We’ve added a preview of the email that will be sent to candidates when a provider rejects their application. We did this to give providers greater awareness of how their reasons for rejecting a candidate will be used, and in order to encourage them to write better feedback.
This change was added in production on 13 March 2023.
The issue
A review of the reasons for rejection sent to candidates has shown us that sometimes these were not of high quality.
Since we started asking candidates if the feedback was helpful in November 2022, 46% of the responses to the survey have said that the feedback was not helpful.
Issues we’ve spotted with feedback have included:
- candidates being written about in the third person and referred to by their name or as ‘the applicant’
- very short reasons not written as full sentences
- use of ‘N/A’ or ‘see email’
What we changed
Previously, after the training provider selected and wrote their reasons for rejection, the confirmation page showed their answers using a ‘check your answers’ style summary list, with ‘change’ links:
We changed this to instead contain a preview of the exact email that would be sent to candidates:
This no longer contained the ‘Change’ links, but we judged that the ‘Back’ link at the top (or the browser back button) would be sufficient, as this goes to the same page anyway.
Research
We tested the changed design in usability sessions with participants from 9 providers, alongside other changes.
All providers were unaware that the candidate saw the feedback presented in this way, except for one provider who had used the sandbox to test the candidate journey.
Around half suggested they would elaborate on feedback now they know how it looks, and would avoid the note-form style, third-person wording and bullet points they use currently.