Candidate Experience Survey: 25 Questions and Templates

A useful candidate experience survey is short, specific and well timed. Keep it to five to eight questions and send it within one or two days of the stage it covers. Ask about concrete moments, like “Did you know what to expect?”, rather than general satisfaction. Make it anonymous, or at least clearly separate from the hiring decision. Below are 25 questions grouped by stage (application, interview, rejected candidates and new hires), with a suggested answer format for each. You’ll also find how to measure candidate NPS, three ready-made templates you can copy, how to run the survey anonymously, and how to analyze open answers without reading every one twice.

Pick the five to eight questions that match the stage you’re surveying. Don’t send all 25 at once.

Why survey candidates at all?

Most hiring teams only hear from candidates who are still in the process, and those candidates have every reason to be polite. The people who could tell you what’s broken are the ones who dropped out, got rejected or accepted an offer elsewhere. A survey is the only systematic way to hear from them.

The stakes are real. In a Greenhouse survey of 2,500 workers in the US, UK and Germany, 61% of job seekers said they had been ghosted after a job interview (Greenhouse, December 2024). That kind of experience rarely shows up in your own hiring metrics. For more data, see our roundup of candidate experience statistics.

If you already use one-way video interviews for screening, a survey also tells you whether the format is working for candidates. For example, were the time limits fair, and did the instructions make sense?

When to send each survey

Stage	Send to	When	Length
Application	Everyone who applied, or a random sample	Right after submission, or within 48 hours	3–5 questions
Interview	Everyone who completed an interview stage	Within 24–48 hours of the interview	5–8 questions
Rejected	Candidates who received a decision	1–3 days after the rejection email, in a separate message	4–6 questions
Hired	New hires	End of the first or second week	4–6 questions

25 candidate experience survey questions

Answer formats: Rating (1–5 scale), Choice (multiple choice), Open (video, audio or text, the candidate’s choice). Keep open questions to one or two per survey. They take the most effort, and they give you the most useful answers.

Application stage (questions 1–6)

1. How did you first hear about this role? (Choice: job board, our careers page, referral, social media, recruiter, other)
2. How clear was the job description about what the role involves day to day? (Rating)
3. Did the job posting include enough information to decide whether to apply? What was missing? (Choice: yes / partly / no, plus Open)
4. Roughly how long did the application take? (Choice: under 5 min, 5–15 min, 15–30 min, over 30 min)
5. Was there any point where you nearly gave up on the application? If so, where? (Open)
6. After you applied, did you know what would happen next and when? (Choice: yes / somewhat / no)

Interview stage (questions 7–14)

7. Before your interview, did you know what format it would take, how long it would last and who you’d meet or who would review it? (Choice: yes / partly / no)
8. How easy was it to schedule or complete the interview around your other commitments? (Rating)
9. Did the questions feel relevant to the job you applied for? (Rating)
10. Did you have a fair chance to show your skills and experience? What would have helped you show more? (Rating, plus Open)
11. For recorded (one-way) interviews: were the time limits reasonable, and could you re-record an answer if you needed to? (Choice: too short / about right / more than needed, plus yes / no)
12. Did you run into any technical problems? What happened? (Choice: none / minor / serious, plus Open)
13. Did you get answers to the questions you had about the role, team or company? (Rating)
14. If you could change one thing about our interview process, what would it be? (Open)

Rejected candidates (questions 15–20)

15. How did you hear about our decision? (Choice: email, phone, ATS notification, didn’t hear, other)
16. How timely was our decision compared with what we told you to expect? (Choice: earlier / on time / later / we didn’t give a date)
17. How clear and respectful was the way we communicated the decision? (Rating)
18. How fair did the overall process feel? (Rating)
19. Would you apply to [Company] again for a role that fits you? (Choice: yes / maybe / no)
20. Is there anything about the process you think we should know, even if it’s uncomfortable to hear? (Open)

New hires (questions 21–25)

21. Looking back, how accurately did the hiring process represent the actual job? (Rating)
22. What made you choose to accept our offer? (Open)
23. Was there any point where you considered withdrawing? What nearly made you do it? (Open)
24. How clear were the offer, start date and first-week details? (Rating)
25. What’s one thing we should keep doing in our hiring process, and one thing we should stop? (Open)

Questions 5, 10, 14, 20 and 23 are the ones most likely to surface something you didn’t know. If you only have room for one open question per survey, use one of those.

Add one tracking number: candidate NPS

Ratings on individual moments tell you what to fix. One repeated question tells you whether things are getting better overall. Many teams use a candidate version of Net Promoter Score (cNPS):

“How likely are you to recommend applying to [Company] to a friend or colleague?” (0–10)

• Calculate it as the percentage of 9–10 answers minus the percentage of 0–6 answers. The result runs from −100 to +100.
• Always follow it with “Why?” as an open question. The score without the reason gives you nothing to act on.
• Split it by stage and outcome. Rejected candidates will score lower than hires; that’s expected. Track each group against its own past results, not against each other.
• Wait for enough answers. With fewer than about 30 responses in a period, one or two people move the number a lot, so read the comments first.

RecRam has a built-in NPS question type, and two of the templates below already include it.

Why video and voice answers add context

Ask “What would you change about our interview process?” in a text box and you get a lot of “Nothing, it was fine.” That’s because typing a considered answer on a phone is effort. When candidates can answer out loud in 30 to 60 seconds, many give you the specific example: “The recruiter told me it was a 20-minute call, but it was an hour with three people, and I’d left my lunch break for it.” That one sentence tells you exactly what to fix.

A few ground rules:

• Always let the candidate choose. Offer video, audio and text on every open question. Some people won’t record video, and anonymity is impossible on camera (see below).
• Keep spoken answers short. Suggest 30–90 seconds, and set the time limit accordingly.
• Focus on what was said. You’re there for the content of the feedback: the moments, the reasons and the suggestions. Don’t try to read anything into how someone looks or sounds.

In RecRam, each open question can accept video, audio or text answers, the candidate needs no account or app, and the survey interface is available in 9 languages. Candidates can watch an answer back and record it again before they submit. See how to choose reply modes and offer a text fallback.

Candidate experience survey templates to copy

These three templates are ready to copy into RecRam and edit:

• Candidate Experience Feedback: Post-Interview. Four questions: process clarity, interviewer professionalism, an NPS question and one open comment. It has no contact block, so it’s the quickest option for a high-volume pipeline and the easiest to keep anonymous.
• Post-Interview Candidate Experience Survey (Unsuccessful). Ten questions for candidates who weren’t selected, covering communication, perceived fairness and one specific improvement.
• Post-Final Interview Candidate Experience Survey. Ten questions sent right after a final interview, including which stage felt most valuable and short recorded reflections.

Two of these templates start with a contact information block. Remove it if you want the survey to be anonymous. The final-interview template’s recorded questions are set to video only; switch them to video, audio or text so nobody has to appear on camera to give feedback.

How to run a candidate survey anonymously

Candidates, especially rejected ones, will only be candid if they believe the answer can’t come back to them. There are two levels:

• Anonymous: you can’t tell who answered. No names, no emails, no identifying links.
• Confidential: you know who answered, but answers are kept away from the hiring team and reported only in aggregate.

Say which one you’re offering, and stick to it. To run a genuinely anonymous survey:

1. Use a separate form, not a question at the end of the interview or application.
2. Remove contact fields, and don’t pre-fill names or emails into the survey link.
3. Offer audio or text for open questions. A video answer shows the person’s face, so it isn’t anonymous. A voice can identify someone too, so tell people that, and let them type if they prefer.
4. Ask only coarse demographics, if any. A role title plus a location plus a date can identify one person on a small team.
5. Report only in aggregate, and don’t break results down for groups smaller than about five people.
6. Tell candidates plainly who will see the answers, that the survey has no effect on any current or future application, and how long you’ll keep responses. Under UK GDPR, this kind of information must be given at the point of collection (ICO: The right to be informed). Our help doc on contact, consent and GDPR fields shows how to include this in a form.
7. Send rejected-candidate surveys separately from the rejection email, a day or more later, so the survey doesn’t feel like part of the decision.

How to analyze the answers

Rating and choice questions are easy to chart. The open answers are where the value is, and where most teams stall, because nobody has time to watch 80 videos. A workable routine:

1. Chart the ratings by stage, monthly. Look for movement, not absolute numbers. A drop in question 7 (“Did you know what to expect?”) after you change interview formats tells you something specific.
2. Read transcripts, not videos. RecRam transcribes every video and audio answer automatically (50+ languages), and each answer gets a short summary and 3 to 5 keywords, so you can skim a month of feedback in one sitting. If candidates answer in different languages, translate the transcripts into yours. Watch the original only when a transcript raises a question.
3. Sort answers into your own themes. Write a short list of themes first, such as “scheduling,” “no reply after the interview,” “time limits,” “interviewer conduct” and “tech problems.” RecRam’s optional AI Analysis can then put each open answer into one of your categories, and you count them in a CSV export or a Google Sheet with a row per response. Spot-check a handful against the transcripts before you trust the counts.
4. Search by keyword. Search transcripts for “deadline,” “recruiter,” “salary,” “camera” or a stage name to pull every mention into one list.
5. Route what needs an owner. Set a rule that tags any answer mentioning accessibility or a technical failure, or that emails the recruiting lead when an answer is negative, so the person who owns the fix sees it the same day. A person still reads and decides what to do.
6. Close the loop. Pick one or two fixes a quarter, make them, and say so on your careers page (“You told us our deadlines were too short, so we’ve extended them to five days”).

Need to share results with hiring managers? See reviewing responses with AI, with human checkpoints, which includes exporting transcripts and summaries for your team. AI Analysis uses AI credits: a voice answer costs 5 and a text answer 2, so check your plan’s monthly allowance against your survey volume.

Common mistakes

• Surveying only hires. Their experience is real, but they’re the people the process worked for.
• Asking “How satisfied were you?” and nothing else. You get a number with no reason to act on.
• Sending it weeks later. Memory fades fast, and so does the response rate.
• Promising anonymity and then asking for an email “for follow-up.”
• Collecting feedback and never acting on it. Candidates notice when the same problems come up again and again.

Putting it together

Start small. Add one survey at the stage where you suspect the most drop-off, usually right after the first interview. Use five questions from the list above and one open video, audio or text question, and review the transcripts monthly. If your first interview is a recorded one, our one-way video interview invitation email templates include a rejection email with an optional survey line. Our customer service video interview questions show how to structure the interview itself.

RecRam plans start at $29/month (Starter) and $99/month (Professional), with a 28-day free trial and no card required. See pricing.

Frequently asked questions

What questions should be in a candidate experience survey?

Ask about specific moments rather than general satisfaction. Did the candidate know what to expect? Was the process fair? Were they kept informed, and how did they hear the decision? What one thing would they change? Combine three to five rating or choice questions with one or two open questions.

How long should a candidate experience survey be?

Five to eight questions for an interview-stage survey, and three to five for an application survey. Candidates owe you nothing at this point, so every extra question lowers your response rate.

When should I send a post-interview candidate survey?

Within 24–48 hours of the interview, while details are fresh. For rejected candidates, send it separately, one to three days after the decision, so it doesn’t feel tied to the outcome.

Should candidate experience surveys be anonymous?

Anonymous surveys usually get more candid answers, especially from rejected candidates. Remove contact fields, don’t pre-fill identifying links and report only in aggregate. If you need to follow up, run a confidential survey instead and say so clearly.

Can candidates answer a survey by video?

Yes. Recorded answers often include the specific example a text box misses. Always offer audio and text as well. Video can’t be anonymous, and some people simply prefer to type.

How do I analyze open-ended candidate feedback?

Transcribe spoken answers, then sort each answer into a short list of themes you define, either by hand or with an AI categorization step. Count the themes by stage, search transcripts by keyword, and use rules to tag answers that need an owner. Then have a person check the examples and decide what to change.

What is a good candidate NPS?

There is no universal benchmark you can rely on, because scores vary with role, stage and whether the candidate was hired. Track your own cNPS by stage over time and act on the reasons behind it.