What do your candidates value? It’s a question that HR and Talent Acquisition teams have brainstormed in countless meetings, trying to understand what candidates value, besides compensation and benefits.

This is especially important in the current market to ensure that candidates don’t withdraw their applications. It’s also massively important to dive into what rejected candidates value, too. After all, rejected candidates can spread negative word of mouth about your business and hurt your bottom line as a result of poor Candidate Experience. 

So, how do you prevent this? How can you ensure that you handle their rejection well, reducing the chance of negative reviews circling online?

Our Candidate Values Report

We had a hunch about candidate values, so we decided to investigate all of our Candidate Experience data to get some hard facts and shed some light on the questions we all want answered;

1. What do candidates care about? 
2. Why are candidates withdrawing? 
3. How valued is Diversity and Inclusion by candidates? 
4. How important is compensation and benefits? 

Drawing on 379,224 anonymized individual candidate responses, we analyzed our entire 2021 dataset to find the main trends and motivations for rejected and withdrawn candidates. We decided to focus specifically on these two groups, and analyzed the correlations between cNPS (Candidate Net Promoter Score) and the average ratings given to different categories of questions by all the candidates.

Through this analysis, we were able to identify the most important categories and elements of your recruiting process, and their impact on cNPS. This allowed us to pinpoint the areas that are most valued by candidates, and answer the key question: What turns candidates off?

How do you avoid upsetting rejected candidates?

No one likes rejecting candidates, but there are ways you can ensure you’re doing it in a way that leaves them still feeling positive about your company. Our analysis revealed that the most relevant areas for rejected candidates are:

1. The feedback given to candidates
2. The quality of the assessment during the interview process 
3. Your company’s Diversity & Inclusion policy 

What drives candidates away?

There’s nothing worse than finding ‘the one’, but losing out on them. We’ve deep dived into the ways that you can avoid this happening. The most important areas to target if you want to avoid candidates withdrawing are:

1. Your Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
2. Your company’s Diversity and Inclusion policy 
3. A clear understanding of the role on both sides 

How valued is compensation and benefits?

You might be wondering where Compensation and Benefits are on the list for withdrawn candidates, and so were we. This finding surprised us, since Compensation and Benefits was found to have a relatively low impact on cNPS. Candidates are increasingly led to value-driven employers and willing to seek out the correct employer.

You can read more about it in the full report.

One thing all candidates care about: Diversity and Inclusion

Whether candidates withdraw, are rejected or hired, our data shows that one thing remains the same…they all care about how a company is committed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Now more than ever, candidates care what ethics and values companies live by, and one of those has to be committing to creating a diverse and inclusive company.

The Full Report

The report also includes tangible recommendations for how you can improve the areas that candidates care about most, subsequently raising your Candidate Experience, as well as a data-led model of how improving these different categories statistically affects your cNPS.

We’ve summarized the main findings in this blog, but if you want to dive deeper into the data, feel free to read the entire Candidate Values Report right here.