Hiring playbook for candidate experience: How to improve at scale

To find out how to improve candidate experience using Recruitment Automation, we have a great eBook on candidate experience.

TL;DR summary

• Candidate experience is how candidates feel about your organisation during the recruitment process, from first touch to hiring decisions and onboarding.
• In high-volume hiring, poor experiences create drop-off, harm employer brand, and can hit revenue when candidates are also customers.
• A practical hiring playbook starts with clarity: set expectations, keep the process consistent, and respect candidates time at every step.
• High-volume, lower-skill roles need simpler flows, faster responses, and feedback that helps candidates feel seen.
• Technology now makes it easier for the hiring team to deliver a fair, human experience at scale without adding workload.
• The goal is a process that helps hiring managers move faster, protects brand trust, and supports long term success.

Candidate experience strategies: How to improve, hiring playbook

Hiring with heart is good for business, and the last few years made that impossible to ignore. In disrupted markets, candidates apply more broadly, wait less patiently, and remember how they were treated. That makes candidate experience a practical priority, not a nice-to-have. Companies with a strong culture and a focus on diversity create a more inclusive and engaging candidate experience, which helps attract a wider range of talent and fosters better engagement from the start.

If there was ever a time for our profession to show humanity for job seekers, that time is now. When competition for roles increases, the recruitment process becomes one of the clearest signals of who you are as an employer. Businesses with structured hiring processes report higher retention and better culture alignment, supporting long-term growth and professional development.

What candidate experience actually means

Candidate experience is the perception a job seeker forms about your organisation based on interactions across the hiring process. Employers play a key role in shaping candidate experience by defining clear criteria and expectations for each role, which helps set the standard for every stage of the process. A clear job description reduces early-stage mismatches and prevents churn.

It also overlaps with brand more than many teams expect. The same person can be a customer today, a candidate tomorrow, and a customer again next week. Their experience does not reset between those moments.

Why candidate experience matters more when volumes spike

With more candidates in the market, the experience of your recruiting process matters more, not less. During high-volume hiring projects, the capacity of internal recruitment teams can be stretched, making it essential to streamline processes to maintain a positive candidate experience. Are candidates respected, regardless of whether they got the job? Is their effort acknowledged? Do they leave with clarity?

This is where an improved candidate experience strategy earns its place. Not because it sounds good, but because it protects outcomes you already care about: conversion through the funnel, offer acceptance, and retention after onboarding.

Here are two big reasons to prioritise candidate experience.

Flexibility in working arrangements is now a baseline expectation for candidates.

1. The stakes are higher for candidates and for your organisation

When candidate supply outstrips demand, organisations can get swamped with candidate applications. That sounds like a good problem, but it often creates messy shortlists, inconsistent reviews, and slower hiring decisions. The result is that top talent drops out while waiting, and your hiring managers lose confidence in the process. One major challenge organisations face is maintaining a positive candidate experience during high-volume hiring, as the sheer volume can make it difficult to provide timely and meaningful interactions.

High-volume recruiting is further aggravated when two dynamics show up at the same time.

More than 64% of candidates choose values alignment over salary when considering job offers, making it essential for organisations to clearly communicate their culture and values throughout the hiring process.

To stay competitive, organisations must also prepare for future workforce changes and shifts in candidate expectations, ensuring their hiring playbook remains effective as the talent landscape evolves.

When the role has a lower barrier to entry

In many organisations, the traditional high-volume low-skill role has become excruciatingly high-volume. Retail assistants, customer service staff, and contact centre roles often attract large numbers of applicants with varied backgrounds and transferable skills. To attract the right candidates, it is crucial to focus job descriptions on meaningful tasks that highlight specific, outcome-oriented responsibilities rather than generic duties. Additionally, identifying and addressing skills and knowledge gaps can help candidates better match market demand and improve their employability.

That is exactly why CVs struggle here. They rarely help you compare candidates fairly, and they don’t show how someone communicates, learns, or handles real scenarios. When your hiring team is under pressure, screening becomes inconsistent and candidates experience silence or generic rejection.

When your organisation is a consumer brand

Candidates often apply to brands they already love. That’s a huge advantage, until the recruitment experience breaks trust.

If 98% of candidates are rejected, the question becomes: how do you keep people as fans of your brand after they have invested effort and received no closure? This is as much marketing as it is recruitment. A poor candidate experience can create a long tail of reputational damage that costs companies significant money in lost customers and brand value. Encourage candidates to sign up for updates or feedback to stay engaged with your brand, even if they are not selected.

For a first-hand case study, read about Sapia.ai’s work with consumer chain Joe and the Juice.

Candidates are people first

Candidate experience and customer experience are not identical, but they share the same foundation: how a person feels when interacting with your brand. If your organisation invests heavily in customer experience, it makes sense to bring that same care to the hiring process.

Organisations can partner with candidates and employees to create a more positive and engaging experience throughout the hiring journey. Additionally, facilitating knowledge transfer and supporting skills mobility within the organisation helps ensure expertise is retained and employees can adapt to new roles, strengthening both retention and overall workforce capability.

It is increasingly recognised that negative candidate experiences can affect customer loyalty and referrals. For organisations hiring at scale, that is a business risk worth managing.

2. Candidate experience improvements are now easier to implement

For years, candidate experience was stuck in the “too hard” basket. Teams would try to define a strategy, agree metrics, get budget approval, then struggle to execute across tools and stakeholders.

That has changed. Today, improving candidate experience is more achievable because the right tools can remove admin load while also improving access, consistency, and communication. Preparing hiring strategies to adapt to changing market demands is now essential for staying competitive in a shifting talent landscape. Using research and data-driven insights to inform onboarding and candidate experience improvements leads to better employee loyalty, engagement, and retention. Onboarding should be treated as a long-term strategy rather than a short-term task to improve retention.

The best shift you can make is to stop treating candidate experience as an extra programme. Make it a design principle that runs through your hiring playbook.

A practical hiring playbook to improve candidate experience

A hiring playbook is simply a shared set of decisions, templates, and behaviours that help your hiring team deliver consistent outcomes. By providing clear guidelines and best practices, a hiring playbook helps organisations achieve excellence in recruitment by maintaining high standards throughout the process. It also brings focus to the hiring process, ensuring that key elements such as interviewer quality and measurement tools are prioritised for continuous improvement. In candidate experience terms, it keeps every stage simple, clear, and respectful. The AlbionVC Hiring Playbook is a digital tool designed to help founders of early-stage technology companies navigate the hiring process.

Step 1: Set expectations early

Candidates are more likely to complete and stay engaged when they understand:

• what happens next in the hiring process
• how long each step usually takes
• how interviews are structured
• when they will hear back

Defining clear expectations and criteria for candidates at the outset is crucial. This ensures everyone involved knows what is required and helps guide candidates through the process effectively.

This is one of the simplest ways to respect candidates time, and it reduces inbound chasing from candidates.

Step 2: Make the first step meaningful

When candidates apply and hear nothing, the process feels broken. The first step should create momentum and show your organisation is organised.

For high-volume roles, interview-first screening can help because it gives every candidate the same start and produces comparable information quickly. This approach also allows you to assess how candidates might perform in real scenarios relevant to the job. The point is not to remove humans, but to give hiring managers better evidence earlier.

Step 3: Keep communication predictable

Silence is the fastest way to damage candidate experience. Use consistent updates at key moments:

• confirmation that the application was received
• confirmation when an interview is complete
• clear next-step messaging
• a decision message that closes the loop

Step 4: Build in feedback and closure

Even brief feedback can change how candidates feel about your organisation. It turns “rejection” into “learning” and protects employer brand.

This matters even more for consumer brands, where candidates may become customers again.

Step 5: Connect candidate experience to retention and onboarding

Candidate experience does not end at the offer. The period between offer acceptance and day one is where doubt, drop-off, and reneges happen.

A simple onboarding plan, clear comms, and early connection with the team improves confidence and supports retention. Effective onboarding enables new hires to contribute meaningfully from day one, which helps reduce churn and elevate company culture. Leaders play a crucial role in supporting onboarding and retention by guiding new team members and fostering an environment where everyone can thrive. In fact, a well-executed onboarding process is the single biggest predictor of whether a new hire will stay long-term. Employers that articulate clear growth frameworks are more likely to retain talent over time. High-performing teams tend to win herebecause they treat onboarding as part of the same experience, not a separate handoff.

Candidate Experience Playbook: Hire with Heart

The good news is that for those organisations who genuinely want to improve candidate experience, it has become much easier to do so. Finally, it is possible to give great experiences at scale while also driving down costs and improving efficiencies.

Win-win is easily attainable. In the Sapia Candidate Experience Playbook, read how organisations are hiring with heart. All by creating positive experiences for candidates while also decreasing the workload for the hiring team.

Conclusion

Candidate experience is not a side project. It is a core part of how your organisation attracts talent, protects employer brand, and makes hiring decisions with confidence.

A simple hiring playbook built on clarity, consistency, and respect helps you improve candidate experience even when volume is high. If you want to see how recruitment automation can support that goal, explore the Candidate Experience eBook or book a Sapia.ai demo.

About Author

Laura Belfield

Head of Marketing