Candidate experience statistics 2024

Candidate experience is a crucial factor when it comes to attracting the best staff.

And the facts and figures behind it show just how much of an impact it has on businesses.

Here you’ll find all of the most revealing and significant candidate experience statistics from across the hiring world in 2021 – 2022.

Key statistics
How candidate experience impacts businesses
Job search
Job application
Communication and feedback
Job interviews
Onboarding process

Key candidate experience statistics

A positive candidate experience makes a candidate 38% more likely to accept a job offer from a company.
50% of candidates will not purchase goods or services from a company after a bad job application experience.
More than half of job seekers will not apply to a company after reading negative employer reviews about them.
60% of job seekers have abandoned a job application due to its length and complexity.
52% of candidates have to wait 3 months or longer to receive a response from a job application.
8 in 10 candidates would be discouraged from applying for a role with a company, if they had failed to feedback on a previous application.
A quarter of job seekers have experienced lateness from hiring managers when attending an interview.
One in ten candidates have left an employer within the first month due to a bad onboarding experience.

How candidate experience impacts business

Although every aspect of candidate experience matters, the most important factor to identify is how candidate experience is impacting employers. Is candidate experience just a catchy new buzz-phrase, or does it greatly impact a company’s talent, time and finances?

A positive candidate experience makes a candidate 38% more likely to accept a job offer from a company.
Providing a poor candidate experience to 10 job seekers will mean that 7 of them will never want to work with your company again.
72% of candidates who have a bad experience with an employer will tell friends, colleagues and family about it.
8 in 10 candidates will share a positive experience with their work network and 50% will post a positive mention on a professional networking site like LinkedIn or Glassdoor.
Negative reviews on Glassdoor will discourage more than half of candidates from applying to a company.

Non-recruitment business impacts

Candidate experience doesn’t just affect your talent pool and recruitment costs – it also influences consumer behaviour towards your business.

Virgin Media estimate that bad candidate experience was once costing them £4.4 million per year (through badly treated candidates cancelling subscriptions)
60% of job seekers say that a bad candidate experience would make them less likely to purchase products from the employer.
50% of candidates will not purchase goods or services from a company after a bad job application experience.

Job search

Job search is the opening step of the candidate experience, and the first chance job seekers have to interact with an employer’s brand and start to build a perception of them. At this point, candidates are discovering employers and vacancies – but how are they doing so, and are businesses connecting with suitable people effectively? From finding job adverts online, to seeing recruitment postings on LinkedIn and attending careers fairs, what are candidates experiencing during their job search?

Seeing the term “competitive” in the salary description stops more than half of job seekers applying for the job.
1 in 10 job seekers have discovered a vacancy after seeing a post from the employer’s recruitment team on LinkedIn.
82% consider employer brand (an organisation’s reputation as an employer) before applying for a job.
Job seekers use multiple resources to research companies, prior to deciding to apply for them – including Company website (31%), employer review sites (28%), and insight from current/former employees (23%)
88% of job seekers are concerned about the lack of jobs in their field.
Job seekers seek the following key pieces of information when viewing job postings: salary, location, commute time, benefits, employee reviews.
43% of job candidates feel that job adverts do not contain enough information about the role.
50 million candidates use Glassdoor every month to research employers and assess their reputation.
86% of active job seekers start their job search via a smart phone.
60% of candidates spend at least 1 hour on research and preparation before starting an online application process.
Despite the plethora of new job search technology available, job websites are still the most popular method of finding vacancies for job seekers – with Indeed being the most widely used in the USA and UK.
55% of job seekers will not apply to a company after reading negative reviews about them on Glassdoor.
53% of job seekers say discovering evidence that a prospective employer would offer poor or less work-life balance would immediately dissuade them from applying to that company.

How businesses are impacted | Job search

Employers who fail to be easily discoverable by job seekers, maintain a strong employer brand, and advertise their vacancies effectively are missing out on good candidates and wasting recruitment budget – with poorly written job adverts alone reducing application numbers by 52%.

The current findings tell us that despite the incentives to provide a strong candidate experience at the “awareness” stage of the journey, many employers still aren’t doing enough.

Job application

The speed and ease with which candidates can apply for jobs plays a huge part in their perception of an employer’s brand. In addition to boosting reputation, a slick job application process will also increase the amount of candidates who are willing and able to apply for a company’s vacancies.

So, are candidates finding the job application process a doddle or a disaster?

Having a lengthy application process (consisting of multiple pages and asking for information already submitted in CV) will mean that only 4 in 10 applicants will complete it.
60% of job seekers have abandoned a job application due to its length and complexity.
The majority of job seekers (48%) would rather apply for a job via submitting their CV to an online system, 35% would prefer to email a hiring manager directly and only 9% would prefer to apply via an online application form.
More than half of job seekers expect to be able to apply for a job via mobile.
19% of candidates will not apply for a role if they discover it is being advertised through an agency.
The things candidates appreciate most in a job application are; speed and simplicity
The most annoying thing in a job application process for job seekers is being asked for the same information twice in one process.
43% of candidates spend 30 minutes or more on an average online application, and 10% invest an hour or more

How businesses are impacted | Job application

With candidates preferring a smooth and swift job application process, it’s easy to see how many employers are falling short in this category. Companies who are forcing candidates to fill out long and complex application forms in an attempt to weed out unsuitable applicants, could actually be reducing their talent pool by as much as 60%.

However, forward-thinking companies who are making it easy to apply for roles and providing options to apply via mobile will be maximising their return on recruitment budget.

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Communication and feedback

It’s no secret that lack of feedback from job applications have been job seekers biggest cause of frustration for many years. But does this situation remain the same, or are employers making more of an effort to communicate with candidates and keep them updated with application progress?

52% of candidates have to wait 3 months or longer to receive a response from a job application.
63% of candidates are unhappy with the lack of communication they receive from employers after applying for a job.
Over half of job seekers say that employers never keep them updated with the progress of their applications.
Only 25% of employers ask candidates for feedback on their experience via candidate surveys.
A quarter of candidates say that the hiring process takes too long.
78% candidates always receive feedback once they reach interview stage.
Only 5% of job seekers do not receive any feedback after a face-to-face interview.
At application stage most candidates prefer to receive feedback via email – at interview stage candidates would rather hear feedback via a phone call
8 in 10 candidates would be discouraged from applying for a role with a company, if they had failed to feedback on a previous application.

How businesses are impacted | Communication and feedback

Communication and feedback are the glue that hold candidates and employers together during a job application. Companies who provide regular updates will not only retain more candidates for their applications, but job seekers will be 4 times more likely to apply to them again (if unsuccessful with the initial vacancy). Companies who fail to feedback to candidates are losing out on talent and damaging their employer brand in the process.

Job interview

The interview is the final hurdle for job seekers and the penultimate stage of the candidate experience, so it’s vital that employers get it right. Here’s what job seekers are making of today’s interview process.

46% of candidates believe that their time is not respected by employers during interviews.
Most candidates feel that 2 stages of interview is acceptable for a vacancy – 64% of candidates believe having 3 or more stages is unnecessary.
37% of job seekers feel intimidated when there are 2 or more interviewers present at an interview.
A quarter of job seekers have experienced lateness from hiring managers when attending an interview.
83% of candidates say a negative interview experience can cause them to reject a role or company they once liked, while 87% say a positive interview experience can attract them to a role or company they once doubted.
3 in 5 candidates would be discouraged from applying to a company if their Glassdoor account showed negative interview reviews.

How businesses are impacted | Job interview

Employers who respect the importance of candidate’s time are winning at candidate experience, with most job seekers citing time-wasting as a bug-bear at interview stage. Companies who don’t value candidate time are pushing candidates away and reducing their chances of offers being accepted.

Onboarding

The integration of new-starters into a business is the final stage of the candidate experience, as job seekers become team members. Here employees need to be assimilated quickly and efficiently, and made to feel welcome.

69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experienced a positive onboarding process.
Glassdoor research showed that an effective onboarding process can increase employee retention by 82%.
87% of businesses find assigning a mentor or a buddy during the onboarding process helps to improve employee retention.
One in ten candidates have left an employer within the first month due to a bad onboarding experience.
Candidates who receive a good onboarding experience are 3 times more likely to recommend their new employer to others.

How businesses are impacted | Onboarding

Although onboarding can often be overlooked in the candidate experience, it’s effects on employee retention and candidate attraction are pivotal. Simply put, employers who invest in their onboarding process will see employees stay longer and refer more often.

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