Designing the Candidate Experience: Modern, Inclusive Hiring

Build a candidate-centered hiring process that’s efficient, engaging, and true to your company’s values

What you'll learn
- Map the end-to-end candidate journey and identify high-impact touchpoints to fix first.
- Write clear, inclusive job descriptions and design a careers page that authentically communicates culture and values.
- Streamline applications (especially on mobile) and implement SLAs for fast, transparent communication at every stage.
- Run structured, bias-aware interviews with scoring rubrics, trained panels, and consistent candidate prep.
- Balance automation and humanity—deploy ATS workflows, self-scheduling, chatbots, and SMS without losing personal touch.
- Design for access and inclusion with accommodations, flexible formats, and diverse interview panels.
- Close strong: craft timely, compelling offers; deliver respectful rejections; and build a preboarding bridge into onboarding.
- Measure and improve continuously using cNPS, drop-off, time-to-hire, and offer-accept rates—then iterate with a simple feedback loop.

Requirements
- No prior experience is required

Description
Bad candidate experiences don’t just cost you hires, they cost you brand equity and, in some cases, real revenue. Ghosting, slow timelines, clunky applications, and vague rejections push great people away and show up later as negative reviews, lost referrals, and declined offers. In today’s transparent job market, the candidate experience is a business lever.

Consider the facts:

61%of job seekers say they’ve been ghosted after an interview.

Nearly80%of hiring managers admit they’ve ghosted candidates at some point.

Virgin Mediaestimated losses of£4.4 million (~$5.4M)per year due to poor candidate experiences driving customer cancellations.

Of Virgin Media’s rejected candidates,18% were paying customers, and6% of those canceled their subscriptions.

48%of applicants report being ghosted by employers during interviews at least once.

This course gives you astep-by-step systemto design a candidate journey that’s fast, fair, and human, from job post to onboarding. You’ll map every touchpoint, remove friction with the right tech, and build communication habits that eliminate the dreaded “black hole.”

You’ll learn how to writeclear, inclusive job descriptions, make yourcareers site tell your story, andstreamline mobile applicationsso more qualified people finish what they start. You’ll also learn how to runstructured, bias-aware interviews, delivertimely offers, andclose the loop gracefullywith everyone who isn’t selected.

We’ll balanceautomation with empathy, using tools like ATS workflows, smart scheduling, chatbots, and text updates without losing the personal moments that matter. You’ll design foraccess and inclusion(accommodations, flexible formats, diverse panels) so more candidates can show their best, and you’ll measure what works using a simple feedback loop (cNPS, drop-off rates, time-to-hire, offer acceptance).

Finally, we’ll dive into areal-world case study of Virgin Media, where a broken candidate experience translated into millions in lost customer revenue, and how redesigning the journey reversed the trend.

Packed withready-to-use templates, interview guides, email scripts, and checklists, this course helps you build a candidate experience that respects people’s time, reflects your values, and consistently wins the talent you want, without adding busywork to your team.

Who this course is for:
- HR leaders, Talent Acquisition managers, and recruiting teams modernizing their hiring process
- Hiring managers and interviewers who want practical structure, fairness, and better signal in interviews
- People Ops/HRBPs, Employer Brand and DEI partners aligning hiring with culture and values
- Startup founders and small-team leaders building their first scalable, candidate-centric process
- Operations leaders and EX/CX professionals connecting candidate experience to brand and revenue
- Anyone responsible for offers, onboarding, and retention who wants to “finish strong” from offer to Day One
More Info