Introduction
As AI and automation have become standard in recruitment practices, it’s easy to forget the human side of hiring. But for candidates, how they’re treated during the process often becomes the deciding factor when choosing where to work. Candidate Experience has become one of the most critical factors shaping form an opinion about your company, how quickly you fill the roles, and whether top talent chooses you over the competitors, proving that candidate experience matters far beyond the hiring process itself.
At Starred, we analyze millions of candidate touchpoints every year to understand what makes a hiring experience stand out. Using Candidate Net Promoter Score (cNPS) and candidate comment analysis, we gather feedback from thousands of candidates across industries, company sizes, and regions to create one of the most comprehensive datasets on Candidate Experience in the world.
This blog brings together the benchmarks and research from our latest Hiring Benchmarks report to help Talent Acquisition reflect on their recruitment processes, spot opportunities for improvement, and keep Candidate Experience front and center, even as new technologies transform recruitment.
This year’s Hiring Benchmarks Report is built on over 2.5M hiring experiences, making it our most comprehensive global dataset on hiring experience to date. To access the report and best practices, read our latest Hiring Benchmarks Report and download the full dataset here!
Candidate Experience Benchmarks
At the core of our Candidate Experience report is the Candidate Net Promoter Score (cNPS). This metric captures how likely candidates are to recommend your company to others based on their application experience.
In 2025, the global averages were:
- Hired candidates: +81
- Withdrawn candidates: +40
- Rejected candidates: -7
FAQs
What is Candidate NPS (cNPS)?
Candidate Net Promoter Score measures how likely candidates are to recommend your company based on their experience, even if they weren’t hired. It provides a simple way to benchmark how candidates perceive your hiring process.
Why is Candidate Experience important?
Candidate Experience directly shapes how people see your company. A positive experience encourages job seekers to reapply, refer others, and even remain loyal customers. But a poor Candidate Experience can damage your reputation, deter future applicants, and hurt your ability to attract top talent. Prioritizing it isn’t just good practice; it’s essential for building a strong employer brand and competitive hiring process.
How do you measure Candidate Experience?
The most effective way to measure Candidate Experience is by collecting feedback at key stages of the hiring process, using surveys that cover the main aspects of the hiring experience. Metrics like cNPS provide a high-level benchmark.
Why benchmark Candidate Experience?
In a competitive job market, staying ahead of the talent shortage means understanding how your hiring experience compares to others. Recruiting benchmarks put your scores into context, helping you identify strengths, set goals, and uncover weaknesses where they matter most.
How is the data in the benchmark report collected?
The data in Starred’s benchmark report is collected directly from candidates via cNPS surveys, distributed at key stages of the hiring process (application, rejection, withdrawal, and hire). Responses are anonymized and aggregated across industries, company sizes, and regions to produce reliable, large-scale insights.
How often is the benchmark data updated?
The Candidate Experience Benchmark Report is published annually and reflects the most recent year’s data across millions of candidate touchpoints. However, companies using Starred can track their own benchmark position in real-time throughout the year.
Recommended resources to learn more about Candidate Experience:
- The Ultimate Guide to Candidate NPS
- Everything You Need to Know About Recruitment Analytics
- How to Get Started with Candidate Experience Surveys
Latest Candidate Experience Benchmarks
Explore the core benchmark metrics from this year’s report based on 2025 data and see how Candidate Experience performance shifts across the hiring funnel, company sizes, industries, departments, and applicant sources. These benchmarks reveal where hiring teams are excelling and where friction is still costing top talent.
Want to explore the full dataset to compare your performance?
Our Hiring Benchmark Data Deep Dive includes the complete benchmark dataset consisting of 2.5M+ hiring experiences and total number of nearly 70,000 candidate comments collected through the Starred platform. Find detailed data segmentations by every stage of the hiring funnel for company size, industry, department, and applicant source, alongside sentiment analysis of the most discussed topics.
Average Response Rate
The willingness from candidates to respond to surveys continued to decline across nearly every stage of the hiring process, suggesting a broader disengagement among candidates navigating increasingly automated recruitment experiences.
Average Candidate NPS
The overall experience remained stable, but stagnant. The global cNPS sits at +17, unchanged from last year. Rejected candidates remain in negative territory, while hired candidates are overwhelmingly positive. The gap between those two groups continues to define the state of Candidate Experience in 2026.
cNPS by Company Size
When we break the data down by company size, we get a consistent pattern. Smaller organizations (under 1000 FTEs) report significantly higher average cNPS scores than enterprises above 5000 FTEs. Larger companies, while operationally structured, experience more negative sentiment concentrated around automation, impersonal rejections and process delays.
cNPS by Industry
For the first time, we’ve also analyzed the dataset by Industry. Companies in the Technology & SaaS and Financial Services industries outperform most other sectors in overall experience, while Professional Services shows more friction, particularly at the rejection and hired stages. What’s interesting here is that Technology & SaaS, despite having the highest overall cNPS score, is the industry with most candidate withdrawals.
cNPS by Department
Roles in Operations & Logistics and Finance, Compliance & Legal tend to report better Candidate Experience than Marketing and Customer Service, Support & Success roles, where rejection rates are high and cNPS scores dip more sharply. Engineering, Product & Data teams show steady improvement year over year, though withdrawal rates remain elevated in competitive markets.
cNPS by Source
Looking at Candidate Source, Referrals and Recruiter Approach consistently outperform Job Posting Sites in both experience and sentiment. Candidates sourced through Job Posting Sites or Agencies report lower cNPS scores, particularly when rejected. Internal Applicants remain one of the most positively scoring groups overall, though even here, cNPS performance softened compared to last year.
Hiring Manager Satisfaction
Hiring Manager NPS rose again this year to +73 with smaller organizations reporting even higher satisfaction levels. Across industries, hiring managers cite improved structure, clearer alignment and better recruitment partnership.
Key Insights From the 2026 Hiring Benchmarks Report
Here are five takeaways from our annual Hiring Benchmark Report, outlining how latest recruitment trends shaped latest hiring practices, talent acquisition teams, and candidate expectations. These findings highlight where companies are getting it right, where candidates are feeling let down, and what Talent Acquisition teams can focus on to improve their hiring process.
1. Application Stage defines your Candidate Experience
In 2025, hiring became more top-funnel heavy as companies focused on efficiency and automated screening. Compared to 82% in 2024, nearly 89.7% of survey invitations were sent to rejected candidates.
As a result, nearly 69.49% of rejected candidates were filtered out at the application stage. With that many candidates rejected before any human interaction, the application stage now largely defines how candidates perceive the entire hiring experience.
When early filtering lacks transparency, candidates often interpret automation and AI tools negatively. 22% of candidates rejected at the application stage mention AI in their feedback and over half (56%) of the AI-related comments carry negative sentiment. This highlights a growing need for clearer communication and expectation setting at the very start of the hiring process before the interview process begins.
If the use of automation feels “sneaky” or communication lacks context, candidates fill in the gaps themselves. And those assumptions (whether accurate or not) shape how your company is remembered.
In an era where the application process is the experience, only those teams that intentionally design this step will be able to maintain control over their Employer Brand and attract more candidates in the long run.
2. Expectation Setting is the biggest driver of candidate dissatisfaction
The primary source of candidate frustration shifted away from traditional pain points like assessments or compensation to unclear expectations throughout the hiring process. Across the dataset, 37.8% of all candidate comments referenced expectation setting. 74.5% of those carried negative sentiment, making it the most negatively perceived topic in the dataset.
What candidates mean by "poor expectation setting":
When nearly three quarters of all comments about Expectation Setting are negative, it represents a major problem in the recruitment sector. The findings highlight a growing need for clearer communication and stronger expectation setting to maintain trust, reduce wasted time and stand out in a hiring environment driven by automation and scale.
How to improve expectation setting?
- Role expectations must be specific and realistic.
- Salary positioning should be visible early to prevent late-stage misalignment.
- Process stages need to be explicitly defined, perhaps as early as the job description.
- Timelines must be clearly communicated and adhered to.
- Feedback, even when concise, will prevent candidates from filling in the gaps themselves.
- The use of AI must be communicated transparently
3. The gap between Hiring Manager Satisfaction and Candidate Experience
While internal hiring performance improved in 2025, candidate experience did not follow the same trend. Hiring Manager NPS rose to +73 (up from +65 in 2023 and +72 in 2024), with strong satisfaction across recruiter collaboration, role alignment, and process clarity. However, candidate experience remained largely unchanged, with rejected candidate cNPS averaging -7.
This growing gap suggests that improving internal structure and efficiency does not automatically translate into a better experience for candidates and new hires. Hiring managers and HR personnel may feel clearer, more aligned and better supported, but unless that same clarity is deliberately extended to candidates, the system remains strong on the inside, yet disappointing from the outside.
The findings highlight a need to design hiring processes that give candidates greater visibility into how decisions are made. High-performing TA teams clearly define what success looks like, align expectations early and make evaluation criteria and timelines visible throughout the process, improving their ability to create consistency across the hiring process.
When candidates understand how they are being assessed, what trade-offs are being made, and what timelines to expect, even rejection can feel fair. Without that visibility, the same decision feels arbitrary – regardless of how disciplined the internal process may be.
4. A “good enough” experience doesn’t guarantee a hire
If there is one area that reflects the tension of 2025 most clearly, it is breaking down our dataset by industry and zooming in on Technology & SaaS.
The Technology & SaaS industry showed that a positive candidate experience alone doesn’t always convert high quality candidates into future employees. Despite an overall cNPS of +24, and even +42 among candidates who voluntarily withdrew, the sector recorded the highest withdrawal rate at 13.5%. That’s well above the cross-industry average.
Feedback from withdrawn candidates suggests the issue isn’t dissatisfaction, but a lack of momentum in the process.
Comments most often referenced:
- Communication gaps (19.02%),
- Slow timelines (8.85%),
- Compensation misalignment discovered late in the process (8.29%).
This suggests that candidates in high demand markets are not leaving because they dislike the organization or the people they meet, but because the process creates space for alternatives to become more attractive. In competitive markets, speed and clarity function differently than in more stable segments. Candidates often engage in multiple processes simultaneously. So when salary positioning is clarified only at the offer stage or when internal alignment delays a decision, even a respectful and well-structured experience can lose its edge.
Hiring performance is decided by whether friction is removed at the exact points that influence commitment. The teams that win in 2026 will be those that stop optimizing for surface-level improvements and instead focus on the moments that get the perfect candidate to accept the job offer and stay engaged long-term, ultimately improving retention and reducing the first year attrition rate.
5. As organizations scale, hiring performance becomes harder to sustain
Candidate feedback shows a clear shift in hiring experience as organizations grow. Smaller companies (1–500 FTEs) are often praised for their company culture, speed, and direct communication, but candidates note a lack of structure. As organizations move into the mid-market (501–5000 FTEs), processes become more structured, but frustration increasingly centers on internal delays or late-stage changes.
In enterprises above 5000 FTEs, the challenge shifts again. While candidates value brand strength and career opportunities, negative feedback concentrates on bureaucracy, slow decision-making, and impersonal interactions, with over one third of negative comments (33.44%) referencing automated or impersonal rejection.
The larger the company becomes, the more the risk shifts from inconsistency to impersonality. And unless the hiring process scales with intention, efficiency gains can slowly overshadow the very interactions that make hiring effective.
In 2026, scaling successfully will depend on how quickly organizations translate those signals into structural changes. The teams that remove obstacles in real time will be the ones that secure the talent their organization needs.
5 Tips From Top TA Teams to Improve Candidate Experience
High-performing companies are taking a proactive approach to Candidate Experience, setting the standard for what hiring excellence looks like. We asked Talent Acquisition leaders from the Top 10 companies with the highest cNPS scores to share their tips and best practices. Here’s what they’re doing differently:
1. Treat Candidate Experience a Baseline for High Performance
2. Use Quality of Hire as the North Star metric
3. Earn Speed and Trust Through Clarity
4. Act as A Strategic Business Partner
5. Use AI with Clear Guardrails
If you are curious to learn more from the top performing TA teams, we have compiled all of their tips, examples and best practices in our latest blog:
Summary
As hiring becomes more automated and efficiency-driven, Candidate Experience is is often shaped by moments that happen earlier in the process and without human interaction. Our 2026 Candidate Experience Benchmark Report reveals how these shifts are impacting both hiring outcomes and candidate perceptions.
Here’s what we found:
- The application stage now defines the experience: Nearly 69% of candidates are rejected at this stage, making early communication and transparency critical to shaping Employer Brand.
- Expectation setting is the biggest pain point: 37.8% of all comments reference expectation setting, with 74.5% of those being negative, highlighting a major gap in clarity, timelines, and transparency.
- AI perception is mixed: 22% of rejected candidates mention AI, and over half of those comments are negative, showing that unclear or “hidden” automation can damage trust.
- Internal success doesn’t equal external satisfaction: Hiring Manager NPS rose to +73, while candidate cNPS remained at -7, revealing a growing disconnect between internal efficiency and candidate experience.
- A positive experience doesn’t guarantee a hire: In competitive markets like Tech & SaaS, strong cNPS scores still coincide with high withdrawal rates (13.5%), driven by slow processes and late-stage misalignment.
- Scaling introduces new challenges: Larger organizations struggle with impersonality and slow decision-making, with 33.4% of negative feedback tied to automated or impersonal rejections.
Top-performing TA teams are already responding by focusing on clarity, expectation setting, and intentional process design, balancing automation with human connection to stay competitive in 2026.
Read the Candidate Experience Benchmark Report
Dive into the latest hiring trends built from the candidate, hiring manager and recruiter insights, consisting of 2.5M+ hiring experiences and nearly 70,000 candidate comments collected through the Starred platform.
The report breaks down how hiring performance and candidate experience metrics vary across industries, company sizes, departments and applicant sources, helping Talent Acquisition teams understand where their process stands and where are the biggest opportunities for improvement.
In this report you’ll find:
- The 5 defining trends shaping hiring performance right now
- Insights and best practices from high-performing talent teams
- Benchmark data you can use to compare your own hiring performance
- The top 10 best-performing companies in 2025
If you care about hiring performance and are curious about where hiring is heading, read the full report here. And if you want to get deeper insights, you can find all the raw cNPS benchmark data and Candidate Experience statistics in the data deep dive.
