It's already well-established: poor Candidate Experience is costly to your business, and positive Candidate Experience can lead to higher ROI.
When candidates have a negative experience with your hiring process, the consequences are significant. You lose out on referrals, deter reapplications, see a dip in your Quality of Hire, and spend a long time managing negative reviews on platforms like Glassdoor. People talk – especially when they’re dissatisfied. That’s why it’s essential to know how to measure Candidate Experience properly.
In this article, we’ll explain how to measure Candidate Experience, step by step. You'll learn how to collect feedback effectively, what touchpoints to focus on, and how to use data and automation to understand and improve your hiring process.
Why Measuring Candidate Experience Matters
Based on many conversations with recruiters, it's clear: many companies still struggle with improving Candidate Experience in a structured way.
While there’s plenty of content about offering “wow moments” or listening to candidates, informal feedback and crowded Excel sheets will only get you so far. To truly improve, you need consistent, measurable data, and that starts with knowing how to measure Candidate Experience effectively.
Read more about the impact of a great hiring experience in our Ultimate Guide to Candidate Experience!
The Latest Candidate Experience Trends
We have recently released our yearly Candidate Experience Benchmark report, where we identified key trends shaping the Talent Acquisition landscape today. By putting together our cNPS data and first-hand candidate comments, we’ve prepared an overview of the opportunities and challenges faced by TA teams in 2024, broken down by company size, candidate stage and department. All with candidates at the center. You can read it here, or through the image below.
Measuring Candidate Experience Starts With Feedback
To improve something, you first need to measure it. That’s where surveys come in, but simply sending one generic Candidate Experience survey won’t cut it. We have seen that one-size-fits-all forms rarely bring any actionable insights and can actually drive candidates away and result in poor reputation.
So if you're going to ask for feedback and measure Candidate Experience, you need to do it right. That means:
- Mapping out your Candidate Journey
- Sending surveys at the right touchpoints
- Measuring the drivers behind your Candidate NPS
- Automating feedback collection with the right tools
- Analyzing your data the right way
- Building a data-driven hiring culture
Let’s break it down.
Step 1: Map Out Your Candidate Journey
Start by mapping your Candidate Journey. What stages do candidates go through in your ATS? Each interaction with your company, whether it’s a phone screen, assessment, or final interview, is a touchpoint that shapes their overall experience.
Your recruitment funnel will have various stages where your candidate interacts with you, your brand, or encounters your automated processes.
Step 2: Map Surveys to the Right Touchpoints
You've got your Candidate Journey mapped out. Now it's time to make sure you have a quantifiable way to capture the experience at each point.
Think of it like this: asking someone at the end of your process what they thought about the application and your online brand is a bit late. Instead, send brief, targeted surveys within 3 business days of each candidate interaction. This way, the feedback is timely and relevant.
- Starred Tip: Survey your rejected candidates. These are your most valuable source of insights. They'll give it to you straight: they are in bigger numbers and not clouded by positive thoughts due to the fact that they just found a new job.
Recommended Candidate Experience Survey Types
We highly recommend creating a tailored Candidate Experience survey after each stage of the hiring process, along with the hired and withdrawn candidates.
Survey types can include:
- Rejected after application
- Rejected after phone screen
- Rejected after assessment
- Rejected after the interview
- Hired
- Withdrawn
- Optional: Hiring manager survey
To see how it looks in practice, test our Candidate Experience survey or see the Starred survey template library!
By creating short and specific surveys, you can gather candidate feedback from everyone, whether hired, rejected, or withdrawn. Already have a setup in place? Find out how to get the best response rates from your feedback so you can analyze with confidence.
Step 3: Understand the Drivers Behind Candidate NPS
We always recommend including the Candidate NPS question: “How likely are you to recommend our recruitment process to others?” in your surveys. But don’t stop there. The Candidate Net Promoter Score helps quantify Candidate Experience, but the score alone doesn’t tell the full story.
Measuring Candidate Experience properly means looking behind the curtain: why are candidates scoring you in a particular way at each stage of the funnel?
So, what should you look at in each step? Here are some examples, if you would like to find out how the candidates perceive the stages of application, interviews, and hired.
Survey after the application process:
- Usability of your job application platform
- Ease of uploading CV
- Satisfaction with the information provided in the job post
Survey after interview(s):
- Did they feel their interviewer was well-prepared?
- Did they feel their time was respected?
- How enjoyable was the conversation?
- How was the speed of the process?
Hired:
- How was the overall experience for new hires?
- Did we give you a thorough brief on the role?
- Was your recruiter easy to reach and communicate with?
You get the idea. Candidate satisfaction and willingness to recommend are tied to these specific experiences. By asking the right questions at the right time, you can identify exactly where improvements are needed.
Recommended reading:
Step 4: Automate with the Right Tools
You can’t improve what you don’t measure consistently, and manually sending out surveys or updating spreadsheets won’t work if you are sending out surveys to hundreds or thousands of candidates. That’s why the best hiring teams use automation to collect feedback consistently and at the right moments.
With Starred, you can integrate Candidate Experience surveys directly into your ATS. Surveys are triggered automatically after key events like application, rejection, interview, or hire, so you never miss a moment to gather feedback. For example, Immutable saved 1.5 days a month by automating their feedback collection process.
Step 5: Analyze Your Data
Once responses come in, the next step is to analyze the key metrics. Don’t just look at average scores. To get actionable insights, you need to dig deeper. Use tags or filters to segment responses by recruiter, department, job type, location, etc.
And over time, patterns will emerge. Maybe candidates consistently call out long wait times between interviews. Or perhaps a specific recruiter consistently scores higher than others. Use these trends to coach your team, refine workflows, and fix issues before they become a problem.
For example, by acting on candidate feedback about the long wait between stages, Deliveroo was able to get enough momentum to establish the SLAs needed to reduce the time in process by 30%.
With Starred, this analysis is automatic. Our real-time dashboards allow you to:
- Generate detailed reports to understand performance metrics.
- Create custom variables that fit your business needs and see the drivers of your Candidate Experience filtered on each recruiter, hiring manager, department, and more.
Plus, Starred’s Priority Matrix helps you focus your improvement efforts by showing you exactly which areas have the biggest impact on Candidate NPS. Instead of guessing what to improve, you’ll know exactly which changes will have the biggest impact.
Step 6: Build a Data-Driven Hiring Culture
Finally, Candidate Experience data should become part of your daily routine. Teams using Starred often use the data to foster accountability and encourage continuous improvement based on real candidate experiences. Over time, the Candidate Experience insights become a natural partner in making decisions, incorporated into setting KPIs, aligning the hiring team, and reporting on the recruitment process.
Being data-driven also means setting benchmarks and comparing your performance to your industry peers. Starred lets you benchmark your Candidate NPS against industry averages and companies of a similar size, giving you context for where you stand and helping you set realistic goals.
Most importantly, use the voice of candidates as a driver for change, and you’ll soon see how feedback helps you build a better reputation, improve your processes, and attract qualified candidates.
Want to see how real companies are doing this?
- Read how Boskalis uses Candidate Experience data to gain stakeholder confidence.
- See how Marqeta works with Hiring Manager data to improve team alignment.
Measuring Candidate Experience: Your Checklist
Let's recap what it takes to measure Candidate Experience the right way. Here’s your step-by-step checklist:
Step 1: Map out your Candidate Journey
Start by identifying every interaction job seekers have with your company, from application to job offer, so you know where to collect feedback.
Step 2: Match surveys to the right stages
Send short, targeted surveys after different stages in the hiring process to gather timely and relevant feedback.
Step 3: Understand the drivers behind Candidate NPS
Learn what's influencing your cNPS by asking questions about specific moments in the hiring journey.
Step 4: Automate survey collection
Use tools, like Starred, that connect with your ATS to send surveys at exactly the right moment, without manual work.
Step 5: Analyze your data
Go beyond average scores and segment feedback by recruiter, department, or job type to identify trends and areas for improvement, turning insights into action.
Step 6: Build a data-driven hiring culture
Make Candidate Experience data part of your daily routine: set benchmarks, create accountability, and use feedback to drive better hiring.
Measuring Candidate Experience Is a Competitive Advantage
If you improve your Candidate Experience, the business will benefit, but how much? Just ask VodafoneZiggo.
By prioritizing feedback and acting on it, they improved Candidate Experience by 25% and saved $142,000 in just 3.5 months. That kind of impact speaks volumes, not only to hiring teams but to leadership as well. Read their success story here!
Ready? Start measuring Candidate Experience with Starred!
Candidate Experience is too important to leave to guesswork. Start measuring what matters and turn feedback into real improvements.
Talk to Sales to see how Starred helps you improve Candidate Experience at scale.
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