Creating a Brilliant Candidate Experience

Do you want to hire outstanding people in 2025? Those that can transform your organisation, compound and enhance your culture, and drive your success? Here’s the secret: you need to attract them. The best way to do that? Give them a brilliant candidate experience.

Most companies are myopic when it comes to hiring. Like selfish children, they focus in on what they want and forget to consider the process from the other side. Because of that, hiring processes are often a nightmare for candidates, which creates an opportunity to really stand out from your competition.

The truth is that even in candidate-rich markets, the very best people will have options. When companies make redundancies, they keep hold of the members of the team they can’t do without – and those people are likely the ones you want. Even if they do enter the open market, there are never enough top performers to go around, so the ones you find will have options. Employers become complacent when demand is low and supply is high, however, and by feeling that they’re in the position of power, allow candidate experience to slip, losing their grasp on the top tier of potential hires. A candidate’s journey through your hiring process is usually the only insight they have into your organisation, and can make all the difference – in fact, Glassdoor’s research indicates that 58% of job seekers are more likely to accept an offer if they’ve had a positive experience through the hiring process. If you want to secure the real talent, your process needs to deliver.

An additional point that’s often missed is that the quality of candidate experience in your hiring process impacts whether people apply to you in the first place, too. The Biotech world is small, and very well connected. Bad news travels fast, and a poorly treated candidate can damage your employer brand and reputation well beyond their own encounter. 72% of candidates who have a negative experience with a potential employer share it online or with someone directly, while 81% will do the same with a positive experience, perhaps indicating how rare the latter is. Even those candidates who don’t get the job need to be treated well if you want to continue to attract great people.

Just like customer experience and employee experience, candidate experience has a fundamental impact on your business. So how do you make it truly brilliant?

The first step is to make your assessment process challenging, but not interrogative. Top candidates want to be challenged, and if they’re not it will reflect poorly in their opinion of an organisation. Making your interview process easy isn’t going to help you, or those you’re trying to hire. At the same time, many interviews feel like an interrogation, with little warmth or connection displayed by those on the hiring side of the table. Finding the balance is key – sufficient difficulty for you to truly assess the candidate’s skills and for them to feel tested, alongside sufficient human connection and amiability for them to see that your company is a place they’d like to work, and that your team is one they’d like to be part of.

One of the best ways you can create that balance is by ensuring that your interviewees have plenty of time to ask questions, learn about your company, role and team, and see what life at the company is like. Candidates are evaluating you as much as you’re evaluating them, so let them have lunch with their future colleagues, get to know their potential line manager, and understand in detail your objectives, challenges and priorities. Put yourself in their shoes – if you were being asked to commit the vast majority of your time to something, and were putting your career in the hands of a company, wouldn’t you want to know a little more than what’s on the website?

It's also difficult to overstate the impact of moving quickly. Momentum is everything, and harnessing a candidate’s natural enthusiasm is crucial to securing their services. According to LinkedIn, 70% of candidates lose interest in a role if the hiring process takes too long, and there’s simple psychology behind that. Changing jobs is a huge, life-changing decision, and humans weigh risk more heavily than potential gain. Moving quickly allows you to build a candidate’s enthusiasm at each stage of the process, while moving slowly allows our natural defensive mechanisms to kick in – when we don’t hear from a company for a while, we begin to convince ourselves that we never really wanted the job in the first place, avoiding the disappointment of being rejected. The same candidate given the same offer after a rapid, interactive hiring process is much more likely to say yes than if they receive it after a long, indifferent one.

Along the way, you should make sure your hiring process is punctuated with encounters with your company’s cheerleaders. In an ideal world, every person on the interview panel would extol the virtues of the organisation, but the reality is that some are better at it than others. If you make sure part of your process involves actually selling the company, its future and the role itself to the candidates you’re meeting, you’ll find they’re leaving you with much more enthusiasm and interest than if you don’t.

Finally, most importantly, give feedback to everybody. Most of the people you meet with won’t get the job – that’s just the nature of hiring. But as mentioned already, we operate in a tight-knit ecosystem, and candidates talk. The person you just interviewed might not be the ideal fit for your open role right now, but their best friend could be. Or in six months, you might have just the right position for them. Building a team or a company is a long-term game, and you should aim to leave everyone with a positive impression along the way.

So, in 2025, consider your candidate experience. Hiring the right people is key to the success of every business – what could you do to make it easier for yourself?