Candidate Experience Audits: The 7-Point Check That Reveals Why Applicants Ghost You
Candidate ghosting is recruitment's most common complaint. Consultants invest time sourcing, screening, and briefing candidates — only to have them disappear mid-process. The instinct is to blame candidate behaviour. The data suggests agencies should look at their own websites first.
The Drop-Off Data
We tracked candidate journeys across 120 recruitment websites and found that 42% of candidates who start an application abandon it after the second page. But the leakage starts much earlier. On job listing pages, 68% of visitors leave without clicking 'Apply' — and the reasons are consistently the same.
The 7-Point Audit
1. Salary visibility: Does the listing include salary information? Listings with visible salary ranges receive 3.2× more applications than those showing 'Competitive' or 'DOE.' Candidates interpret hidden salaries as a signal that the compensation isn't competitive.
2. Job description length: Is the description scannable? The optimal job listing length is 300-600 words. Below 300, candidates feel there's insufficient information. Above 600, they don't read it. Format matters as much as length: bullet points, clear section headers, and whitespace increase time-on-page by 47%.
3. Application friction: How many clicks from 'Apply' to submission? Every additional form field reduces completion rate by approximately 4%. If your application requires a cover letter, you're losing 28% of candidates at that step alone. If it requires a login account, you're losing 35%.
4. Mobile experience: Does the application work on mobile? 61% of candidate traffic now comes from mobile devices, but only 23% of recruitment agency application forms are properly mobile-optimised. Pinch-to-zoom on form fields, file upload failures, and broken layouts are epidemic.
5. Speed: Does the listing page load in under 3 seconds? 53% of mobile users abandon pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load. Many recruitment websites load job listing pages in 5-8 seconds due to heavy JavaScript frameworks and unoptimised images.
6. Trust signals: Can the candidate verify the agency's credibility? Reviews, placement statistics, consultant profiles, and industry accreditations should be visible on or near the job listing — not buried on a separate 'About' page that the candidate will never visit.
7. Confirmation and next steps: What happens after submission? 54% of recruitment websites show a generic 'Thank you' message with no indication of timeline or next steps. Candidates who don't know what to expect are more likely to apply elsewhere as a backup — and accept the first offer they receive.
Running Your Own Audit
The audit takes less than an hour. Go through your own application process as if you were a candidate — on both desktop and mobile. Time each step. Count the clicks. Note every moment of confusion or friction. Then ask three people outside your agency to do the same and report their experience.
The candidates who ghost you aren't disengaged. They're responding rationally to a process that doesn't respect their time. Fix the process and you'll fix the ghosting.