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Talent

How to Measure Candidate Experience

You can tell a lot about an organization based on how they treat potential employees. Not only do these choices impact the candidate experience, but they also shape the company’s reputation in the job market and overall brand perception.

In fact, 75 percent of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before even applying for a job. Whether it’s a job posting on your careers page, emails, video calls, or a message over the phone, how you communicate with candidates matters—and could impact whether or not they decide to accept an offer.  

Plus, a positive candidate experience can help improve the quality of your hires, reduce hiring costs, and increase retention rates. 

So how exactly can you measure and optimize the candidate experience? 

Let’s take a closer look.

Track the Quality of Interactions

From recruitment through onboarding, it’s important to evaluate the interactions and experiences that candidates have with your company culture and processes. You can start by examining candidates’ communication with hiring managers. Some indicators may be how long it takes them to get to the offer letter stage, as well as recruiters’ attitudes towards them. To get a better understanding of recruiters’ interactions with candidates, you can stamp the time and date of their emails and phone calls. 


It’s also helpful to track how many times hiring managers screen candidates and assign them an interview slot or offer letter. This can help you determine whether parts of the process were skipped, or if the recruiter properly followed up after assigning a candidate an interview slot. It will also show how long it took for an offer letter to be sent out. Using recruiting software, CRM software, or a streamlined HR platform can simplify the process of tracking these.

Improve the Experience for Future Candidates

As you begin to organize and collect your company’s recruiting data, you can analyze these findings by comparing them month over month and then year over year. This will help you understand the types of interactions and communication styles that resonate best with your company’s candidate pool. Ultimately, you can use this information to improve both the satisfaction levels and quality of your future candidates. For instance, your analysis may reveal that you need to implement more touchpoints for communication or make it easier for candidates to get in touch with the different teams at your company. 

Establish Best Practices

Now that you have a clear picture of your company’s recruitment process and have identified areas of improvement, you can establish a plan for your organization going forward. These best practices will serve as a guide for your hiring team to follow and ensure a consistently high quality candidate experience. 

For instance, you can create a list of questions for all hiring managers to ask candidates that will allow them to identify top qualities your company is looking for. You can also provide feedback on the most effective emails and phone calls so that recruiters can improve their communication styles. Consider offering training and coaching sessions for your recruiters so they are adequately prepared to give constructive feedback when turning down candidates.


By proactively connecting with candidates to build employer brand recognition, organizations can better appeal to their target market and develop a robust candidate pipeline. To learn more about effective recruitment marketing strategies, check out our blog post.

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