A poor candidate experience isn’t a single problem with a single fix. It’s a different challenge in every industry, and the sectors getting it right prove that meaningful improvement is well within reach—often without a major technology investment.
Our research report, Inside the Candidate Experience 2026, analyzes survey data from more than 1,000 job seekers across 10 markets globally alongside data from PeopleScout’s Candidate Experience Index across more than 20 industries. In this article, we take a deep dive into the sector-level data to see what specific practices are driving the difference between industries that are getting it right and those that aren’t.
Healthcare and Engineering: The Quiet Overperformers
Two sectors produce notably better-than-average experiences: engineering and healthcare. The engineering sector has the highest number of candidates rating their experience as positive at 55%, with healthcare close behind at 52%. Healthcare also holds the lowest negative experience rate of any major sector, at just 7%—less than half the rate seen in retail or technology.
The healthcare data is particularly striking given the context. It is a sector with high hiring volumes and meaningful AI suspicion (49% of candidates believed they were screened by AI), yet the sector produced some of the best candidate sentiment in the dataset. The likely explanation is the structure of the process itself: healthcare hiring tends to involve direct human contact at early stages. Even if candidates think AI is involved in the process, they are confident their applications were evaluated by a person, not simply filtered by a system, and the data reflects that.
Engineering’s outperformance tells a similar story from a different angle. Technical assessment in this sector tends to be explicit and well-explained, meaning candidates understand what they are being evaluated on and why. That clarity—even where AI is involved in earlier stages—significantly improves how the overall experience is perceived.
Both sectors offer a lesson for other industries: the experience is better when candidates understand the process. Transparency throughout the journey matters.
IT/Tech: High Adoption, High Expectations, and a Paradox Worth Examining
Technology sector candidate data paints the most complex picture. These job seekers have the highest AI adoption of any sector (81%) and the highest AI screening suspicion (74%)—both by a wide margin—while still posting a respectable 46% positive experience rate. But IT/Tech also has the highest percentage of candidates saying that AI makes hiring feel less human (66%).
The paradox is instructive. Technology candidates are likely more informed about AI—including its use in hiring—than almost any other group. They are more likely to suspect it is being used, more likely to feel its dehumanizing effect, and more attuned to gaps between what a process claims to be and what it delivers.
Technology companies are managing the basics reasonably well, but the AI transparency conversation is where the experience breaks down. This gap will likely widen as candidate expectations in the sector continue to rise.
Government and Education: The Widest Gap Between Expectation and Reality
Hiring within the government and education sectors represents the most significant experience challenge in the dataset—and one with implications that go beyond employer brand.
Candidates in the government and education sectors place the highest priority on fair assessment of any major sector (4.43 out of 5), yet these sectors have the lowest positive experience rate (35%), the highest ghosting rate (74%), and the highest rate of employers not mentioning AI (77%).
For public sector talent acquisition leaders, this is both a candidate experience opportunity and a reputational one. Organizations that champion fairness and transparency in their public-facing mission have a natural head start in applying that same standard to how they treat applicants—and closing this gap may be one of the most visible trust-building moves available to them.
Retail: The Highest Volume, Highest Risk Sector
Retail accounts for the largest share of respondents in this study and carries some of the most consequential experience findings in the dataset. A 72% ghosting rate. Just 35% of candidates say they had a positive experience. Employer silence about AI at 75%—among the highest of any major sector. Only 23% of candidates are very confident a human reviewed their application.
Retail also has the most direct overlap between its talent pipeline and its customer base. The candidates being ghosted in retail hiring are, in many cases, regular customers of the same companies. A third of retail candidates who have had a negative recruitment experience say they would stop purchasing or actively discourage others from applying. This has some major commercial consequences in a sector where customer acquisition costs are significant, and word-of-mouth travels fast.
High-volume retail hiring is precisely where automated workflows and AI screening deliver genuine efficiency benefits. It is also precisely where the communication gap is most costly—because the scale of the brand exposure is highest. For any talent leader running volume retail programs, the candidate experience opportunity in this sector is among the largest and most commercially significant in the dataset.
Banking and Financial Services: Better at AI Communication, Still Falling Short
The banking and financial services sector performed best when it comes to communicating with candidates about AI—but don’t get too excited. Nearly two in three banking candidates (64%) still heard nothing about AI from employers, which says more about how low the bar is than how well the sector is doing, with silence running as high as 77% across the other major sectors.
The good news is that relative edge still shows up in the experience data: 48% of the sector’s candidates rated their experience as positive, the second highest among major sectors. This suggests even partial, inconsistent communication can move the needle on candidate sentiment—which says something about how easy this problem should be to fix, and how little most sectors are doing about it.
Banking’s modest edge likely reflects regulatory pressure to be explicit about automated decision-making, coupled with the industry’s standard of more structured, formal communication in general. But the sector still shows that even a partial improvement in communication is replicable elsewhere.
The Takeaway
The practices that move needle when it comes to candidate experience—transparency, frequent communication, a process candidates can understand—aren’t sector-specific. Any organization, in any industry, can adopt them. The sector data simply shows what’s possible when they do, and what it costs when they don’t. This change doesn’t require new technology or a bigger budget. It simply takes a decision to implement fundamental best practices that close the gap between candidate expectation and reality, to stand out from the competition.
To explore the full data and benchmark your organization’s candidate experience, download the Inside the Candidate Experience 2026 report.
