Most companies I speak with are decent at guessing what their candidate experience problems might be. A few can identify them clearly—usually Survale clients. But very few know how to prioritize candidate experience problems. That’s where the real gap is.
Let’s walk through a practical, structured way to first uncover and then prioritize what’s actually hurting your hiring process. No guessing. No hunches. Just feedback, data, and action.
Why Candidate Feedback Matters
Candidate experience feedback is the starting point. Without it, you’re working off assumptions. Feedback lets you know what’s wrong instead of just thinking you know.
Options for Gathering Feedback:
1. Periodic Candidate Surveys
Send surveys to past candidates to ask about their job satisfaction and the hiring steps. Be sure to include both rejected and hired candidates. Only surveying those you hired skews your results.
Pros:
- Gives a general sense of candidate experience issues.
- Helps identify parts of the process that need improvement.
Cons:
- Feedback is delayed. Candidates forget details quickly.
- Surveys can get long, which hurts completion rates.
- Manual surveys are hard to maintain.
2. CandE Award Program
This is an annual benchmarking program that gives you expert insight and peer comparisons. Survale powers the survey platform for this program.
Pros:
- Gives you a wide view of your process compared to other companies.
- Offers insights and tools to dig deeper.
- Great for employer branding.
Cons:
- Data is collected after candidates finish the process.
- Survey length may reduce accuracy.
- Not tied directly to ATS data, limiting detail by job, region, or hiring team.
3. Real-Time Candidate Feedback Platform
Systems like Survale collect feedback in real time as candidates move through each step of the hiring process. It’s tied to ATS events like application, screening, interview, and offer.
Pros:
- Feedback is instant, while the experience is fresh.
- Fewer survey questions needed.
- Feedback linked to job, manager, recruiter, region, etc.
- Helps fix problems quickly.
- More accurate Net Promoter Scores (NPS) at each stage.
Cons:
- Higher up-front cost than one-off surveys.
- Takes some time to set up.
How to Prioritize Candidate Experience Problems
Once you’ve gathered enough data—especially NPS candidate experience scores and comments—you can start to prioritize what needs fixing.
The Four-Box Matrix Method
Here’s how it works:
- Plot satisfaction scores on the horizontal axis.
- Plot impact (number of responses or volume) on the vertical axis.
Now you have four zones:
- Top right: High impact + low satisfaction → Fix this first.
- Bottom right: Low impact + low satisfaction → Keep an eye on it.
- Top left: High impact + high satisfaction → Doing well, reinforce it.
- Bottom left: Low impact + high satisfaction → Least urgent.
This gives you a fast way to spot critical problems and which feedback to act on first.
Example: Hiring Manager Feedback on Interviews
Let’s say your average interview satisfaction score is 8.3. That’s solid. But when you break it down by hiring manager, you see one—Luke—is scoring poorly and handling many interviews. That drags the whole process down. Meanwhile, another manager—Jeffrey—also scores low but interviews only a few people, so the impact is smaller.
Luke’s issue becomes a priority. This feedback helps you spot exactly where to focus training or support.
Candidate Experience Problems You Can Prioritize
Using the matrix, you can go beyond just interviews. Here are a few more examples:
- Interview experience by hiring manager, job family, or region.
- Career site experience by job applied for, location, or device used.
- Offer satisfaction by recruiter, department, or compensation level.
- Onboarding experience by location, team, or manager.
- Hiring manager satisfaction with recruiter support or time to fill.
This lets you see the root causes, not just the symptoms.
Why Real-Time Feedback Works Best
When feedback is tied to ATS stages—like “interview complete” or “offer sent”—you get better timing and stronger data. You can use this to:
- Prioritize feedback from the most important hiring steps.
- Identify patterns by job or recruiter.
- Fix small issues before they hurt your brand.
Survale does this automatically. When a recruiter updates a candidate’s status, the system triggers a short feedback survey. No extra work needed. That’s how you optimize candidate experience.
Common Causes of a Poor Candidate Experience
When you start reviewing feedback, these problems show up again and again:
- Poor communication or long gaps.
- Confusing application forms.
- Inconsistent interview formats.
- Job descriptions that don’t match the actual role.
- Delays in offers or onboarding.
By mapping these against candidate satisfaction and impact, you can fix what matters most, first.
FAQs
What are the effects of candidate experience?
Good candidate experience increases job acceptance, referrals, and brand loyalty. Poor experience leads to negative reviews, lower engagement, and lost talent.
What is the biggest problem in recruitment?
Lack of communication. Candidates often don’t hear back, feel ignored, or are left guessing about next steps.
How does a candidate deal with difficult problems?
Strong candidates stay calm, ask for clarity, and solve problems logically. That’s why it’s important interviews allow them to demonstrate this.
What are the best questions for a candidate experience survey?
- Was the job description clear?
- Were you kept informed?
- How would you rate the interview process?
- Would you apply here again?
- What would you change?
Final Thoughts
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. And guessing won’t cut it. Real candidate feedback—especially when gathered in real time—gives you the power to prioritize the right experience problems.
With tools like Survale, you’re not just reacting. You’re getting ahead. Fixing what matters most. And building a better hiring process that treats every candidate with respect.
