategy.
By focusing on these elements and committing to an ongoing process of improvement, your organization will not only attract the best talent but also cultivate a reputation as an employer of choice – ultimately driving long-term success and growth.
To learn more about how to use technology in your hiring process, download The Recruiter's Guide to LLMs and Generative AI and our guide to recruitment automation.