I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – It’s rough out there. Going back 25 years and spanning the Dot-com crash, the mortgage crisis and the Great Recession, and the pandemic, this is undeniably the worst candidate market in recent memory. There may be some resilient economic indicators, but over 1 million people were laid off in 2025, layoffs continue in 2026, and economic uncertainty keeps businesses up at night. At the same time, application volumes have skyrocketed for employers that are hiring. From our CandE Benchmark Research we found that midsized to global enterprises saw a 31% increase in job postings receiving 51+ applications, and a 62% increase in postings receiving 200+ applications.
You’d think that with this deluge of people looking for work, and those employed thinking of looking for work when hiring opportunities increase because they’re unhappy, employers would be hyper-focused on understanding the feedback, behaviors, and sentiments of the people interacting with their business and their brand. Whether it be applying for jobs and working at their organization.
Unfortunately, in uncertain economic times, or when candidates are abundant, companies often do the exact opposite: they reduce, avoid, or restrict candidate and employee feedback mechanisms. This hesitancy is largely driven by fear of hearing negative feedback they cannot afford to fix, potential legal risks, and the desire to control the narrative.
No one likes to hear their candidate and/or employee experiences suck. Here are reasons why employers don’t ask for candidate and/or employee feedback:
- Avoiding Negative Information: Companies often fear surveying during downturns because they are not prepared to act on negative feedback.
- Legal and Safety Concerns: In tough markets, employers may ghost candidates or provide vague feedback to avoid legal liability or manage how rejections are received.
- Survey Fatigue & Skepticism: Many organizations find that massive, infrequent surveys create too much data to analyze, leading to skepticism when no action is taken, which can worsen morale.
- Focus on Control: Leadership may prefer, or be advised, to keep feedback channels closed to maintain control, rather than inviting open criticism during unstable periods.
- Technology Improvements: Implementing new systems (ATS, CRM, etc.) creates a blind spot that, when implemented, the belief is most of the poor candidate experiences will be improved. While it may fix some issues, there are usually systemic communication and feedback issues that will still need to be addressed.
And even when employers do ask their candidates and employees for experience feedback, it’s done internally with fewer probing questions and without the ability to compare against other companies by size, industry, and other categories.
That’s benchmarking, and here’s the value:
1. Establishes a Performance Baseline
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Benchmarking helps you:
- Understand your current experience performance
- Identify strengths and breakdowns across the candidate and employee journeys
- Compare across teams, regions, roles, or time periods
- Set realistic, data-driven improvement targets
Without benchmarks, experience efforts are subjective. With them, they’re measurable and accountable.
2. Connects Experience to Business Outcomes
Strong candidate and employee experiences are directly linked to:
Talent Acquisition Outcomes
- Higher offer acceptance rates
- Faster time-to-fill
- Reduced candidate drop-off
- Improved employer brand reputation
- Increased referral rates
Employee Outcomes
- Higher engagement
- Lower turnover
- Stronger internal mobility
- Improved productivity
- Better customer experience
- Increased referral rates
Benchmarking allows you to show strong relationships between experience metrics (e.g., satisfaction, fairness, communication quality) and hard business metrics.
That’s where experience shifts from “HR initiative” to “business strategy.”
3. Identifies Competitive Positioning
External benchmarking answers:
- Are we ahead, average, or behind peers?
- Where do we differentiate?
- Where are we at risk?
If competitors deliver a faster, more transparent hiring process, you may be losing potential hires silently. If your onboarding experience lags the market, retention risk increases.
Benchmarking reveals blind spots you can’t see internally.
4. Prioritizes Investment and Resources
Not all experience gaps matter equally. Benchmarking helps you:
- Identify high-impact friction points
- Avoid over-investing in low-impact areas
- Focus leadership attention on meaningful drivers
- Allocate budget based on evidence
For example:
If communication during hiring scores far below industry benchmark and strongly predicts acceptance rate, that’s a high-value fix.
5. Improves Credibility with Leadership
Experience programs gain executive traction when they show:
- Comparative performance data
- Movement over time
- ROI linkage
- Risk exposure
Benchmark data turns:
“Candidates feel communication could improve”
Into:
“We rank in the bottom 25% for hiring communication, and that leads to a 12% lower offer acceptance rate.”
That’s actionable and strategic.
6. Drives Continuous Improvement Culture
Benchmarking:
- Creates performance transparency
- Encourages accountability across managers and recruiters
- Normalizes feedback loops
- Supports agile iteration
It shifts experience from a one-time survey to an ongoing performance discipline.
7. Reduces Risk
Poor experiences create:
- Negative employer brand impact (Glassdoor, social media)
- Compliance risk (perceived bias, unfairness)
- Talent leakage to competitors
- Disengagement and turnover costs
Benchmarking highlights early warning signs before they become reputation or financial problems.
That’s why skipping surveys and forgoing benchmarking during tough times is a massive mistake. Understanding candidate and employee behavior continuously year after year is vital for survival during economic downturns, and the data proves it.
For example, when companies shut down feedback loops and communication, candidate resentment—the percentage of candidates who said they had a poor candidate experience and won’t apply again, refer others, be brand advocates, or be customers—skyrockets. In 2025, candidate resentment was the highest it has ever been in the 14 years of our CandE Benchmark Research.
This resentment adds up fast. Let’s look at the Consumer Goods industry, which had a 20% resentment rate in North America in 2025. If you have 10,000 annual hires, an average of 100 applicants per hire, and an estimated $400 annual customer value, a 20% candidate resentment rate translates to a potential total revenue loss of over $79 million.
Yes, over $79 million dollars. That’s just one of many examples in our research. The sheer number of candidates employers reject during the recruiting process can quickly impact the business and the brand in very negative ways.
Sustaining a quality candidate and employee experience over time is the hard part, especially with leaner recruiting teams and under-utilized technologies fighting an uphill battle against untenable application volumes. But ignoring candidate and employee experiences and feedback and shutting down communication channels only guarantees alienated people, lost referrals, and potentially lost revenue.
Your talent acquisition and talent management teams control the dials of how and when they communicate with job candidates and employees. If you want to improve your candidate and employee experiences, reduce overall negative sentiment, and survive this forever uncertainty, you must turn those dials to being highly responsive.
That’s where benchmarking pays off – for both candidate experience and employee experience – understanding how you stack up against other employers big and small across industries. That’s why candidate and employee experience benchmarking should be critical business priorities.
