Designing the Candidate Experience: Modern, Inclusive Hiring
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.
Nearly 80% of hiring managers admit they’ve ghosted candidates at some point.
Virgin Media estimated 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, and 6% of those canceled their subscriptions.
48% of applicants report being ghosted by employers during interviews at least once.
This course gives you a step-by-step system to 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 write clear, inclusive job descriptions, make your careers site tell your story, and streamline mobile applications so more qualified people finish what they start. You’ll also learn how to run structured, bias-aware interviews, deliver timely offers, and close the loop gracefully with everyone who isn’t selected.
We’ll balance automation with empathy, using tools like ATS workflows, smart scheduling, chatbots, and text updates without losing the personal moments that matter. You’ll design for access 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 a real-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 with ready-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
Instructors
PracticalGrowth is a San Francisco-based education studio producing practical workplace courses for professionals, managers, and modern teams.
Our catalog covers leadership, management, HR, project delivery, communication, customer experience, AI, productivity, business strategy, operations, and career development. Each course is designed to help learners build useful skills they can apply directly in their work.
With three professional studio locations across the United States, PracticalGrowth creates polished, studio-produced courses that combine clear instruction, practical examples, and focused workplace learning.
The company was founded by Evan Kimbrell, a longtime online instructor whose courses have reached millions of students worldwide and remained bestsellers for years. Evan’s background spans online education, startups, venture capital, and digital product development.
With more than 350,000 learners and 133,000 reviews, PracticalGrowth is focused on building a practical, high-quality workplace learning catalog for people who want to learn efficiently and apply what they learn immediately.
Jesse Shroyer is a business consultant and organizational strategist with nearly 15 years of experience across government relations, corporate policy, community engagement, and business development. She has held leadership roles at organizations including Smith Electric Vehicles, where she served as Government Relations & Incentives Manager, and Dewsly Media, where she worked as Director of Community Engagement — building a career that spans the private sector, media, and emerging industries.
Through her consulting work with companies like Zeus Electric Chassis and Pegasus Specialty Vehicles, as well as her long-running independent practice, Jesse has advised organizations on everything from stakeholder strategy and workplace culture to communications, operations, and sustainability. That cross-sector, cross-functional experience is what she brings to her courses — giving professionals practical, grounded insight into the business topics that matter most today.