5 Reasons For Bad Candidate Experience In Tech Interviews

In 2023, the one thing on top of the mind of any tech organization should be aiming for happier employees. Happier employees are more productive and more likely to stay longer in their current jobs. You may argue that this has nothing to do with the bad candidate experience faced by developers who are not even your employees yet.

But it has everything to do with making a good impression on developers who may or may not become a part of your company, someday. The ramifications of providing a poor candidate experience during the hiring process will have a domino effect on your brand.

If you are known to treat potential candidates poorly, it will be a direct reflection on how you treat your employees, post recruitment. A bad candidate experience will damage your brand’s reputation within the developer ecosystem, word will spread, and soon enough, not many people will want to work with you.

As much as 83% of developers say that a negative interview experience can change their minds about a role or company that they previously liked. Seeing that tech interviews play a major part in being the deciding factor, let’s look at some of the areas that hamper candidate experience during the interview segment.

Pitfalls most interviewers fall into during tech interviews leading to a bad candidate experience

Misleading job descriptions

Hurriedly copy-pasting job descriptions of similar roles serves to deter candidates from applying. They could be too vague, too generic, or unclear about what is required of the candidate for the job.

Also, simply using the bait and switch tactic by stuffing job descriptions with keywords can be misleading to the actual requirements of the role. Asking developers to solve questions related to A when the job description says you need skills related to B is not the correct way to assess them.

This could lead to mistrust among the developer community when it comes to interviewing with your company. You would ostensibly make a bad hire, which could be an expensive mistake to make.

Not enough communication

Most candidates are kept in the dark about the progress of the interview. Be it the outcome, or what to expect next, developers are used to not receiving any kind of communication from recruiters. Ghosting your candidates or leaving them hanging occurs more often than you think.

In fact, a major peeve of candidates as stated by 40% of the respondents of HackerEarth’s Developer Survey 2021 is lack of feedback post-interview. Bad communication leads to broken interview processes and you do not want that.

Long, archaic interview processes

A complicated application form, unclear instructions, and no timely updates lead to a tedious tech interview process; they are also massive turn-offs for candidates. Filling out complex application forms results in 60% of job applicants quitting midway through as found by a CareerBuilder survey.

Recruiters miss out on setting timelines and expectations with potential hires, and the end result is an especially long-drawn-out interview process. You will lose talented developers to competitive organizations because a developer is not just going to sit around and wait. They are actively looking for suitable roles with different companies while you have an archaic hiring process in place that delays everything.

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Unprepared interview panel

Candidates put in a lot of time and effort preparing for the interview. Also, it is a widely-known fact, interviews are an anxiety-inducing experience. Imagine a candidate invested hours studying for an interview with your company that went awry because the interviewer or the panel of interviewers were not prepared?

Not knowing what skills the candidate possesses or what their resume says shows a clear lack of interest in the candidate. It leaves them feeling undervalued, which can affect their performance in the interview.

Poor technology used for interviewing

Asking candidates to write code on a piece of paper or a word processor is akin to asking someone to bake a cake without an oven. That is not what the real job looks like. Besides, such manual interviews leave a lot of room for error, bias, and unstandardized evaluation.

Coding interviews require appropriate interviewing tools that allow developers to code, compile, and debug while providing an objective assessment of each candidate. Poor technology can cause skilled candidates to either drop out of the running or fall through the cracks. And worse, this is simply a bad look for your company.

Say NO to bad candidate experience

Don’t skimp on being prepared for the interview, the remote tech interviewing tools you use or the feedback you provide. 63% of job seekers will likely reject a job offer because of a bad candidate experience, and you definitely don’t want that.

The tech interview is the first chance candidates have to actually see you, hear you, and interact with you. Candidates spend a considerable amount of time and effort preparing for the interview process, which is more often than not a nerve-wracking experience. You, as a recruiter, owe it to them to take the interview just as seriously and make sure that they have a memorable candidate experience.

Take FaceCode, our intelligent coding interviewing tool, for a spin.

Ruehie Jaiya Karri

Always interested in the “road less traveled”, she went from being a developer to a writer - her dream career. Her writing is simple and uncomplicated, two things she strives to achieve in her life. When not writing, you’ll find her curled up on her couch watching a rom-com or reading a book. A believer of dancing away her blues and a lover of coffee, she is also super passionate about baking.