Most recruitment processes were not designed from scratch. Screening stages were inherited. Assessment formats were carried forward from previous cycles. Application funnels were built with the organisation’s administrative needs in mind rather than the candidate’s experience.
But new research published by TST reveals the true cost of that fragmented approach: organisations that have mapped their end-to-end candidate journey are seven times more confident their screening process finds the right people – at 62% – compared to just 9% among those that haven’t.
The findings are one of the starkest gaps in the entire Best-Practice Early Careers Guide, and suggests that the deliberateness with which a journey is designed matters far more than the individual tools or stages within it.
Unpacking the data: What factors are driving this?
Journey mapping transforms screening confidence
According to the research, the sevenfold confidence gap between organisations that have mapped their full candidate journey and those that haven’t reflects a fundamental difference in how recruitment operates.
Functions that have interrogated every stage, from first awareness through to offer acceptance, know what they are looking for at each point, why each stage exists, and what a successful outcome looks like. That deliberateness produces confidence that reactive, inherited processes cannot replicate.
Keep-warm strategies are twice as strong in mapped journeys
Organisations with a mapped end-to-end journey are twice as likely to have a strong keep-warm strategy in place, at 69% compared to 33% among those without one.
In a market where the gap between offer acceptance and start date can stretch across months, and where competitors are actively courting the same candidates during that window, the strength of a keep-warm strategy has a direct impact on cohort yield. The data suggests that journey mapping creates the visibility needed to identify and address the points where candidates are most likely to disengage.
Internships attract significantly more applications – and deliver stronger retention
The report unpacks how organisations with strong intern-to-graduate pipelines retain 11 percentage points more graduates by year three, at 73% compared to 62%.
Interns who convert to graduates already understand the culture, have built relationships across the business, and have had the opportunity to self-select into an organisation they have actually experienced. That familiarity appears to produce a meaningfully different quality of commitment, and makes internship investment one of the higher-return decisions available to an Early Careers function.
What are best-practice Early Careers functions doing to strengthen their recruitment?
1. Map the end-to-end candidate journey deliberately: Audit every stage of your recruitment process with the candidate experience as the primary lens. Align screening directly with development, giving applicants a transparent view of what to expect rather than a process that feels opaque. The ECO data shows that this single exercise is the strongest predictor of both screening confidence and keep-warm effectiveness.
Talk to our data team about conducting a recruitment journey review
2. Invest seriously in internship channels: Internships attract more applications per role than any other Early Careers route, and organisations with strong intern-to-graduate pipelines retain significantly more graduates at year three. Treat internship programmes as a core pipeline and retention strategy, not a peripheral offering.
Talk to our Solutions Team about designing high-impact internship experiences
3. Gather structured candidate feedback at every stage: Treat candidates as the primary experts on their own journey. Collect feedback from those who accept, those who decline, and those who do not receive an offer. Each group has different and valuable information about where the process is working and where it is falling short.
Download the full Best-Practice Early Careers Guide
The data in this article is based on findings from TST’s Early Careers Optimiser (ECO) methodology, which brings together quantitative and qualitative research from more than 200 Early Careers leaders across 30 global organisations.
For a comprehensive understanding of all six vectors of Early Careers best practice, download the full Best-Practice Early Careers Guide to discover the practices that consistently distinguish high-performing Early Careers functions.