Candidate Experience

What candidate experience is

Candidate experience is the impression an applicant forms of an organisation across the whole hiring journey: from reading the advertisement, to applying, to the interviews, to the final answer, whether that answer is an acceptance or a rejection.

The definition deliberately runs to the final answer rather than to the offer, because the majority of the people forming an impression never receive an offer. That is not a detail of the definition, it is the reason the subject exists.

Why it matters even for the people who are rejected

Because the rejected are the larger number, and usually by a wide margin. An organisation that interviews ten people to hire one leaves nine impressions against one. Those nine are potential customers, a source of referrals to the people around them, and may apply again for a more suitable role.

The size of the imbalance depends entirely on which stage you count at, and the two common stages give very different figures. Both are worth stating, with the stage named before the number:

• Counted at the interview stage: 10 interviewed and 1 hired leaves 9 not hired, or 90% of the people who met the organisation face to face.
• Counted at the application stage: a vacancy that draws 240 applications and produces 1 hire leaves 239 not hired, or 99.6% of everyone who engaged with the process at all.

Those are two different denominators, and quoting a rejection share without saying which one it came from makes the figure meaningless. They also point at different problems. The 90% figure is about how interviews are conducted. The 99.6% figure is about the advertisement, the application form and the silence afterwards, which is where most of the impressions are actually formed and where almost none of the attention goes.

Follow the second denominator one step further and the argument closes itself. Of the 239 people not hired, 9 were interviewed and 230 never reached that stage. So 96.2% of those 239 never met anyone in the organisation, and formed their impression entirely from the advertisement, the application form, and the answer that did or did not arrive. The interview room accounts for the remaining 3.8%. Almost all impressions sit in the second denominator, and the second denominator is the one nobody measures, because the interview is the part of the process that has a person in it and the rest of it has nobody present to notice.

Where the experience usually breaks

• Silence. An application that receives no response at all. This is the cheapest of all of them to fix.
• Vagueness. An advertisement that states neither the scope of the work, nor the place of work, nor the next steps.
• An exhausting application. A form that asks the applicant to retype their curriculum vitae by hand after uploading it.
• Interviews without end. Rounds that multiply with no announced schedule.
• Rejection without notice, particularly after an in person interview.

Four of these five cost nothing to fix beyond deciding to fix them. Only the application form involves changing a system, and it is the one most likely to be blamed on the system rather than on the decision to keep it as it is.

What measures it

A single question after the application closes is enough: would you recommend that someone else apply here? It is sent to those accepted and those rejected alike, because sending it only to those accepted measures the satisfaction of people who succeeded rather than the quality of the process.

That last point is the one most often got wrong, and the error is not obvious from the results. A survey restricted to successful candidates will produce good scores in almost any organisation, because the respondents have just been given something they wanted. The scores will be real, and they will be evidence about the offer rather than about the process.

A second operational measure is available without any survey: the application abandonment rate, the share of people who begin an application and do not complete it. A high rate points at friction in the application form itself, and warrants examining the form before reviewing the advertisement. The order matters, because the advertisement is the more interesting thing to discuss and the form is the thing that is losing the applicants.

The rejection is the part of the process most people will ever see

That follows from the figures above rather than from an opinion about how applicants should be treated, and it decides where the effort is worth spending. A rejection that arrives on time, names the stage the application reached and does not pretend to be a personal letter is received better than a warm one sent three months later, because timing is the one variable the applicant can actually observe. Two practices do most of the work. State at the point of application when a decision will be communicated, and communicate on that date whether or not the vacancy is settled. An honest message saying the decision has not been made and naming the date of the next one costs a single send and keeps the only promise the process made.

The common failure here is not a harshly worded rejection, which is rare. It is a decision taken internally and never sent, which the applicant experiences as the organisation never having read the application at all. The two are indistinguishable from the outside, and the second is far more common, which is why silence sits first in the list above.

How it differs from employer brand

Employer brand is what the organisation says about itself as a place to work. Candidate experience is what the applicant actually encounters. The gap between the two wastes the entire brand budget: an attractive advertisement followed by a month of silence leaves a worse impression than not advertising at all.

That is a stronger claim than it looks, and it holds for a specific reason. Someone who never saw the advertisement has no view of the organisation. Someone who saw it, believed it and was then ignored has been given a view, and it is a worse one than they started with. Spending on the advertisement without spending on the response is not neutral, it is buying a negative result at full price.

What it costs to fix, and where that cost sits

Most of what is described above resolves to acknowledgements and rejections being sent, and to the process having an announced shape that somebody tells the applicant about. The work is real but it is small, and it is almost entirely internal time rather than spending, which means it lands in cost per hire as hours rather than as invoices. That is worth saying because it is the reason this work is both cheap and persistently not done: nothing in the budget shows its absence.

A fixed process makes it easier still. Where the questions are decided in advance, as in a structured interview, the number of rounds and what happens after each is already known, so telling the candidate the schedule costs nothing beyond writing it down once. The same holds at the other end: the point at which a successful candidate stops being a candidate and starts being a new hire is where employee onboarding takes over, and an accepted offer followed by silence until the first day undoes a good hiring experience at the last possible moment.

Related terms

• Structured Interview
• Cost per Hire
• Employee Onboarding
• Competencies