How Candidate Experience Impacts Employee Experience

Recruiting and retention data collected from HR and talent acquisition leaders points to a workforce under strain. Candidate resentment, the share of applicants who say they will stop doing business with a company after a poor hiring experience, has climbed to its highest level ever recorded, including in regions that historically skewed positive. At the same time, employee engagement has been sliding since the pandemic, reflecting a deeper shift in what people want from work rather than a simple reaction to return-to-office mandates.

The research connects these two trends directly. Candidate experience and employee experience are treated as the same continuum: how someone is treated as an applicant shapes how they behave as an employee, and a company's internal culture shows up immediately in how candidates are handled.

Key findings and recommendations include:

• Frustration and burnout among recruiting and HR teams are running high, driven by leaner staffing, higher application volumes, and years of disruptive market swings.
• Falling engagement traces back to people reassessing what matters most to them, not just resistance to commuting or office mandates.
• Companies with strong retention build in regular, structured conversations with employees about identity, values, and what they need, often organized around affinity groups.
• Leaders are advised to commit meaningful budget, roughly a fifth of relevant spend, to developing managers, teams, and career paths, since underinvestment shows up quickly in attrition and weaker recruiting.
• Hiring difficulty varies sharply by industry and role type: healthcare and hospitality continue hiring at pace despite a cooling market overall, while technology and biotech have seen layoffs and slower demand.
• Recruiting teams are urged to periodically remap the candidate journey itself, from first contact through onboarding, since expectations around communication tools, remote versus in-office work, and interview formats keep shifting.
• Setting aside dedicated time, even a single day, to review and redesign hiring and retention practices produces insights that carry directly into future interviews and offers.

Together the findings argue for treating candidate and employee experience as one connected system, one that needs regular reexamination rather than a fixed process set once and left alone.