Thereâs a story Talent Acquisition likes to tell about how the candidate experience (CX) is broken, but as far as weâre concerned, it was never whole to begin with. And not for lack of effort: Recruiting professionals and leaders care deeply about delivering both remarkable and meaningful experiences to every candidate that touches their organization. The truth is, sub-par candidate experience has been a technology problem. Thatâs because until recently, no one had tackled the automated engagement and self-serve logistics space.
At this point, we enjoy seamless, customer-centric digital experiences in virtually every facet of our livesâso much so that theyâve become table-stakes. Order your pet supplies from Amazon, a pizza from Dominoâs, a dinner over DoorDash, a custom-made couch from Room & Board, a flower delivery, and you know exactly what stage those items are at along their journey from production to delivery by simply checking a temporary âportalâ that tells you. The interview process is one of a handful of remaining exchanges that fails to offer consumer-grade experiences, dissolving candidatesâ confidence and excitement in the company. Where are they in the process? What are the details of the next step? Why donât they have easy access to all the information they need for that stage of their candidate journey?
Itâs not that anyone is actively denying candidates ease or transparency. At its best, the Talent Acquisition team works triple-time to manage candidate communications with speed, precision, and personalization, disseminating information over any number of disparate email threads. But something is always bound to fall through the cracks, and/or candidates are left to chaotically search through email threads to recover the information they need.
Itâs not an overstatement to say the industry has been desperate for a way to automate and streamline candidate communications to provide world-class experiences at scale. Lucky for us, this is what the candidate portal (finally) does: Itâs the source of truth for communication, interview scheduling, interview prep, employer brand content, real-time tracking of where candidates are in process, and more. It's frictionless to access and automatically updates as recruiters move candidates through the process in the ATS.
The status quo of mediocre candidate engagement is being challenged. Soon enough, every TA team will be setting aside budget for a candidate portal if they want to compete. Hereâs how the candidate portal is revolutionizing hiring for its candidates:
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âThe portal provides an entirely new experience for candidatesâwhat candidate.fyi calls a âcandidate homebaseâ for each stage of the candidate journey. Itâs unlike anything Iâve seen before. Itâs clear to me this is the future.â
- Kevin Grossman, VP of Research @ ERE
âFinally, an elegant solution to tackle improving the candidate journey.â
- Chuck Solomon, host @ The Candidate Experience Podcast
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40+% fewer candidate withdrawals thanks to centralized (and timely) employer branding content
Attracting talent is one thing; maintaining their interest and engagement through the hiring process is another. It used to be that the only places candidates could go to find company information were the careers page and the handful of emails full of linked content they received from recruiters while in process. That information was often onerous, if not impossible, to update or changeâwaiting on an overwhelmed developer to refresh the company website, for example. And the time that passed between email touchpointsâthose gaps when candidates didnât hear anything from recruitersâgave them plenty of time to become responsive to another role elsewhere.
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The candidate portal, on the other hand, automates content delivery, empowering talent leaders to create (and update) a content archive in real-time. Talent can âunlockâ photos, videos, blog posts, press releases, customer case studies, details on the organizationâs vision and value proposition, and more as they move through each phase of the hiring process. That staggered content is a way of building and keeping momentum with a candidateâwithout losing their interest after a one-time information dump in an email. Your company remains top-of-mind for candidates through ongoing self-serve touchpointsâfor as long as theyâre in your process.
Whatâs the ROI on this new model of branded content engagement? Hiring teams have seen up to 41% fewer candidate withdrawals, meaning fewer resources wasted on disengaged applicants. (Weâll let you do the math on what that savings would mean for your org.)
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â[With candidate.fyi] Iâm delivering no-code content in a single source-of-truth that I update myself. And candidates rave about the platform. For the first time ever, they have a central hub with everything they need. Within hours of enabling candidate.fyi, we received dozens of unsolicited emails from candidates telling us how excited they were to have a candidate experience portal and how surprising it was to have never experienced anything like this. It instantly elevated the talent team, and our ability to attract the best talent.â
- James Parker, Head of Talent @ Tropic
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Hours saved in comms and interviews thanks to self-serve information about the process
Recruiters spend a significant portion of their work weeks (8-10 hours, anecdotally) in back-and-forth communications with candidates around logistics. What time is their interview again? What time zone is it in? What skills will the assessment test? Who are they meeting with? What should they do to prepare? Whereâs the Zoom link? Oh wait⊠can they reschedule? Thatâs a lot of administrative time looking up answers, copy-and-pasting responses, and more. Recruiting teams need to deliver answers more expertly and efficiently than hundreds of one-off threads.
A candidate portal supports this âdo more with lessâ mentality. Within the portal, candidates self-serve the answers to those operational questions rather than wildly searching email threads or frantically reaching out to the team. (Weâve seen some candidates log in to the portal well over a hundred times over the course of their processâwhether to resolve those logistical questions themselves, take a DIY approach to interview rescheduling, or deepen their own research on the company. Imagine the hours saved with those candidates.) Of course, thereâs the obvious time-savings hereâdozens or hundreds of hours per week, depending on the size of your recruiting team. But consider the ways it impacts the most significant stage of your hiring processâthe interview:
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âWeâve had almost no email back-and-forths with candidates since we started using the portal. The entire team is saving a lot of timeâand closing candidates earlier now.â
- Head of Talent @ AI company
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For one thing, every interview can be shortened by 10-15 minutes thanks to the candidate portal. Ultimately, this means managers are doing their jobs more because theyâre interviewing less, which has downstream consequences (of the favorable kind!) for company productivity and revenue. If you can save your sales team 15 minutes per interview and there are 150 interviews in a quarter, thatâs 38 hoursâone full work weekâthat translates directly into dollars.
Conversely, those minutes can be leveraged for more spirited and engaging conversations with candidates. Because all the operational information candidates need is readily-available in the portal, every conversation talent has with the hiring team can be animated by whatâs most interesting to them. Rather than process and logistics, that precious time can be used discussing the product, the culture, or the future of the companyâthe details that actually matter when itâs time for the candidate to make a decision.
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âI used to spend hours each week prepping candidates for interviews, or answering a multitude of questions about our company or our process. Now on calls, candidates recite details about Tropic they learned while exploring our portal. And because they arrive to our conversations more informed about our business, our product, and our process, a remarkable space has opened up for more engaging conversations with candidates.â
- Matt Papa, Talent Partner
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On-the-fly optimization of the hiring process thanks to continuous candidate feedback
A quality candidate portal not only allows talent to self-serve information; it also allows TA teams to collect candidate feedback on a stage-by-stage basis for a more granular view of the candidate experience. Collecting feedback through an ATSâwhich is how teams have traditionally gauged candidate sentiment, if at allâhas its drawbacks. For one, waiting until the process is over to collect feedback invites recency bias. Candidates who were extended offers are more likely to give positive reviews; and while that might feel good, it wonât offer insights about how to improve your process for future candidates. It also wonât tell you which stages of the hiring process need the most attention. Finally, itâs not seamless: ATS surveys are delivered to talentâs over-full inboxes, where they have to actively click through to the survey.
With in-portal pulse surveys, hiring teams can collect candidate sentiment in real-time, meeting candidates exactly where they are in their workflows. The moment someone enters the portal to find out when their next interview isâand with whomâthe survey pops up, which explains why teams see up to 61% survey completion rates, when the industry standard is only 20%. When recruiting leaders can deep-dive into every stage, they can deliver more precise feedback, hone in on hiring managersâ growth areas, and tailor coaching journeys. Conversely, stage-specific candidate feedback can be used for positive reinforcement and to establish best practices. So the portal supports optimizing the hiring process in real-time, uncovering areas of opportunity and iterationâwhich ultimately means faster, higher-quality hires down the road.
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âBecause the pulse checks occur after every stage of the process, we get to see where we have room for improvement. I can see when certain interviewers are receiving above- or below-average scores. I can dig into what theyâre doing to establish best practices across the team. That information is invaluable from a talent leadership perspectiveânot to mention a Recruiting Ops perspective.â
- Sara VoĆĄinek GaĆĄpar, Head of Talent Acquisition @ Synthesia
âWeâre getting great engagement on candidate surveysâabout 10x the response rate compared to our automated ATS candidate surveys.â
- Kaitlyn Tarpey Borea, Director, Talent & People
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Full control of employer brand messaging
As candidates pass through your hiring funnel, theyâre doing their own due diligence (aka âresearchâ) on your organization. Itâs impossible to know what theyâre discovering about your business during that timeâthe good, the bad, or the uglyâunless youâre guiding their knowledge journey rather than leaving it to chance. Often, individual recruiters have their own set of resources that they share through Calendly or email templates, which results in inconsistent employer brand. But with a shared content library in the portal, where FAQs, videos, and other resources live, recruiters can drag-and-drop the content they want into the templates for their rolesâand your business presents a steady, coherent story to the market.
Anytime content is updated in the library, the portal updates every active job that content is associated with. If a recruiter once shared a LinkedIn post by someone who doesnât work at the company anymore, they can delete that link from the template and it disappears across all open roles. (If that post had been shared in an email, on the other hand, that trail would be there permanently.)
Whatâs more, candidates lose access to the portal a predetermined number of days after dropping out of process or being rejected by the company, so the hiring team can safely share sensitive and changing dataâannual recurring revenue, for exampleâthat they wouldnât otherwise give in writing. In this sense, the portal is essentially a content management system that gives recruiting teams the power to frame, share, and modify their messaging (no paper trail involved) and view engagement in an easy-to-digest dashboard. So you control the company message in a moment-to-moment way, observing behavior all the while to know if that message is resounding.
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âThe way I quantify the ROI of the portal is: How many people are logging in? Weâve had 13,500 sessions, averaging 5 œ minutes each. Candidates are spending hours on our brand content. What that tells me is we now have a very cost-effective way of delivering a ton of information to people. Thatâs taking our brand to the next level.â
- James Parker, Head of Talent @ Tropic
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The candidate portal: the newest essential addition to the recruiting tech stack
For years, big tech companies like Meta have had the internal resources to build their own bespoke candidate portals, helping them deliver some of the best candidate experiences out there. As for the other 99.9% of companies? Whether or not theyâve been able to articulate it, theyâve known something is deeply amiss with how they engage with candidates.
Thatâs where candidate.fyi comes in. Weâre helping revolutionize the hiring experience at companies of all sizes, with a candidate portal that integrates with recruiting teamsâ ATS. Thereâs never been a tool like this for Talent Acquisition; but now that there is, expect the CX landscape to change. As a Head of Talent recently said: âThe candidate portal is going to become table stakes. The more candidates have a taste of this experience, the more theyâll be asking other companies, âHey, whatâs the login to your platform?â Candidates are demanding incredible experiences, and if a company canât deliver, theyâll be considered irrelevant.â
At candidate.fyi, we want you to stay relevant. Want to know more about our all-in-one automated engagement platform? Weâd love to tell you all about it.