Conversion Rates are a key metric of the health of your overall hiring operations—they are indicators that something has changed—good or bad. Intentional changes in your conversion rate can significantly impact your hiring velocity, cost of hire, and ability to meet your hiring goals.
For recruitment marketers, tracking key conversion rates is crucial for optimizing the recruitment process and improving the efficiency of finding, engaging, and hiring top talent.
Setting the Foundation: Key Definitions in Recruitment Metrics
Before you engage in any sort of metrics, there are a few things you should consider. First and most importantly, you should clearly define each object, action, or activity that is part of the metric. Definitions allow everyone to operate from a shared understanding of the data and enable everyone to understand the data and make decisions more quickly.
Applicant – a person who has engaged with your online application process, completed the application and submitted it to the ATS for consideration.
Apply – the act of submission of an application.
Candidate – a person who has either expressed an interest in a job or a recruiter has expressed interest in this person for a job.
Click – an activity where an interested person engages with a job, often based on the match result, title, or other visible job information.
Disposition – moving a candidate from ‘new’ to a new status (reviewed, screened, interviewed, unqualified, etc.)
Ghosting – the act of a party failing or ceasing to respond to recruiter outreach, failing to show up for an interview, or failing to show up on the first day of work.
Hire – the activity where an applicant accepts an offer, completes onboarding, and starts work.
Interview – the activity of a person being interviewed, generally not by the recruiter.
Screen – the activity of the recruiter talking to the applicant to better understand if they are qualified for the open job.
Offer Acceptance – where an applicant is presented with and accepts a job offer from an employer.
Qualified Applicant – an applicant that meets a pre-defined set of criteria – often measured by the progression of the applicant to the next stage of the hiring process.
Calculating Conversion Rates: The Basic Formula
With your definition set of what you are measuring, it’s now essential to consider the tools you have access to to understand how to measure against your definitions. For most, leveraging the stages in your ATS is key to understanding most of the key conversion rate metrics. Qualified is only a helpful metric, for example, if you have a mechanism to identify which applications are reaching qualified status.
Analyzing Data Through Multiple Lenses
The key to any conversion rate is understanding the conversion rate itself and many slices of the data that will provide immediate insights. The most common ways to slide the data are:
Job Family: Sometimes known as job type or job category – there are distinct differences between hiring for the hourly workforce and hiring for your next CEO. Looking at the data through this lens can help you better understand what the general data tells you.
Hiring Manager: The hiring manager may be new to leadership, unfamiliar with the technology, or unsure of their needs, all of which can lead to a less-than-ideal experience.
Location: “Location Location, Location” matters, and given the role and the area, you will find that some jobs simply perform better in some places than in others.
Source: Where did the candidate or applicant originate from? This could be a job board, social media, corporate brand, referral, etc. Capturing the source is generally the biggest challenge.
Understanding and Managing Change in Conversion Rates
As you consider your conversion rates, the most important thing to watch for is change. Intentional or accidental, understanding when you have a change and a plan to peel apart, then what is different—a higher or lower conversion rate can impact either the beginning or the ending number with a significant change—or worse, both simultaneously. Whether or not these changes are good or bad has far more to do with your desired outcomes than the shifts in the numbers themselves.
As you review any of these metrics, you need to keep everything aligned to your specific business objectives – what is the business ultimately after – for example:
- Increase Hiring Velocity
- Lower cost per Hire
- Lower overall costs
- Improve candidate experience
- Improve the quality of hire
- Improve retention of employees
Any change in your conversion rate will have a downstream impact on the rest of your funnel – so once you identify a change (because you noticed it or because you have done something to initiate such change), follow that change through the pipeline to understand the ultimate impact on your hiring operations or your Human Capital ROI.
As you consider metrics, the last piece to consider is transparency—you can track anything you like, but if no one can see it, it is very difficult to institute change.
Aligning Metrics with Business Objectives
Understanding and actively managing conversion rates is fundamental to building an effective, data-driven recruitment operation. While the metrics are important, success lies in establishing clear definitions, consistently measuring the right data points, analyzing changes through multiple lenses, and maintaining transparency throughout the organization.
By thoughtfully approaching conversion rate analysis and tying it directly to business objectives, recruitment teams can make informed decisions that positively impact hiring velocity, costs, and quality of hire.
Ready to take control of your recruitment metrics and optimize your conversion rates? JobSync’s advanced Hiring Operations platform helps you track, measure, and improve every step of your hiring funnel.
Schedule a demo today to discover how JobSync can help you turn your recruitment metrics into actionable insights and better hiring outcomes.
