What Candidates Want From Recruiters in 2026

Andrew Davis: Recruiting emails get under 10% response rate. And across TextUs staffing accounts, texts get a 43% average. Same recruiters, same candidates, same jobs. I'm Andrew with Team TextUs. What you're about to watch is a conversation I had with Adam Conrad, Chief Experience Officer at Great Recruiters.

Adam Conrad: It's good by me.

Andrew Davis: Before Great Recruiters, Adam ran business and recruiting operations for a staffing firm out of Troy, Michigan. He's built this from the inside and has seen this problem firsthand. He's written a version of the same line a hundred times online: candidates don't pick the firm and they don't pick the logo — they pick the recruiter, because the recruiter is where the trust actually gets built. Which is why the two of us ended up looking at the same thing from different sides. We see the conversation while it's happening — who replied, how fast, how many texts it took to get there. Adam sees what the candidate says about it afterwards, in their review. His team asked 12,600 candidates whether a recruiter's review affected their decision to call back, and 86% of them said yes. So that's what we get into today: where candidates' experience actually breaks, what the response data looks like by channel, and why the firms with the best reviews aren't always the ones with the best pitches. They're the ones who answer. Everything we reference in this conversation is in the recruiting communications report that both Great Recruiters and TextUs have built together — the link is below. Here's Adam. Adam, welcome to the show.

Adam Conrad: Andrew, I appreciate you having me. I've been a long-term fan of TextUs. You mentioned I've been in the staffing industry for twenty-five-plus years. Part of my passion is being someone who cut their teeth as a recruiter, moved into recruiting operations, and was running a staffing firm. One of the things I wanted to do was help recruiters better manage their reputation. The reputation of a firm really boils down to the experience that recruiters are creating for those candidates. We're nine years in — we have hundreds of thousands of reviews from candidates across the different staffing verticals — and I'm just happy to share what we've learned along the way with the audience. Pleasure being with you here today.

Andrew Davis: Yeah, absolutely. And obviously we have firsthand experience with that on the recruiting side too. We'll jump into the communication stuff in a second, but I'm curious — nine years into Great Recruiters, after running a staffing firm for fifteen-plus years — what gave you the idea to create Great Recruiters? Was there a specific moment, or something that just kept repetitively happening where you thought, "I can fix this"?

Adam Conrad: Ha — funny enough, there was a very specific moment. As a recruiter, you don't get a lot of time off; you're always working, always there. Back in 2016, I took my family on our first week-long vacation. We were down in Florida at a great resort, and I met a bartender there who was really personable. He said, "I want to make sure you have a great experience while you're here — I'll be here all week, let me know if you need anything." So I got to know him — he was an Ohio State fan, I'm a Michigan fan, we got past that — but at the end of our stay, when we were saying goodbye, he handed me a business card and said, "Would you mind rating your experience with me — not the resort, not the food, but the experience I created?" I'd been looking for something for the staffing industry to help with this, and right there the light went off: this is for the recruiters. I started digging, and there wasn't a platform that existed. You had end-of-year survey programs, people using SurveyMonkey, but nothing built to do exactly what he was doing — saying, "I want to create a great experience for you, and it's important for me that you share how that experience was." Throughout the whole week he was essentially setting himself up to be evaluated, which was also a catalyst for him to make sure he actually delivered the experience he'd promised. That's really the springboard for what became Great Recruiters. Today it's far more than just the recruiter — it's about getting feedback across all the meaningful moments in staffing: sourcing, recruiters, account management, on assignment, compliance. We've developed a fully robust experience and reputation-management platform, and it's all centered on the idea that real-time feedback is what fuels your growth. It's really difficult to grow in the moment if you're waiting until the end of the year to ask the people you successfully placed — you're missing everything in between. That was the beginning of Great Recruiters, and we've been growing ever since.

Andrew Davis: I love that — that's the beginning of something really cool, where you saw an idea and said, "I can apply this to the industry I'm in." Especially today, where there are a lot of fake job postings, scams, and things like that — building trust through the recruiting experience is really important. I've seen that many times myself, and not all recruiters are built the same. It's a great story that a bartender kicked that off during your vacation. Speaking of building trust and winning in this space as a recruiter — where do you think the candidate experience actually breaks down here in 2026, heading into 2027? Why are there slow responses, missed touchpoints, or candidates going quiet and ghosting recruiters? And on the flip side, where do the really good recruiters go really well and create a positive experience?

Adam Conrad: Definitely a loaded question, because there are so many variables outside a recruiter's control. The one piece a recruiter can always control is how they communicate — when they communicate, who they communicate with. When you look at the breakdown of a candidate experience, it all comes back to communication: Did you call me back when you said you would? Did you keep me informed? Did you respond when I had a question? Did I know what was happening next? Candidates understand, for the most part, that recruiters don't control everything — you don't control whether the hiring manager likes your resume, whether the client changes the requirements, or how quickly the client gives feedback. But you absolutely control how you communicate through that process. Sometimes the best communication is just saying, "I don't have an update yet, but I haven't forgotten about you." At the firm I was with, we created "Fanatical Fridays" — every Friday afternoon, it was our job to make sure no candidate went into the weekend wondering what was going on. Whether we had an update or not, it was important to give them the peace of mind that they could relax into their weekend. Recruiters are juggling a lot of candidates, and we don't always know how important a given job is to someone — but we can control making sure they go into the weekend with an update, even if that update is "I don't have one, but you haven't been forgotten." That's where a majority of it breaks down. Andrew, we actually did an analysis of all the reasons recruiters get negative reviews — we took every negative review, looked at the sentiment, and distilled it down to ten key things. A majority fall into some form of communication breakdown: no closure, silence, no updates, no outreach. The number one reason you get a negative review is ghosting, and there's no reason — with technologies like TextUs — that you ever need to ghost someone. The platforms are there to let you communicate openly; it's a choice to be disciplined enough to do it every day, every week. Other reasons show up too — process breakdowns, mixed-up interview details, promised callbacks that never happened. Those things stick with us in life generally, candidate or not — we all just want peace of mind about what's coming next. Communication is huge, it's something we can control, and yet a lot of people are still doing it poorly. With a platform like Great Recruiters, we don't want to find that out at the end of the year — we want to know now, so someone can jump on it and say, "I'm sorry, that's not the experience we intend." Even the best recruiters sometimes drop the ball, and if nobody's watching all the balls and asking "how am I doing," that ball can get dropped and never picked back up. When you're in the know, and someone tells you "you got a bad review because you didn't call back like you said you would," that gives you the opportunity to turn a negative into a positive. Nobody's perfect — we're not asking for perfect, we're asking for progress — but you can't do that without real-time insight.

Andrew Davis: Yeah, I think it boils down to process a lot. I love your "Fanatical Friday" idea — that should be adopted in sales too; I shouldn't go into the weekend not knowing where my pipeline sits. But from a candidate's seat, that's a great feeling — knowing you're not forgotten even if there's no update, even if you're one of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five candidates. It does boil down to process. From an operational standpoint, is the best approach continually reviewing individual recruiters' process, training them to a specific process, or is it more "your results are in your placements and your numbers"?

Adam Conrad: In staffing you have the quantitative and the qualitative side. Everybody measures submittals, interviews, hire ratios — every ATS reports on it, and there are data-analytics companies built around that. What we bring is the other side of the story: the reason somebody sticks with you, wants to come back to you, or wants to refer someone to you isn't about the outcome. Some of my best referral sources, when I was a recruiter myself, were people I never placed. What they could count on was that I'd always be there for them, that they'd get a response from me, that they'd have a great experience. When you think about referring a friend, family member, or coworker, you're going to lean on referring them to someone who created a great experience — you don't want to refer someone and have them say "that was the worst experience I ever had." Your reputation is on the line. So when it comes down to it, having a system in place to measure those interactions matters. Again, it's not about being perfect — it's about staying in the know, and having a platform that helps you catch it when the ball gets dropped and take action to make it better.

Andrew Davis: I totally agree — it's like a realtor: you don't want to refer one who gave you a bad experience, because then it's on you. Does a bad candidate experience usually show up in Great Recruiters' star rating and content, or is it more that a really positive experience shows up? What do you see more of — is it a healthy balance?

Adam Conrad: What's funny is, when you don't ask, human nature is to want to share the negative stuff — we find it exciting. If we have a bad experience and nobody asks about it, we need to get it off our chest, we need to share it. If you're just leaving it to chance whether you get reviews, your reviews are mostly going to be negative, because it's the people fueled to want to share how bad it was who'll do it unprompted — we'll tell ten times more people about a negative experience than a positive one. When we launched, we didn't know what we'd see, but what's stayed consistent the entire time is that about 80% of the feedback we get is positive. That means more often than not, firms are doing a good job, doing the right things. The problem is, if you don't ask people in the moment how you're doing, they typically won't take the time to share it on their own. But if you have a negative experience and get ghosted on your own job search, you're going to find ways to share it — Google, Glassdoor, Indeed, wherever — you need to get it off your chest. There's a fear for staffing firms: "What if it's negative?" But what if it's negative and it's out there and you have no idea who said it? What if it's negative and you never find out, but they keep telling their friends to avoid that company or recruiter? This puts you in control — the only way to get better is to control the feedback and have a way to bring it in and take meaningful action on it. Don't fear the negative; it's going to happen. But the clients who use Great Recruiters are committed to creating a great experience — we didn't make them say that, they came to us wanting a way to make sure they're actually doing it, because everybody says "we have the best candidates, the best process, we have everything" — but the rubber meets the road in the interaction between two individuals. We collect that insight down to the desk level, down to the individual contributor, and for recruiters the words we hear most are that they love the feedback — it's motivating, it's validating, it makes them feel more empowered because they're in control of their reputation and the experience they're creating. They have a way to make sure — like the bartender — that what they committed to is actually happening. It's not just their belief about the experience; it's real data from real people experiencing their process, their organization, their recruiting. That validated information helps them make good business decisions about where there's room to improve.

Andrew Davis: Given that feedback runs about 80% positive, what's one thing you've noticed over the last nine or ten years that almost every good recruiter has in common? If you had to pick one thing, what does every good recruiter just have, or need to do, to create that positive experience?

Adam Conrad: They meet the candidate where they're at. A rigid process doesn't fit into the daily lives of all these different people. For example, there was a recruiter who was fanatical about following up and got a negative review — the candidate basically said, "Pump the brakes, I don't need to hear from you every single day." She realized her process was to follow up daily with everybody, but that was actually creating a negative experience for some candidates. She thought, "If this person feels this way, maybe others feel the same — maybe I'm being a little overbearing." So instead of a rigid process, she made it fluid: she started asking, "How would you like to be communicated with? How often do you want to hear from me?" She adapted and improvised to create a better experience for everyone, and it also gave her insight into something she didn't realize she was doing that was creating a negative experience for some people. Recruiters who are highly rated all the time have great communication, strong knowledge of their jobs and industry, and they aren't making promises they can't follow through on — that's a big mistake younger recruiters make: they want to tell the candidate what they want to hear. The reality is you need to tell candidates the truth and be able to have a tough conversation when there's no update or no feedback. You can't promise to place somebody, but you can promise to keep them in the know along the way and to create a great experience — those are things you can control; you can't always control the outcome. People often assume you'd get a bunch of negative reviews from people who didn't get the job, and the answer is no, because that's not what was promised. There are a lot of variables that impact whether or not you get a job — sometimes clients just pull the job, sometimes you weren't the right fit, and that's okay. But if you maintain the relationship and keep that high level of experience, they become candidates for life, your job gets easier, and you can start tapping into your network and growing your referral base. Those are the things that get missed if you're just treating everybody the same and running one rigid process.

Andrew Davis: I totally agree, and it's a very personalized thing in my opinion — you're placing a candidate in a role, you do this job five days a week, some do it more, and it's a pretty personal experience. And you mentioned directness — having to give direct feedback, and a lot of the time that's difficult feedback to hear. I remember, well before my time at TextUs, going up for a head-of-marketing role against another candidate, and I lost — I didn't get the job. But the experience with the recruiter was fantastic: he called me and gave me honest feedback, said, "Listen, you killed it in these areas, you were really good here, they passed because of this, and I'd work on these three things." It led me to TextUs about a year later, but it was a direct conversation that wasn't necessarily easy to hear. It's a very personal thing. Adam, how do you think candidates' expectations of the recruiting process have shifted over the last decade or so?

Adam Conrad: I think, as consumers, our expectations have shifted, and I don't think the industry has caught up to where we are in other parts of our lives — from consumer goods and purchasing, I know at any moment where my package is and when it'll get here; I order food and know where the driver is. We have all this information at our fingertips through platforms, and that hasn't become a consistent thing within staffing yet. As consumers, we expect to know where things stand at any given moment, and I think that expectation has changed. I also think some candidates don't need to talk to a recruiter as much anymore — some are happy just picking up shift work, so there's not as much need to communicate. And we hear the opposite too — candidates who say, "This is the seventh time Betsy has placed me, I wouldn't go anywhere else." Everybody's needs are a little different, so it's hard to put candidates into one bucket of expectations. Depending on the types of jobs, the industry, the location, and the clients, you start to see patterns of what makes sense. But the number one thing is that candidates expect information readily available to them, and there's technology that allows that — the industry is just still catching up. Some companies do it really well, and others are probably still managing it on a spreadsheet.

Andrew Davis: I'd agree with that — I've seen both ends of that spectrum myself in the staffing space, and there's definitely some catching up to do, but the firms on the leading edge of technology are doing very well and making a name for themselves — it's a positive experience all around. Kind of following that expectation thread — do you think candidates expect text messaging to be a channel of communication now? Is that the number-one channel you saw running a firm, or working with firms now, or is there another channel surpassing it?

Adam Conrad: Every day, text messaging is core to a lot of what we do, and it can also be intrusive if you don't have the right permission — which is why there are so many regulations around it. Permission first is important, but for me, I love it — do you want to opt into status notifications? Yes, let me know. I don't need to talk to somebody, I don't need a phone call or an email — my phone is right next to me, I get an alert: "Would you like to reschedule? Yes or no." There's a convenience through text message that's critical — I couldn't imagine the world without it. Depending on where someone is in their career journey and how long they've been in it, text might not be their number-one mode, but it comes back to understanding their communication preferences — what's the best way to reach you, what's the best number, do you prefer email or text? One interesting thing: because we don't own the candidate data, we don't have permission to text on their behalf, so we don't do that directly. But our clients using TextUs will say, "I just sent you a review request in your email, wanted to remind you to check it" — so although they send it via email, they use text to reinforce that it's there. We also use text for verification and validation — we used to validate purely through email, but once we started validating through text messages, verified reviews shot up because it's so easy and convenient. Without a doubt, texting is a mainstream thing every staffing firm should have — but they need to know how to use it and how it'll resonate with the people they're working with.

Andrew Davis: So simple. Yeah, I see a lot of that — it depends on the persona, like you said. Is it somebody who's been in the space for thirty-five years and is strictly email, doesn't want a text message, or is it somebody five or ten years in who says "I don't check email, maybe once or twice a week"? It all depends, and I think it comes back to that personalization — meeting the candidate where they are, having multi-channel outreach available, whether email, text, phone, or even LinkedIn message sometimes. Having those options available is really important, and then it's that continuous, personalized follow-up. I loved your example of opting into status updates — "do you want to reschedule?" — things like that can be automated and collected easily.

Adam Conrad: Well, one word you brought up that I talk about a lot is trust — trust is established through transparency. If you're doing direct outbound to people who don't know who you are and sending text messages, I get random texts all the time — "we're in your neighborhood to trim trees" — I don't know these people, I just delete, delete, delete. What recruiters are doing well is saying, "Hey Andrew, I'd love to talk to you — I've helped other marketing folks like you. Here, check out my reviews of what people think about working with me." They're using text to share their Great Recruiters profile. Now you get a text, you click through, you read it, and you think, "It's Adam Conrad, wow, he's helped a lot of other marketing people, he's highly rated." There are lots of ways to use this — you don't know where somebody's at, so saying "text is 100% the way to reach everyone, always" isn't true either — nobody believes that. Sometimes it's email, sometimes LinkedIn messaging, sometimes carrier pigeons — it depends on the individual, but everybody needs access to a way to communicate easily. I love it for quick check-ins — a quick way to check in, a quick way to make sure things are going well. Personally I don't love long conversations over text, but I'll use it to confirm what's going on: "Just want to confirm your resume was submitted." "Just want to confirm the interview's been scheduled." Send the email, but also confirm it's there — it's just another line of communication that enhances the overall experience.

Andrew Davis: Yep, absolutely. I'll acknowledge there's a risk of over-texting candidates too — in the report we built together, 70% of candidates say they'd unsubscribe if brands text them too much. But that's about volume, not necessarily the channel. Recruiters texting one-to-one, at a personal level, at the right volume for what that person wants, doesn't trigger the same fatigue or push people to unsubscribe. There's a bit of an art and a science to it, but feeling out what's best for the candidate is great.

Adam Conrad: Like saving money — I've got kids in sports, and sports are expensive. A sports store said, "Sign up for text alerts and get 20% off your purchase today." I signed up, great — but within about ninety minutes, maybe a couple of days, I was unsubscribing, because I was getting bombarded. At no point did they ask how often I wanted alerts, or what I wanted alerts about — it was just, like you said, part of that consumer report — they took advantage; the door was open and they walked in without knocking. That's a quick way to get shut down fast. I'm glad you brought that up, because it is important to meet people where they want to be, no matter the channel. I signed up for order alerts and then the marketing emails started flooding in — I don't have time for that, so: unsubscribe. It's unfortunate, because I might miss out on good opportunities, but they never asked how often I wanted to be communicated with, and that's a really important thing to know.

Andrew Davis: Yeah — listen, I work for a texting provider, and I unsubscribe from texts all the time for that exact reason. It's an art, and you really have to figure out what the right amount is. I want to go back to a data point we mentioned at the start, Adam — Great Recruiters surveyed 12,600 candidates, and 86% said a recruiter's reviews influenced whether they'd call that recruiter back, and 60% said good reviews were the reason they called back at all. When did you notice this was making a real impact — you started about a decade ago?

Adam Conrad: Yeah. One of the things we've always said is: put your reviews to work for you. People collect reviews, every recruiter has a profile, and when they get 30-plus reviews at four and a half stars, they get GR-certified — we have different badging levels. It's nice to have, but you want to put it to work. In an industry with spam, bots, fake jobs, and fake recruiters, nobody knows who's on the other end of that text, call, or email. So we say: share your reviews. When you meet somebody new, the profile is designed to let them know who you are, what their peers think of you, what kind of accolades or opportunities you've had. It's a way to passively introduce yourself and give the candidate what they need to decide whether to call you back — because if they don't know who you are or your firm, it's a trust question: can I trust this person? We're putting that trust up front by saying, "Here's why you can trust us." The numbers are actually over 14,500 reviews now since we did the report. We asked recruiters what the impact was, and I have yet to talk to a firm that measures this as closely as they measure submittals, interviews, and hires. It's the old adage: make a hundred calls a day. I always ask, well, why a hundred — what if you make fifty and forty-nine call you back? Isn't that good enough? So I ask firms, "What's your callback rate?" Nobody knows. Nobody knows the efficiency of their outbound communication or how it compares from one recruiter to the next. So we started asking — when you share your profile, what happens? The response came back consistently: "I'm getting 50 to 60% more candidates to call me back." So we said, we need real data behind this. We inserted a question into the review process for any recruiter who was GR-certified, simply asking: "Did reading [Recruiter]'s reviews influence your decision to call them back?" 60% of candidates — across healthcare, IT, engineering, commercial, labor, it doesn't matter — said yes, they called back because of the reviews. That's the influence. We're in a reviews economy, and we trust reviews almost as much as a friend's recommendation. We have some recruiters where 85% of candidates say they called back because of the reviews, and others where it's lower — and when we ask those recruiters if they share their profile, the answer is usually no. So they're missing out on those callbacks. You can't place somebody you never talked to. Recruiting is all about how you get that conversation started — once it's started, the ball's in your court, you have to create a great experience, and you have a platform to help measure and make sure you're doing a good job; you get the review, and those things compound. But none of it happens if they don't pick up the phone or return your call. That data tells me there are a lot of candidates out there looking for a recruiter they can trust, and when they find one, they're very likely to call back.

Andrew Davis: Yeah, I'd agree. For the candidates with a lower callback rate — do you think it's that they don't know how to share their profile, or how would you recommend they increase that callback rate?

Adam Conrad: I think part of it is texting the profile, sending the email, leaving a message — a three- or four-prong approach: "Left you a message, sent you an email, connected on LinkedIn, and here's a text follow-up to let you know I did all those things." In one of those touches they include their profile link, because LinkedIn shows your career, but recommendations there can be edited and aren't validated the same way. This is a system management uses to make sure recruiters are doing a great job — these are validated candidates. Part of it is just comfort and education — some people are nervous about coming across as "look at me, look how great I am," but the positioning isn't that; it's "I want to make sure I create a great experience for everyone I work with, here's my profile with reviews from people I've worked with, and I want to give you peace of mind that I'm not one of those recruiters you read about who ghosts you." That lowers the barrier of trust, and when you create transparency, trust rises. Then the ball's in your court, and you have to follow through — that's why it works so well, because people don't know who to trust these days, and our platform helps them know whether it's worth having a conversation with someone.

Andrew Davis: I love it — trust is huge to me, and I think it's getting harder in today's world, with bots, AI, and scams out there. Building trust is one of the biggest takeaways from this call. Adam, last question as we wrap up — what's one thing, whether a statistic or something to remember, that you want listeners to walk away with?

Adam Conrad: That's a good one. Control what you can control — your attitude and your effort. You can control whether you provide value in every call. You can control whether you're just a transactional recruiter churning through candidates like Kleenex, or someone who tries to find ways to provide value in every interaction — recruiting gets a lot easier if you do. Like what you said about getting value out of that call even when you didn't get the job — that's a choice. That recruiter could have avoided the feedback conversation because it was uncomfortable, but instead he told you where you did well and what to work on, and left you with value. There was a candidate I worked with, treated well, never placed — ten years later he calls me and says, "Adam, I'm a manager now, I need to hire twenty people, and you're the recruiter who's going to do it for me." The only reason he called is because I created a great experience for him, not because I got him a job. Opportunity exists everywhere, but it doesn't exist if you're not remembered. So do things that are memorable, do things that add value — that's the biggest takeaway, whether you're texting or using Great Recruiters, it doesn't matter. Those are the things you can control. And practice giving bad news — you're going to give it a lot more than good news. Good news is easy. Delivering bad news in a way that still leaves someone feeling good — that's where the industry can really improve as a whole.

Andrew Davis: Absolutely. Adam, how can people find you?

Adam Conrad: You can find me on LinkedIn — just Google Adam Conrad, I'll show up. You can also reach me directly at adam@greatrecruiters.com. I'm not going to give out my cell phone number to text me though — not quite yet, but we'll get there.

Andrew Davis: Love it. For the viewers — TextUs and Great Recruiters have put together a recruiting communications report that you can find and download in the link to this episode. Adam, thanks so much for joining us — really enjoyed the conversation.

Adam Conrad: My pleasure. I love our partnership, love what you guys are doing, and thanks for giving me the chance to showcase what Great Recruiters is doing out there. Appreciate it.

Andrew Davis: Love it. Thanks again.

‍