Candidate Experience: Tips You Can Use to Wow Top Talent

Candidate experience is all about how an applicant feels during interviews, onboarding, and other stages of the recruitment process. A positive experience can make a candidate feel satisfied and more likely to accept your job offer. A negative experience reflects poorly on your company and can lead to a candidate going elsewhere.

Below, learn why candidate experience is so important, how to improve it, and how the latest technology can help. You’ll also find top candidate experience best practices and expert insights on this topic. 

Why candidate experience is important

Think about a time you had a bad candidate experience. Perhaps the recruiter didn’t communicate with you properly or wasn’t very welcoming during your interview. That experience might have impacted your perception of the company, making you think twice about whether you even wanted the job.

Candidate experience can influence almost every aspect of the recruitment process. When applicants have a positive experience, they are more likely to want to work for your organization, leading to higher engagement and productivity. When applicants have a poor experience, they might develop a negative perception of your company. Too many bad experiences can affect your reputation and damage your employer brand, making it harder to acquire talent.

A growing number of recruiters understand the importance of a good candidate experience. According to Good Time’s 2024 Hiring Insights Report, 35% of talent acquisition leaders said improving candidate experience was one of the top focus areas in the past 12 months.

“Candidate experience will play a tremendous role in sourcing and hiring the best talent because communication will always be important,” says recruitment operations consultant Jeremy Lyons. “Candidates talk, hiring managers talk, people in networks talk. Communication will always be important, and if people are having a terrible or extremely positive experience, others will know about it. If organizations want to improve this, then starting with communication is where it all begins, and that starts with no ghosting and open and honest communication.”

Best practices for improving candidate experience

Creating positive experiences for candidates is a lot easier than you think. Here are the three essential recruitment best practices to help you do it:

Communicate with candidates

One of the biggest pet peeves for job applicants is a lack of communication from recruiters. For example, waiting weeks or months to hear back after an interview or not hearing back from recruiters at all can make candidates feel undervalued.

Communicating regularly with everyone who applies for a job can be tough, especially if you have hundreds of applications. However, you can set clear expectations about different hiring process steps from the first interaction with a candidate. For instance, you can give an estimated timeline for how long each stage of recruitment will take, including pre-screening, interviews, and onboarding. This helps candidates understand the hiring process and resolves their concerns that employers may be completely disregarding them. 

Also, consider automating low-level recruitment tasks such as interview scheduling so you can free up time to communicate more with candidates. Many applicants expect quick replies to any questions or queries, and providing timely feedback can lead to more positive hiring outcomes.

According to our 2024 Hiring Insights Report, talent acquisition (TA) teams think they need to focus on the following communication areas in the next 12 months:

• Quickly connecting with candidates (46%)
• Spending more time building meaningful relationships with candidates (45%)
• Increasing the number of candidate touchpoints in their process (42%)

“One of the simplest things an organization can do to build up their recruiting brand is putting an emphasis on communication—style, tone, consistency, and frequency,” says Geva Whyte, recruiting coordinator with experience at Lyft, Stripe, and OpenAI.

“Communication gives candidates an idea of the kind of culture they will be stepping into. In your communication with candidates, are you coming off friendly and inviting? Stiff and robotic? Are you sending follow-up emails? Are you using the default boilerplate ATS rejection email if things don’t work out? One of the biggest and easiest pain points to solve is recruiters ghosting on candidates.”

Personalize communication

Personalized communications and positive candidate experiences go hand in hand, and for good reason. Tailoring emails, texts, and other messages to each job applicant proves you care about them as individuals, not just potential additions to your workforce.

There are various ways to personalize communications, from the initial touchpoint when a candidate applies for the job to the final step when you present a job offer or reject or welcome a person to your organization. For instance, you can:

• Include someone’s first name or preferred name in messages rather than a generic “sir,” “madam,” or, even worse, “candidate.”
• Refer to where candidates are in the recruitment process in messages to manage expectations.
• Reference specific information about why someone did or didn’t get a job in offer and rejection letters. This can help candidates identify areas of strength or things they need to improve.

According to our most recent Hiring Insights Report, 36% of TA leaders are upgrading their hiring technology to increase personalization.

Respect candidates’ time

Candidates are humans, not just names on resumes. A job seeker might spend hours writing a job application and preparing for the interview process with your company, so it’s only right that you respect their time and effort.

One way to show respect is to avoid distractions during an interview with a candidate. Put your phone away, listen to what they say, and stay engaged. Even if someone might not seem like a good fit at first, you should hear them out and get to know them a little more.

Sending “thank you” emails to candidates at different stages of the recruitment process is also respectful. You can thank an applicant after submitting their resume, attending an interview, and at other touchpoints.

The role of technology

Upgrading your hiring technology helps you enhance the candidate experience. The tools below can streamline various tasks that result in more satisfied applicants.

• An applicant tracking system (ATS) centralizes recruitment tasks into a single system, making it easier to track candidate applications. Job seekers can also check the statuses of their applications without having to contact you.
• Interview scheduling tools remove the back-and-forth between candidates and recruiters. GoodTime, which integrates with top applicant tracking systems, allows candidates to choose interview dates, reducing no-shows and improving efficiency.
• An Interviewer portal contains interview info, hiring team profiles, and important resources in one place. Built-in feedback collection and messaging options ensure an impressive, best-in-class candidate experience every time.

While new technologies require an outlay, you could generate a return on your investment by optimizing candidate experience and retaining more talent.

Consider balancing the need for automation with the human touch. The tools above can streamline various processes, but most candidates enjoy developing human connections with your recruitment team. Sixty-six percent of Americans say they wouldn’t want to apply for a job with an employer that solely uses AI for hiring. 

Measuring and improving the candidate experience

Finding out whether candidates have a good experience can enhance your future hiring practices. Discover what job seekers think about your company by leveraging:

Surveys

Candidate experience surveys let you collect feedback from candidates at different recruitment stages, making job seekers feel like you are listening to them. You can use insights from surveys to fine-tune your recruitment process.

Net promoter score

A net promoter score (NPS) is an effective tool for measuring and improving candidate experience. It asks candidates how likely they are to recommend your company to other people on a scale of 1 to 10. You can then calculate the average of scores from multiple candidates to determine collective perceptions of your company.

Social media sentiment

Tracking sentiment on social media reveals what people say about your recruitment processes online. For example, you can find out if previous candidates had positive experiences when interviewing with your team.

Consider refining your measurement techniques to continuously improve candidate experience. Over time, you’ll know which technologies and key recruitment metrics are most valuable for determining candidate satisfaction and engagement.

Candidate experience FAQs

Gain a competitive edge in your candidate experience with GoodTime

Improving the candidate experience can make your company more attractive to job seekers and prevent them from seeking out your competitors. Good experiences may also lead to other talent wanting to work with your team.

“The talent pool isn’t as big or as deep as organizations like to believe—candidates talk to each other,” adds Whyte. “Even if a candidate doesn’t make it to the offer stage, they will still mention a positive interviewing experience, which could lead to them referring people they know.”

If you want to create positive candidate experiences and gain a competitive edge, consider using GoodTime’s candidate experience platform. GoodTime allows candidates to schedule their own interviews, connect with your team, and receive personalized communications through a candidate portal, resulting in a smoother and more efficient hiring process that improves perceptions of your company.

GoodTime expands human capabilities instead of replacing them, allowing you to engage with applicants on a deeper level. Get a demo now to learn more.

Additional resources to continue learning:

• 6 Recruitment Marketing Strategies to Attract Talent
• Human-centric AI is the future of hiring
• Hiring Managers: Understanding Their Role in the Recruitment Process
• Recruitment Best Practices To Elevate Your Hiring Strategy