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65 of the best Candidate Experience Quotes

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Background to the ‘thought experiment’ on Candidate Experience

Search for “Candidate Experience” on Google and you will get in the region of 2.3M results. “Wow, that’s a lot!”

Yet do the same search for “Customer Experience” and you will 56x that amount – with a whopping 132,000,000 results delivered to you. Also, have a look at Google Search trends over the past 10 years and, this is what you will see. Overall, there is very little interest in “Candidate Experience” when compared to “Customer Experience”.

The same trend exists in books. Search Amazon for “Customer Experience” and there are over 1000 books written. However, if you do the same search for “Candidate Experience” and theres a pithy 20 books.

To borrow from our recent blog on The Two Big Reasons To Prioritise Improving Candidates’ Experience In 2024: Candidate experience is defined as the perception of a job seeker about an organisation and their brand based on their interactions during the recruiting process. Customer experience is the impression your customers have of your brand as a whole throughout all aspects of the buyer’s journey. Is there a difference?

It’s all about how the human feels when interacting with your brand. Thus, it’s all about the human and candidate experience. 

Let’s take the best famous quotes on “customer experience” and change them to “candidate experience”.

What could we learn from that ‘thought experiment”? We borrowed Blake Morgan’s article in Forbes as a source. Some of these quotes should be read as if your full-time role is in Talent Acquisition.

These could provide a source of inspiration for your next retrospective or “Lessons Learnt” on Candidate Experience.

  • Is there anything we’re doing well when it comes to candidate experience?
  • Can we be doing anything better?
  • What are we not doing that needs to start?
  • Is there anything we’re doing that must be stopped?

Candidate Experience Thinking

“We see our candidates as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the candidate experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” – Warren Buffett

“Candidate experience isn’t an expense. Managing candidate experience bolsters your brand.” – Stan Phelps

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” – Mark Zuckerberg

“Make the candidate the hero of your story.” – Ann Handley

“Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.” – Walt Disney

“If you don’t care, your candidate never will.” – Marlene Blaszczyk

“Loyal candidates, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.” – Chip Bell

“Candidate experience better be at the top of your list when it comes to priorities in your organization. Candidate experience is the new marketing.” – Steve Cannon

“Building a good candidate experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.” – Clare Muscutt

“Exceptional candidate experiences are the only sustainable platform for competitive differentiation.” – Kerry Bodine

candidate experience

Candidate-Focused Culture

“Innovation needs to be part of your culture. Candidates are transforming faster than we are, and if we don’t catch up, we’re in trouble.” – Ian Schafer

“Our attitude towards others determines their attitude towards us.” – Earl Nightingale

“Your mission statement may be on the wall, but your core values are displayed in the attitudes of your employees.” – Elle Clarke

“So, get to know your candidates. Humanize them. Humanize yourself. It’s worth it.” – Kristin Smaby

“Treat each candidate as if they are the only one!” – Laurice Leitao

“The key is to set realistic candidate expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them—preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.” – Richard Branson

“Revolve your world around the candidate and more candidates will revolve around you.” – Heather Williams

“To earn the respect (and eventually love) of your candidates, you first have to respect those candidates.” – Colleen Barrett

“How you think about your candidate influences how you respond to them.” – Marilyn Suttle

“If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand” – Howard Schultz

“You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar

“Ease your candidates’ pain.” – Hazel Edwards

Candidate Service

“Your most unhappy candidates are your greatest source of learning.” – Bill Gates

“Courteous treatment will make a candidate a walking advertisement.” – J.C. Penney

“Good candidate service costs less than bad candidate service.” – Sally Gronow

“Candidate service is an opportunity to exceed your candidate’s expectations.” – John Jantsch

“It is so much easier to be nice, to be respectful, to put yourself in your candidate’s’ shoes and try to understand how you might help them before they ask for help, than it is to try to mend a broken candidate relationship.” – Mark Cuban

“Only once candidate service has become habitual will a company realize its true potential.” — Than Merrill

“Candidates don’t care about your policies. Find and engage the need. Tell the candidate what you can” – Alice Sesay Pope

“Here is a powerful yet simple rule. Always give people more than they expect to get.” – Nelson Boswell

“A lot of people have fancy things to say about candidates service, but it’s just a day-in, day-out, ongoing, never-ending, persevering, compassionate kind of activity.” – Christopher McCormick

“We have entered the era of the candidates. Today, providing candidates with outstanding candidate service is essential to building loyal candidates and a long-lasting brand.” – Jerry Gregoire

“Great candidate service doesn’t mean that the candidate is always right, it means that the candidate is always honoured.” – Chris LoCurto

 

Candidate Focused Marketing

“The first step in exceeding your candidate’s expectations is to know those expectations.” – Roy H. Williams

“Satisfied candidate is the best source of advertisement” – G.S. Alag

“Making candidate evangelists is about creating experiences worth talking about.” – Valeria Maltoni

“No amount of advertising can repair the damage done by failing to properly address a candidate’s concern.” – Albert Schindler

“Candidates who love you will market for you more powerfully than you can possibly market yourself.” – Jeanne Bliss

“If you want to be a good brand and have a value exchange with the candidate… you’ve got to have the listening mechanisms that can catch up to the candidate as well.” – Kelly Soligon

“People don’t just buy your products that they can see; they buy your attitude that they can sense” – Roxanne Emmerich

“Just having satisfied candidates isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create raving fans.” – Ken Blanchard

“Happy candidates are your biggest advocates and can become your most successful sales team.” – Lisa Masiello

Candidate-Focused Leadership

“Service, in short, is not what you do, but who you are. It is a way of living that you need to bring to everything you do, if you are to bring it to your candidate interactions.” – Betsy Sanders

“Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, ‘What’s in it for me?’ – Brian Tracy

“Your candidate doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Damon Richards

“When you serve the candidate better, they always return on your investment.” – Kara Parlin

“People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Teddy Roosevelt

“If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the candidate first, success will be yours.” – Ray Kroc

“Being in a curiosity mindset means being fascinated by your candidates and their reactions.” – Jake Knapp

“Treat the candidate like you would want to be treated. Period!” – Brad Schweig

“Never lose sight of candidates. Always be focusing on meeting their needs and expectations.” – Sue Duris


Candidate Experience Playbook 2024: 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. It is now straightforward to give great experiences at scale while also driving down costs and improving efficiencies.

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


Blog

The AGC Debate: Are AI-Written Interview Answers a Red Flag or Smart Strategy?

Every day, we read stories of increased fake or AI-assisted applications. Tools like LazyApply are just one of many flooding the market, driving up applicant volumes to never-before-seen levels. 

As an overwhelmed hiring function, how do you find the needle in the haystack without using an army of recruiters to filter through the maze?

At Sapia.ai, we help global enterprises do just that. Many of the world’s most trusted brands, such as Qantas Group, have relied on our hiring platform as a co-pilot for better hiring since 2020. 

Our Chat Interview has given millions of candidates a voice they wouldn’t have had – enabling them to share in their own words why they’re the best fit for the role. To find the people who belong with their brands, our customers must trust that their candidates represent themselves. Thus, they want to trust that our AI is analysing real human answers—not answers from a machine.  

The Rise of GPT 

When ChatGPT went viral in November 2022, we immediately adopted a defensive strategy. We had long been flagging plagiarised candidate responses, but then, we needed to act fast to flag responses using artificially generated content (‘AGC’). 

Many companies were in the same position, but Sapia.ai was the only company with a large proprietary data set of interview answers that pre-dated GPT and similar tools: 2.5 billion words written by real humans. 

That data enabled us to build a world-first:- an LLM-based AGC detector for text-based interviews, recently upgraded to v2.0 with 99% accuracy and a false positive rate of 1%. An NLP classification model built on Sapia.ai proprietary data that operates across all Sapia.ai chat interviews.

Full Transparency with Candidates

Because we value candidate trust as much as customer trust, we wanted to be transparent with candidates about our ability to detect artificially generated content (AGC). As an LLM, we could identify AGC in real time and warn candidates that we had detected it. 

This has had a powerful impact on candidate behaviour. Since our AGC detector went live, we have seen that the real-time flagging acts as a real-time disincentive to use tools like ChatGPT to generate interview responses. 

The detector generates a warning if 3 or more answers are flagged as having artificially generated content. The Sapia.ai Chat Interview uses 5 open-ended interview questions for volume hiring roles, such as retail, contact centre, and customer service, and 6 questions for professional roles, such as engineers, data scientists, graduates, etc.

Let’s Take a Closer Look at the Data… 

We see that using our AGC detector LLM to communicate live with candidates in the interview flow when artificial content has been detected has a positive effect on deterring candidates from using AI tools to generate their answers. 

The rate of AGC use declines from 1 question flagged to 5 questions – raising the flag on one question is generally enough to deter candidates from trying again. 

The graph below shows the number of candidates, from a total of almost 2.7m, that used artificially generated content in their answers.  

Differences in AGC Usage Rate by Groups 

We see no meaningful differences in candidate behaviour based on the job they are applying for or based on geography.

However, we have found differences by gender and ethnicity – for example, men use artificially generated content more than women. The graph below shows the overall completion ratios by gender – for all interviews on the left and for interviews where the number of questions with AGC detected is 5 or more on the right. 

Perception of Artificially Generated Content by Hirers. 

We’re curious to understand how hirers perceive the use of these tools to assist candidates in a written interview. The creation of the detector was based on the majority of Sapia.ai customers wanting transparency & explainability around the use of these tools by candidates, often because they want to ensure that candidates are using their own words to complete their interviews and they want to avoid wasting time progressing candidates who are not as capable as their chat interview suggests.  

However, some of our customers feel that it’s a positive reflection of the candidate, showing that they are using the tools available to them to put their best foot forward. 

It’s a mix of perspectives. 

Our detector labels it as the use of artificially generated content. It’s up to our customers how they use that information in their decision-making processes. 

This concept of having a human in the loop is one of the key dimensions of ethical AI, and we ensure that it is used in every AI-related hiring product we build. 

Interested in the science behind it all? Download our published research on developing the AGC detector 👇

Research Paper Download: AI Generated Content in Online Text-based Structured Interviews

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Blog

Joe & the Juice Partners with Sapia.ai, Scaling an Exceptional Candidate Experience and Cutting Time to Hire

Read the full press release about the partnership here.

Joe & the Juice, the trailblazing global juice bar and coffee concept, is renowned for its vibrant culture and commitment to cultivating talent. With humble roots from one store in Copenhagen, now with a presence in 17 markets, Joe & The Juice has built a culture that fosters growth and celebrates individuality.

But, as their footprint expands, so does the challenge of finding and hiring the right talent to embody their unique culture. With over 300,000 applications annually, the traditional hiring process using CVs was falling short – leaving candidates waiting and creating inefficiencies for the recruitment team. To address this, Joe & The Juice turned to Sapia.ai, a pioneer in ethical AI hiring solutions.

A Fresh Approach to Hiring

Through this partnership, Joe & The Juice has transformed its hiring process into an inclusive, efficient, and brand-aligned experience. Instead of faceless CVs, candidates now engage in an innovative chat-based interview that reflects the brand’s energy and ethos. Available in multiple languages, the AI-driven interview screens for alignment with the “Juicer DNA” and the brand’s core values, ensuring that every candidate feels seen and valued.

Candidates receive an engaging and fair interview experience as well as personality insights and coaching tips as part of their journey. In fact, 93% of candidates have found these insights useful, helping to deliver a world-class experience to candidates who are also potential guests of the brand.

“Every candidate interaction reflects our brand,” Sebastian Jeppesen, Global Head of Recruitment, shared. “Sapia.ai makes our recruitment process fair, enriching, and culture-driven.”

Results That Matter

For Joe & The Juice, the collaboration has yielded impressive results:

  • 33% Reduction in Screening Time: Pre-vetted shortlists from Sapia.ai’s platform ensure that recruiters can focus on top candidates, getting them behind the bar faster.

  • Improved Candidate Satisfaction: With a 9/10 satisfaction score from over 55,000 interviews, candidates appreciate the fairness and transparency of the process.

  • Bias-Free Hiring: By eliminating CVs and integrating blind AI that prioritizes fairness, Joe & The Juice ensures their hiring reflects the diverse communities they serve.

Frederik Rosenstand, Group Director of People & Development at Joe & The Juice, highlighted the transformative impact: “Our juicers are our future leaders, so using ethical AI to find the people who belong at Joe is critical to our long-term success. And now we do that with a fair, unbiased experience that aligns directly with our brand.”

Trailblazing for the hospitality industry

In an industry so wholly centred on people, Joe & the Juice is paving the way for similar brands to adopt technology that enables inclusive, human-first experiences that can reflect a brand’s core values. 

If you’re curious about how Sapia.ai can transform your hiring process, check out our full case study on Joe & The Juice here.

 

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Sapia.ai Wrapped 2024

It’s been a year of Big Moves at Sapia.ai. From welcoming groundbreaking brands to achieving incredible milestones in our product innovation and scale, we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in hiring.

And we’re just getting started 🚀

Take a look at the highlights of 2024 

All-in-one hiring platform
This year, with the addition of Live Interview, we’re proud to say our platform now covers screening, assessing and scheduling.
It’s an all-in-one volume hiring platform that enables our customers to deliver a world-leading experience from application through to offer.

Supercharging hiring efficiency
Every 15 seconds, a candidate is interviewed with Sapia.ai.
This year, we’ve saved hiring managers and recruiters hours of precious time that can now be used for higher-value tasks. 

See why our users love us 

Giving candidates the best experience
Our platform allows candidates to be their best selves, so our customers can find the people that truly belong with them. They’re proud to use a technology that’s changing hiring, for good.

Share the candidate love

Leading the way in AI for hiring 

We’ve continued to push the boundaries in leveraging ethical AI for hiring, with new products on the way for Coaching, Internal Mobility & Interview Builders. 

Join us in celebrating an incredible 2024

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