A Look at Today’s Candidates: Identifying the Most Impactful Tactics to Improve Candidate Experience

Annual benchmarking research on candidate experience shows a widening gap between how employers describe their brand and how candidates describe their actual experience applying for jobs. Employer brand words tend to be positive: culture, collaborative, inclusive, meaningful. Candidate experience words skew negative: broken, lengthy, inconsistent. The data behind that gap, and what closes it, comes from years of survey responses gathered across North America, EMEA, APAC and Latin America.

Two long-running metrics anchor the findings. One tracks candidates who report a great enough experience that they'll keep engaging with an employer as an applicant, referrer, or customer; that number has been declining. The other tracks outright resentment, candidates who say they're done with an employer for good, and that figure has been climbing to its highest point on record.

Because most applicants are eventually rejected, the moments that shape perception happen mostly at the point of application and in the communication that follows. Practices that consistently separate above-average employers from the rest include:

• Setting expectations up front about timeline, process stages, and what happens after someone applies
• Sending timely, consistent communication rather than silence between application and decision
• Asking new hires for feedback before their start date, and surveying rejected candidates too
• Publishing values, diversity and inclusion information, and career-path content, which correlates with meaningfully higher ratings from candidates researching the company
• Using conversational AI or chat tools to handle communication volume that recruiting teams can't manage manually
• Testing the application process personally, once or twice a year, to catch friction points that get missed internally

Even the highest-rated employers in the research don't execute every one of these practices perfectly or all the time. What distinguishes them is doing most of it consistently, year after year, regardless of hiring volume, team size, or economic conditions. Recruiting technology and marketing spend matter less to candidates than the outcome: whether they got clear communication and a fair process, since ultimately the only thing most candidates care about is whether they got the job. Everything else, including tone, timing, and transparency, shapes whether they walk away willing to engage that employer again.