Candidate experience checklist

A candidate experience checklist is a way of walking through your hiring process the way a candidate actually meets it, from the job listing to the decision, and noting every point where someone might give up. The checklist below is the one we use with frontline employers, and the best way to use it is on your own phone, applying for one of your own roles, ideally somewhere other than your desk.

Most of the questions are simple. The hard part is being honest about the answers, because the people who could tell you what went wrong are the ones who left without saying anything.

Before they apply

Start where the candidate starts, which is almost never your careers site’s home page.

1. Search for one of your roles on Google or Indeed and tap the listing. Does it land on a page about that role, or on a generic jobs list where the candidate has to search again?
2. Time how long that page takes to load on a mid-range phone over mobile data. If you find yourself waiting, so did they.
3. Check whether a candidate can find roles by what they care about: location, shift pattern, hours, whether it suits a student. If the only way to find out is to open every listing, most people will not.
4. Look for the answers to the questions frontline candidates actually ask, such as pay bands, what the interview involves and how soon they could start. If the careers site does not answer them, ask yourself who does, and when.
5. Check the site against WCAG 2.1 AA, or ask your provider to show you that it meets it. A site that some candidates cannot read or navigate is quietly narrowing who applies.

The application

This is where most of the loss happens, so it deserves the most attention.

1. Count the screens between tapping apply and finishing. Then count the questions. Every one should earn its place.
2. Check whether the application asks the same questions for every role. A kitchen porter and a head chef should not be answering the same form.
3. Notice whether you are asked to create an account or log in before you can start. For an hourly role, that step alone loses people.
4. See whether a CV is required. For many frontline roles it is not needed, and a lot of good candidates do not have one ready on their phone.
5. Find out what happens to a half-finished application. If the candidate is interrupted, can they pick it up again, or do they start from scratch?
6. Ask whether you can see, step by step, where people drop out. If you cannot, you are guessing at the fix.

The pattern we see work is an application that adapts to the role and the region, asks the basics once and then only what that job needs, and finishes in a single thread. That is what conversational apply is built to do. When Compass Group rebuilt its application this way, it saw 42% more completed applications.

Questions and answers

Candidates have questions at the times they are looking, which for frontline roles is often evenings and weekends.

1. Try asking a question out of hours. Is there anything on the site that can answer it, and is that answer drawn from your own approved policies rather than guesswork?
2. Check what happens when the answer is not known. A good system says so and offers a route to a person rather than inventing something.
3. Make sure answers about a specific role, such as its shifts or location, come from that role’s live data and not from a page that was last updated a year ago.

The Candidate Agent exists for exactly this: it answers from the knowledge and policies your team approves, finds roles that fit, and hands the conversation to a recruiter when judgment is needed.

After they apply

The experience does not end at the submit button, even if most tools behave as if it does.

1. Check that the finished application lands in your ATS with every answer in the right field, so nobody has to re-key it and nothing is lost.
2. Look at what the candidate hears straight away. A confirmation that says what happens next, and roughly when, is the minimum.
3. Be honest about how many applications are actually read. If the queue is too long for your team to get through, the good candidate whose application landed on your busiest weekend may never be seen.
4. Make sure every candidate hears a decision, including the ones you are not taking forward.

Measuring it

Finally, check that you can answer four questions without a spreadsheet exercise: how many people viewed a role, how many started an application, how many finished it, and which channel brought the people you hired. If those numbers live in different systems, or nowhere, that is the first thing to fix, because without them every other improvement is a matter of opinion.

What to do with the results

You will probably end up with a longer list than you expected. Resist the urge to fix everything at once. Start with the application, because that is usually where most candidates are lost and where a change shows up fastest in the numbers. Then work outwards to answers and follow-up.

If you would like to see how others have tackled the same list, our page on candidates dropping off before they apply sets out the problem and the fix, and there is more on the subject under candidate experience.