I’ve talked a lot about candidate resentment over the years – the percentage of candidates who applied for a job but had a poor candidate experience and who aren’t willing to engage that business and brand again. That could mean never applying for another job again, never referring anyone to that company, never being a paying customer, and/or never being a brand advocate.
You can use our updated candidate resentment calculator that will calculate the potential negative revenue impact on your business based on your current hiring volume, customer value, and resentment rate. Even if you’re not a consumer-based organization, it’s still a valuable tool to use and understand the potential financial impact.
For example, when you use the calculator and plug in the following numbers (see image below), including the current North America resentment rate of 15%, the total potential lost revenue is over $74 million dollars.
That’s a lot of operating cash loss that could be mitigated by making timely communication, feedback, and process improvements across the candidate journey. Candidate resentment has been stubbornly high the past two years; it’s not the candidate market it was, and for professional and management level positions, it’s been an especially painful job market of late.
It’s true that not everyone will put their money where their mouth is as the expression goes, but the potential impact is real.
But I’m also the “glass half full” kind of guy, and the other side of the resentment percentage is candidate contentment – the percentage of candidates willing to increase their relationship with a business and a brand because they felt their candidate experience was positive and fair. Not just because they were hired, which ultimately are the only happy customers in this equation (besides the hiring employer). In our CandE Benchmark Research, only 10% of the candidates are hired on average, which means 90% are not. That’s also the real world, too.
And even in this slowed hiring market, candidate contentment is up to 28% in North America this year so far (we’re still collecting data for the 2025 benchmark year). That’s a nice offset when compared to the current 15% candidate resentment, which is still a financial impact. And, if your organization has higher candidate resentment than contentment, all bets are off.
We’ve worked with over 2,000 companies in the past 13+ years helping them benchmark their candidate experience, understand their recruiting strengths and weaknesses, and make recommendations on where and how to make improvements.
But after organizations make these process improvements, what else have they done to mitigate candidate resentment, and potentially increase brand advocacy and even revenue? Over the years we’ve seen various examples, but they’ve also been few and far between.
One example that I like to go back to again and again is one from Kimberly-Clark. They completed a case study for us back in 2018 when they won a CandE Award (the awards we give away to companies with above-average candidate ratings). Kimberly-Clark Corporation is a global consumer goods corporation with some of the most recognized brands in the world – Huggies, Kleenex, Scott, Cottonelle and Kotex.
According to our CandE Case Study from back then, nearly one in four people globally used their products every day at the time. It was essential that they had a candidate-centric experience, as their candidates were/are consumers of our products.
They built support and commitment from the top down with business leaders. Two of their sponsors were presidents of our largest business unit who are accountable for about $6B in revenue at the time. They tied the candidate experience back to business results because they interacted with over 200,000 candidates a year at that time and all of them were/are potential customers. They made it simple and explained:
- If we provide a good experience we can increase revenue.
- If we provide a bad experience we could lose revenue.
- We also pointed out the other implications of providing a poor experience—including the percentage of people that will tell a friend, talk negatively about us on social media and stop buying our products.
They worked with our finance team to understand the buying power of a customer. During the lifetime of a consumer, they can spend $30,000 on all of their products. Below are the stats/data that they shared with their stakeholders:
And that’s exactly what they did – they made their candidate experience improvements and gave product coupons to rejected candidates. That in turn generated a lot of revenue from their candidates that wasn’t expected because they were rejected candidates.
For companies that aren’t consumer-based, we’ve heard many examples over the years of giving candidates career advice and job-seeker resources.
For example, at many of their career events, Northwell Health Career Services offers guidance on career paths, resume writing tips, and step-by-step instruction on how to complete their job application, easing the way for candidates to apply. They also have multi-lingual translation services leveraging iPads available for all their events, and bilingual informational flyers in Spanish. As part of their communities at work program, they provide workshops at local churches, libraries, and community centers, sharing information on resume writing, interview tips, and how to build one’s personal brand. You can read the rest of their 2024 case study here.
Whether giving product coupons to rejected candidates or other “thank you” gifts, or offering career advice and resources, giving back to your candidates – most whom you say “no” to after they’ve applied no matter how far in the recruiting process they get – can pay off with increased revenue and brand advocacy.
This being above and beyond any candidate journey process improvements and communication and feedback improvements, all of which we recommend in our CandE Benchmark Research Reports every year (the 2025 research will be available at the end of this year with a new set of case studies). All of these things make up the ROI of improving candidate experience, one we recommend you invest in today.
