Most of the people who experience your hiring process don't get the job. A corporate posting draws around 250 resumes (as cited in Cipher, ch. 2); one person gets an offer. Candidate experience is what the other 249 walk away with — and what they do with it is measurable:
- 83% of candidates say a negative interview experience can change their mind about a role or company they previously liked. (LinkedIn Talent Trends, 2015.)
- 37% have left a negative review online after a bad experience; 61% left a positive one after a good experience. (LinkedIn Talent Trends, 2015.)
- 60% of job seekers have abandoned an application because of its length or complexity. (CareerBuilder, as reported by SHRM.)
So the question in the title has a blunt answer: it's important the way any public-facing operation is important. Every process run is ~250 people forming a view of your company, most of whom you're declining, all of whom talk.
Where the experience is actually decided
The emails, the scheduling, the acknowledgements — all real, all secondary. The experience is decided in the interviews, because that's the only place the candidate and the company actually meet. Three things decide it:
Whether the interviewer was prepared. A candidate can tell in minutes whether the person opposite knows what the role needs or is improvising. In Cipher, Craig della Penna notes that candidates reject offers over exactly this — "seeing company leaders who are not on the same page and instances where interviewers outright contradicted each other about the opportunity."
Whether the questions respected their experience. Repeating "tell me about yourself" across three rounds reads as nobody having a plan. Questions mapped to the actual role read as respect.
How it ended. In the HireBest Foundations training, Craig closes every interview the same four ways — thank you, real question time, an offer of feedback, and clear next steps:
"Let them know what's coming up so they're not surprised by it — and they know where they stand in the process."
The return, in hiring terms
A good experience isn't a courtesy programme; it converts. High-quality candidates are on the market for about ten days (Workonic, as cited in Cipher, ch. 2) — a process that respects their time is often simply the one still standing when they decide. And the offer you eventually make lands on someone who has spent the whole process gathering evidence about what working for you would be like. The interview is the evidence.
That's the case for structure. Define the role before interviewing — a Cipher — and every candidate meets a prepared interviewer asking relevant questions against the same standard. The experience improves and the decision improves, because they were never separate things.
See how a structured interview runs →→ /product · Create a free Cipher →
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Frequently asked questions
Why is candidate experience important?
Because nearly everyone who experiences your process is rejected by it, and they act on the experience: 83% say a bad interview can change their mind about a company, and over a third have posted a negative review after one. Experience quality also converts the candidates you actually want, who are typically off the market in about ten days.
Does candidate experience affect employer brand?
Directly. Reviews, referrals and word-of-mouth from interviewed-but-rejected candidates reach your future applicant pool before your careers page does.
What improves candidate experience most?
Prepared interviewers. Logistics polish helps, but candidates judge the interviews — whether questions were relevant, fairly heard, and ended with clear next steps.
Sources
- “Top Recruitment Statistics for 2019.” Workonic — as cited in Cipher, ch. 2.
- CareerBuilder application-abandonment study, as reported by SHRM: “Study: Most Job Seekers Abandon Online Job Applications.”
- LinkedIn Talent Trends (2015), via LinkedIn Talent Solutions, “How to Measure Candidate Experience.”
- della Penna, C. HireBest Foundations course — quoted verbatim from the course transcript.
- della Penna, C. Cipher: A Proven Framework to Hire the Best People. Third Act Publishers, 2026.