Talent Board, a non-profit organization focused on the elevation and promotion of a quality candidate experience through its annual recruiting and hiring industry benchmark research, today released a new research report that reviewed the candidate experiences of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies To Work For to determine how fair and positive these experiences are.

The “100 Best Companies To Work For” and “Great Place To Work” are proud designations that thousands of companies strive to earn and hold onto every year. They are based on a rigorous employee experience methodology that evaluates and certifies thousands of organizations in America’s largest ongoing annual workforce study. The question Talent Board wanted to answer with this new research project was, do the 100 Best Companies To Work For also deliver fair and positive candidate experiences?

Talent Board created a comprehensive checklist for reviewing each company’s research and application stages, which their team followed to ensure consistency in each review. The results below are based on a simple point system: companies score points for having implemented practices that improve candidates’ perceptions of fairness and their positive sentiment, as revealed by Talent Board research over the years.

The review research report highlights include:

• Marketing content is important to candidates. The top 10 all-time CandE Winners provided 163% more of all the recommended marketing content in the Talent Board checklist candidates want than the 100 Best Companies to Work For (30% versus 3%).

• Candidates want to know what is going to happen next. When it comes to setting expectations after the application stage, 80% of the top 10 all-time CandE Winners provided expectations, versus only 13% of the 100 Best CompaniesPlaces to Work For.

• Only 31% of the 100 Best Companies to Work For sent Talent Board a rejection note within 2 weeks. But 40% of the all-time top 10 CandE Winners sent Talent Board a rejection note within 2 weeks, another big difference.

• The qualities that made up a great candidate experience a decade ago still make up a great experience today. And job seekers continue to crave these qualities from potential employers:

• Frequent and respectful communication

• Insights into your company and its culture

• Plenty of feedback

For 11 years Talent Board has been measuring the candidate experience at companies big and small across industries. They’ve worked with over 1,350 companies and have surveyed over 1.4 million candidates to date. Each year they give awards to companies with above-average candidate experience ratings, and only 21 companies out of the 2022 100 Best Companies to Work For, including Accenture, Capital One, Hilton, Northwell Health, West Monroe, and others have won Talent Board CandE Awards to date.

“We hypothesized that the 100 Best Companies should deliver a great candidate experience, which is something we haven’t seen reviewed before,” said Kevin Grossman, Talent Board president. “Based on what drives a positive candidate experience that we see every year in our benchmark research, after our review research was conducted, we expected to see a better overall candidate experience at these companies. And while it was, for the most part, positive and fair, many still underdelivered when compared against our highest-performing CandE Winners.”

The entire Candidate Experience Review Report: The 100 Best Companies To Work For is now available to download here.

The 2022 CandE Awards & TalentNet Live Conference will be November 2-3 in Dallas, TX, where the companies with above-average candidate experience ratings will be celebrated. Registration is open and HR and recruiting leaders and their teams can save an additional 20% by using discount code CandEAll20 when they register here.

About Talent Board

Founded in 2011, Talent Board and the Candidate Experience Awards is the first non-profit research organization focused on the elevation and promotion of a quality candidate experience. Talent Board delivers annual recruiting and hiring industry benchmark research that highlights accountability, fairness, and the business impact of candidate experience. More information can be found at https://www.thetalentboard.org.