What Applicants Really Think — And Why We're Going to Ask

Maybe an automated email arrived to confirm the thing you already knew — that you had applied. Maybe a no came six weeks later, in language so smooth it could have been about anyone. Maybe nothing came at all, and you worked out from the silence that it was over. You never learned what they saw when they read you. You never learned why. And somewhere in there you stopped being a person who wanted a job and became a row in a system that was counting you.

We talk a great deal, in this industry, about what hiring does to companies. Time-to-hire. Cost-per-hire. Quality of hire. Every cost gets a name and a number — except one.

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Nobody measures what the process does to the person going through it.

That silence is not an accident. The systems most companies hire with were never built to hear from the candidate. They were built to receive, filter, rank, reject, and forget — and a system designed to forget you is not going to ask how it felt. So the most common experience in the entire labour market, the experience of being on the other side of the screen, goes almost entirely unrecorded. We have data on everything in hiring except the thing it is actually done to.

We think that is the wrong way round. So we are going to do something the industry mostly hasn’t bothered to do.

Not guess. Not infer it from drop-off rates or read it off an abandonment curve. Ask — directly, in your words, how the process actually landed: where it respected you, where it wore you down, what you wished someone had told you, and what, if anything, made you want to keep going.

We are not pretending to know the answer in advance. The honest position is that we don’t, not with the precision this deserves, and we would rather collect the evidence than perform certainty we haven’t earned. This is the beginning of that collection — the first questions, put plainly, to the people who have been treated as data and rarely asked for any.

If you have applied for a job in the last year — got the offer, didn’t get the offer, or never found out — these are for you.

The applicant experience survey

It takes about four minutes. A few of the questions waiting for you noesishiring.ai/survey:

• When you applied, how confident were you that a real person would actually read it?

• Did you understand what the company was looking for — or were you guessing?

• If you were screened out, were you told why — clearly enough to correct a mistake, if it was one?

• Did the process treat you as someone the company was trying to win, or someone it was trying to filter?

• In one sentence: how did it leave you feeling about the company?

The rest are here: noesishiring.ai/survey. Answer the ones that matter to you; skip the ones that don’t. There are no right answers — only what actually happened to you, which is the only thing we want.

We will publish what we find. Not a polished number engineered to flatter anyone, including us — the real distribution, including the parts that are uncomfortable for an industry that would rather not look. Because you cannot fix a relationship you have refused to measure, and hiring is a relationship, even when one side has spent twenty years pretending it’s a transaction.

That belief is not a marketing line for us. It is the entire premise. Treat the applicant as a stakeholder with a right to be seen, to be told the truth, and to speak back — and a fairer process is simply what follows.

So tell us what you really think — at noesishiring.ai/survey. We built NoesisHiring to listen on the other side of the screen, and this is us, listening.

You can add your first name, if you like also the email address (or not) we will NEVER use them. This just helps to assess how many real people contributed.

Antonio Specchia is the founder of NoesisHiring, an AI-powered recruitment platform. He is a researcher, Routledge author, and the creator of the Applicant Relationship Management (ARM) framework. His first book, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Medium and Small Enterprises (Routledge, 2022), laid the foundation.

A forthcoming book, Applicant Relationship Management (ARM): Human–AI Collaboration in the Agentic Economy, is in preparation for Routledge. His research on Applicant Relationship Management has been widely accepted among academics and HR professionals.