Candidate Experience Is Broken: And Most Companies Don’t Even Know It or Care
Earlier this year, while exploring the market myself, I’ve had a front-row seat to something many Talent leaders already suspect, but too few executives truly understand:
Candidate experience is not in a poor state. It is in a horrible state. Not “some room for improvement.”Not “a few process gaps.”Not “we’re a bit busy right now.”
BROKEN!
And the most dangerous part? Many organisations are completely blind or ignorant of it.
To be fair, I’ve worked in Talent long enough to know none of us are perfect. I’ve had moments in my own career where candidate experience could have been better. But being on the receiving end again has reinforced just how powerful and damaging these moments can be.
The experiences from my journey
From the applications I submitted for senior leadership roles:
- SME companies: responded within 72 hours, they made a call and had a conversation.
- Enterprise companies: For 26.5% of applications, the first communication came more than three weeks after the application. The remaining 73.5% never responded at all, not even a rejection email.
- Many required lengthy, clunky application processes that took significant time to complete
- Some processes felt entirely automated, impersonal, and disconnected from the seniority of the role
This wasn’t graduate recruitment. This wasn’t high-volume entry-level hiring. These were leadership roles. So if this is the experience for experienced executives, imagine what your broader talent market is dealing with.
Candidate Experience Is A Mirror
Many companies think candidate experience is about being polite. It’s not. It is a mirror held up to your organisation. It reflects:
- How you make decisions
- How you respect people’s time
- How aligned leaders really are
- How modern your systems are
- Whether Talent has influence or is just admin
- Whether your brand promise matches reality
The recruitment process tells candidates what working with you will feel like, and many companies are telling on themselves.
Every Candidate Touchpoint Is A Commercial Touchpoint
Many organisations still treat recruitment communication as administration. It is not. It is:
- Brand
- Reputation
- Market positioning
- Trust
- Future revenue influence
All candidates matter. But senior candidates often bring additional leverage:
- Future customers
- Referral sources
- Industry advocates
- Board-level networks
- Potential future hires
- Market voices with reach
Yet many are met with:
- Silence
- Delayed templated emails
- “Dear Candidate” responses
- Generic rejection copy
- No timelines
- No ownership
- No accountability
That is not neutral. That creates negative market sentiment.
That Experience That Stood Out.
A company branding itself as progressive and forward-thinking was recruiting a Chief Talent Officer, a role that should signal they understand the strategic importance of talent. Based on the advert, I have 90% of the requirements. I lacked the Accounting Offshore industry experience.
- Email enquire to the recruiter, no response!
- Four weeks after the application, I got an email.
- That first communication was a rejection.
- It began with “Dear Candidate” (Don't get me started)
- The reason was not only generic, but it also gave me three reasons to choose from. If the reason included "or" we have an issue!
- No sense of relationship value.
The irony is impossible to miss. If you are hiring a Chief Talent Officer, you have likely recognised something in your talent model that needs fixing. The hiring process itself demonstrated exactly why the role probably exists.
For any company, it would raise a bigger question: Where was the executive leadership oversight?
Candidate Experience Is Not About Being “Nice”
This is where many leaders get it wrong. Candidate experience is not about hand-holding. It is about:
- Operational excellence
- Respect for time
- Process maturity
- Commercial discipline
- Leadership standards
- Brand consistency
- Human decency
Poor candidate experience often signals deeper internal problems:
- Slow decision making
- Weak leadership alignment
- Lack of ownership
- Hiring manager indifference
- Outdated systems
- Underpowered Talent teams
- Low empathy cultures
Candidates notice, the talk and some include their experience in blogs.
The Cost Of Getting It Wrong
Poor candidate experience is not a soft issue. It creates hard costs.
- Lost Talent - Strong candidates withdraw quietly.
- Lower Offer Acceptance - If the process feels chaotic, candidates assume the company is too.
- Employer Brand Damage - People share poor experiences privately and publicly.
- Revenue Impact- Today’s rejected candidate may be tomorrow’s client.
- Vacancy Cost - Roles stay open longer while inefficient processes drag on.
- Leadership Credibility - Companies say people matter, then prove otherwise in hiring.
What Good Looks Like
This is not hard. At minimum:
- Acknowledge applications quickly
- Set realistic timelines
- Communicate proactively
- Reject promptly once decisions are made
- Personalise where seniority warrants it
- Hold hiring leaders accountable
- Measure candidate NPS and SLA response times
- Treat every candidate as a stakeholder
For executive hiring:
- White-glove communication
- Senior ownership
- Fast decisions
- Respectful closure
- Honest feedback where possible
- Relationship mindset, not transaction mindset
4 Questions For Executive Teams and Boards
If your customers experienced your recruitment process the same way candidates do… would you tolerate it?
If investors experienced it… would you tolerate it?
If your best employees were treated this way internally… would you tolerate it?
Then why is it acceptable in hiring?
Talent Acquisition should not be an inbox management function. It should be a growth engine, and candidate experience is one of the clearest external signals of whether your organisation is modern, disciplined and people-centred; or slow, fragmented and asleep.
Right now, too many companies are failing that test, and worse still, many don’t even know it or just ignore it.