Describe your hiring stages, roles, and feedback goals. Makeform turns that brief into a candidate experience survey with stage-aware questions, consistent rating scales, optional comments, and routing details your recruiting team can use to improve the process.
Route recruiting feedback to Google Sheets, Slack, and Zapier.
Sample prompts for the survey builder
Choose the hiring moment you want to evaluate, edit the prompt, and send it to the Makeform builder. Each structure is an example you can adapt to your process.
Audience
Candidates who completed a phone, video, or panel interview
Format
Two-minute survey with ratings and one comment
Prompt size
429 chars
Example survey structure
Two-minute survey with ratings and one comment
Which role and interview format?
How clear were the interview instructions?
The interviewers were prepared and respectful
How timely was communication?
What is one thing we could improve?
Suggested routing tags
Application
Interview
Offer or decline
Ask which stage the candidate reached before interpreting a rating. Application, interview, offer, and rejection experiences expose different problems.
Step 1
Choose a stage
application, interview, offer, withdrawal, or rejection
Step 2
Ask consistently
short scales plus focused optional comments
Step 3
Segment responses
role, location, stage, and recruiting team
Step 4
Improve the process
turn recurring friction into an owned action
Why candidate feedback matters
Recruiting metrics show where candidates leave. Direct feedback helps explain why: unclear instructions, long silences, repetitive interviews, mismatched expectations, or an offer that arrived too late.
Branch from the stage reached so applicants rate the application, interview candidates review interview logistics, and offer recipients answer decision questions. The survey stays relevant instead of forcing one generic questionnaire onto everyone.
Reuse the same labeled response scale for clarity, timeliness, respect, and overall experience. Add role family, location, recruiter, and interview format as routing fields so teams can compare patterns without treating every comment as a trend.
A rating identifies a weak moment; a focused optional comment explains it. Ask for one improvement after the relevant stage, rather than ending with a broad prompt that produces vague praise or unrelated complaints.
Survey moments
A useful candidate experience program asks close to the event and recognizes that each audience has seen a different part of the hiring process.
Evaluate job-description clarity, application effort, mobile usability, and confirmation messages. Keep this version especially short because an applicant has not yet built much context with your team.
Ask about scheduling, preparation, interviewer conduct, question relevance, accessibility of the format, and whether the discussion created an accurate picture of the role and team.
Measure offer clarity and decision speed, then branch by accepted or declined. Decision factors belong in a selectable list so recruiting can group patterns while leaving room for context.
Use neutral wording, optional comments, and an anonymous setting when appropriate. Ask about the process the person experienced, not whether they agree with a selection decision.
Survey workflow
Start with one decision the team wants to make, generate a focused survey, and establish a review rhythm before adding more questions or candidate segments.
Name the stage, role group, and question the results should answer. A brief such as improve interview scheduling for engineering candidates produces a more focused survey than simply asking for recruiting feedback.
Use a consistent five-point scale with labels on both ends. Add conditional paths for stage and outcome, remove questions the team will not act on, and rewrite prompts in the same plain language candidates saw during recruiting.
Share the survey after the relevant event while details are still fresh. Explain how long it takes, whether answers are anonymous, and whether contact information is optional so candidates know what to expect.
Send responses to a shared inbox or sheet, group them by stage and role, and review recurring issues on a set cadence. Assign an owner and next check date for each change instead of collecting feedback indefinitely.
Choosing a survey design
The right structure depends on how precisely you can trigger outreach. Stage-based pulses are easier for candidates to answer; a single branched survey is easier to operate when automation is limited.
Field guide
These six sections connect a response to the right hiring moment, capture comparable signals, and invite enough context to guide a practical recruiting change.
Context
Start with the context needed to interpret the response: role family, location, application source, and furthest stage reached. Decide whether recruiter or interview team should be attached automatically rather than asking candidates to name people.
Expectations
Measure whether the job description explained the work, qualifications, location, and process well enough for a candidate to make informed choices. Separate job clarity from application ease because each points to a different owner and remedy.
Interviews
Ask whether interview logistics were clear, interviewers appeared prepared, questions related to the role, and the candidate had enough opportunity to ask questions. Avoid combining these into one score that hides the source of friction.
Communication
Recruiting silence often matters more than the interview itself. Ask whether candidates knew what happened next, received updates near the promised time, and had a clear contact for questions. Keep speed and clarity as separate measures.
Outcome
An overall rating provides a stable headline, while future-intent questions reveal whether the process affected willingness to reapply or recommend considering the organization. Treat these as perceptions, not promises about candidate behavior.
Open feedback
Close with a specific optional question such as what one change would have improved scheduling. Focused prompts are easier to answer and easier to code into themes than a large blank box. Add follow-up permission separately.
Related recruiting tools
Build the application, scheduling, interviewer feedback, onboarding, and exit forms that sit around your candidate experience survey.
Collect structured applications with questions tailored to the open role.
Open toolGather availability and the details needed to coordinate an interview.
Open toolGive interviewers a consistent scorecard for role-related observations.
Open toolContinue listening after an accepted candidate becomes a new employee.
Open toolCollect candidate contact and background details in a structured form.
Open toolCapture employee feedback at the other end of the employment journey.
Open toolFAQ
Practical answers for recruiting and people teams designing a useful feedback loop.
A candidate experience survey asks job applicants how they experienced specific parts of hiring, such as the application, scheduling, interviews, recruiter communication, offer, withdrawal, or rejection. It combines consistent ratings with a small number of optional comments. The goal is to identify process friction and decide what recruiting teams should improve, not to reassess the hiring decision.
Send it soon after the event you want the person to remember: after an application, completed interview round, offer decision, withdrawal, or rejection notice. A stage-specific pulse usually produces clearer context than waiting until the entire hiring cycle ends. Avoid sending before an important status update; communicate the decision or next step first, then request feedback in a separate, respectful message.
Start with stage reached and role context, then ask about job-description clarity, application ease, scheduling, interviewer preparedness and respect, question relevance, communication timeliness, clarity of next steps, and overall experience. Add one future-intent measure and one focused optional improvement comment. Offer-stage surveys can branch into acceptance or decline factors. Only include questions tied to a decision your team is prepared to make.
It can be. Anonymous feedback may help people speak candidly, especially after rejection or withdrawal, but it also prevents follow-up and can limit segmentation when groups are small. Explain the setting accurately and avoid collecting hidden identifying fields when you describe a survey as anonymous. Another option is to make name and contact details optional, keep them separate from ratings, and ask explicit permission before following up.
Keep a stage pulse short enough to complete in a few minutes: typically a handful of rating questions and one optional comment. A broader end-of-process survey can be longer if conditional logic hides irrelevant sections. Test it on a phone, remove duplicate measures, and state a realistic completion estimate in the invitation. The strongest constraint is usefulness: if nobody owns a question's result, remove that question.
Compare the same labeled scale over time and segment carefully by stage, role family, location, recruiter, or interview format. Review response counts alongside averages so small groups are not overinterpreted. Code optional comments into a short set of recurring themes such as scheduling, communication gaps, role clarity, or interview repetition. Combine quantitative patterns and comments, then assign each improvement an owner and a date to review the signal again.
Yes. Makeform offers unlimited free forms and responses, so you can generate, edit, publish, and collect candidate survey responses without a response cap. The paid tier removes the Makeform badge. You can start with one interview survey, revise its wording and logic, and create separate versions for other hiring stages as your feedback program develops.
Yes. Begin with the candidate's outcome or route it from the survey link, then use conditional logic to show only relevant follow-ups. Accepted candidates can review offer clarity and transition expectations; declined candidates can select decision factors; withdrawn candidates can identify the stage and reasons; rejected candidates can rate communication and respectful treatment. Keep a small shared core so results remain comparable across outcomes.
Turn candidate perspective into a better hiring process.
