Enhancing Candidate Experience: Lessons From a Healthcare Recruiter

Recruiting is about more than filling positions—it’s about fostering trust, aligning with organizational values, and building a purposeful and human process. This is especially true in fields like mental healthcare, where emotional intelligence and mission alignment are essential. 

Throughout my career as a recruiter, I’ve seen how these principles come to life. Most recently, my time in the mental healthcare sector as the Director of Corporate Talent at Brightside Health was especially formative as I built teams and leadership grounded in empathy and psychological safety. That experience reinforced that a recruitment approach rooted in compassion and transparency can strengthen hiring processes in any field.

Drawing on my experience, I’d like to share some key strategies for building a supportive and psychologically safe recruitment process—practices that address the unique challenges of mental health recruitment and offer valuable lessons for hiring across industries. If you’re looking for ways to strengthen and expand your hiring strategy, I’m confident these insights can help you create a more human-centered recruitment experience.

The Stress of Job Hunting and How to Alleviate It

Looking for a job is an anxiety-inducing process. In a 2024 survey of 1,000 job seekers conducted by Resume Genius, 72% of respondents reported that “job hunting has negatively affected their mental health.” Another study by Indeed showed that 27% of respondents said they have to overcome anxiety to find a job they want, while nearly half of respondents said that most employer application processes are too long and complex, adding to the issue. 

Pain points throughout the process exacerbate stress. According to a Castle Employment Group study, job seekers identified interview anxiety (40%), lack of feedback (30%), difficulty finding suitable opportunities (20%), and crafting a standout resume (10%) as the primary sources of frustration. 

To address these challenges, recruiters can take several practical steps:

• Set clear expectations: Outline the hiring process in job postings and provide realistic timelines. This transparency helps alleviate candidate uncertainty.
• Offer prompt feedback: Keep candidates informed after interviews to build trust and reduce their anxiety.
• Be supportive: Recognize the emotional toll of job hunting. Simple gestures like proactive check-ins or sharing resources can make a significant difference.

These efforts not only ease candidates’ stress but can also enhance your organization’s reputation.

Building Psychological Safety Into Recruitment

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson says “psychological safety nurtures an environment where people feel encouraged to share creative ideas without fear of personal judgment or stepping on toes.” The concept of psychological safety–coined in Edmondson’s book The Fearless Organization–is vital in mental health recruiting. But it’s equally beneficial in any industry. A 2024 BCG study found that organizations prioritizing psychological safety had significantly higher employee retention rates.

Recruiters play a crucial role in setting an example of psychological safety. You create an environment of trust by fostering open, honest dialogue and ensuring candidates feel comfortable discussing their experiences. Here’s how:

• Emphasize transparency: Share details about your company’s mission, culture, and expectations from the start.
• Model honesty: Be authentic in your interactions and encourage the same from candidates.
• Align messaging: Ensure every team member a candidate interacts with reflects the company’s values.

At Brightside Health, one of my favorite moments was hearing candidates–regardless of the offer outcome–say that the process echoed the organization's culture and purpose. This consistency leaves a lasting impression.

Meaningful Interviews: Asking the Right Questions

Supportive interviewing isn’t about avoiding tough questions—it’s about asking thoughtful ones that reveal authenticity and emotional intelligence. This approach aligns with the mental health sector’s values but is equally effective in other fields.

Here are some impactful questions:

• What work environments have helped you thrive, and which have held you back?
• Can you share an example of when you felt mentally and emotionally supported at work?
• Beyond external factors, what drew you to this role and company?

Listen carefully to candidates’ answers and questions. Are they thoughtful and reflective or rehearsed and generic? This approach fosters meaningful conversations and helps assess cultural fit.

Tips for Empathetic Interviewing

Creating a psychologically safe interview environment takes effort but yields significant results in the form of confident candidates. Here’s what I recommend recruiters do to make their interviewees more comfortable:

1. “Geek out” on the mission: Candidates drawn to the company's mission will often explain why they connect to it in their initial interview. Go there with them—talk about your own connection and what you love about working there. This shared enthusiasm in the mental health space can create a deeper connection, which can also apply to other industries.
2. Be vulnerable: Bring up instances where you, as a recruiter, have learned from your mistakes, then ask for instances where they learned from theirs. This will help model the behavior you’d like to see from the candidate and show them it’s safe to be their honest and authentic selves.
3. Train your hiring managers: Brightside Health, like many startups, may initially hire a lot of individual contributors. As the organization grows and people are promoted into manager roles, they may not have previous hiring experience or proper management training. To help with this, we developed an internal training program for all hiring managers, ensuring that anyone in charge of bringing new people into the company was an expert in the process. In the training we also considered how we could present our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in an interview panel in a meaningful way. In short, we made sure we thought through the entire interview process well before we ever posted the role.
4. Be transparent throughout: It’s important to be as clear as possible about a candidate’s initial fit and what the process of moving forward looks like. Try offering a written outline of the process in a follow-up email so they can see it, review it, and understand it. Knowing what to expect allows candidates to adequately prepare and can help reduce stress and anxiety associated with an interview.
5. Give feedback ASAP: Keeping the candidate in the loop with timely feedback after every milestone and interview goes a long way. I always try to get the candidate on the phone to share feedback if I can. In a 2023 survey by the hiring software company Greenhouse, two-thirds of respondents reported having been ghosted after a job interview. This kind of company behavior results in a culture of anxious interviewing and can hurt your reputation.
6. Part ways compassionately and with takeaways: Providing detailed, meaningful, and compassionate feedback is crucial if you are not progressing with a candidate. Begin by sharing positive things, like exemplary qualities and traits recognized during the process. Then share a few specific examples where the candidate’s skills perhaps fell short of the job requirements. You might say something like, ”We really appreciate the time and effort you put into our process. While you clearly have a solid and impressive background in data analysis, you haven’t yet managed a team or project as large as this. We need someone with a proven track record of successfully managing and leading big teams.” Candor and kind transparency are everything.

Assessing and Improving Your Process

Continuous improvement is key to effective recruiting. At Brightside, we used surveys to gather feedback from new hires about their recruitment experience. Questions included:

• How would you rate your overall experience with the recruitment process?
• Did the recruiter communicate clearly and provide timely feedback?
• How prepared were your interviewers?

We aimed for a 90% satisfaction rate, using the results to identify areas for improvement. This practice ensures your process evolves to meet candidates’ needs.

Conclusion: A Safer, Smarter Hiring Strategy

Here’s something I’d like to leave you with: recruitment isn’t transactional; it’s a relationship. Every interaction, from the first email to the final offer, is a chance to make a genuine human connection that benefits your process, your company, and the person on the other line. Recruiting can feel like a race to the finish line, but taking the time to build trust and show compassion pays off—not just when it comes to finding the best candidates but in building a reputation that continues to draw top talent for years to come. 

So, the next time you’re structuring an interview, sending feedback, or reviewing a candidate pool, ask yourself: How can I make this more human? How can I make this process reflect not just the company’s values but mine? That’s where the magic happens.