Reto Stöckli was inducted into the CX Hall of Fame for a long arc through every digital shift since the marketing textbook had a single page on online, and for the surface he keeps pointing to that the rest of the practice still ignores: the candidate experience.

Stöckli’s career has tracked the digital marketing discipline through its full evolution, from first-generation web through CRM, marketing automation, and the current AI-driven layer. Most CX practitioners with that career length have settled into a comfortable orthodoxy. Stöckli has not. The argument he takes into client conversations now is that the largest underexplored CX opportunity in most organizations sits not on the customer side at all, but on the candidate side: the experience that job applicants have when they engage with the company.

His evidence is concrete. A national restaurant chain that quadrupled its email acquisition by adding a simple opt-in to job applications. The eight-week application processes that quietly burn the company’s reputation across every applicant they touch. The brand damage from a rejected candidate who experienced poor process is real, measurable, and almost never accounted for. Every company that has lost specialists they could not replace, Stöckli argues, has done so partly through application experiences they would never have tolerated on the customer side.

What earned Stöckli induction is the willingness to keep pointing at the underexplored surface while the rest of the practice invests in the well-trodden ones.