Candidates per Hire

What is Candidates per Hire?

This metric supports your marketing and candidate experience metrics and can be used to predict the candidate numbers needed in your pipeline to make a successful hire for a similar role.

How to calculate Candidates per Hire:

Total # candidates / Total # hires = Candidates per Hire

You may want to segment the total candidate number to a particular role or level for a more accurate number, especially if you are using this number for pipeline predictions.

Pros:

This metric can provide insight about how many candidates you are likely to need in your pipeline before you will make a hire. Over time as you hire more people in the same role, your prediction of the number of Candidates per Hire will become more reliable.

Further segmenting your data by candidates who progress to interview stages per hire can also help you ascertain the average number of conversations you’ll need to have to make a hire.

A significantly high number of Candidates per Hire may also indicate a larger issue and be an indicator to help you rectify them. Such issues could include a poor candidate experience (compare with drop off rates), poor marketing strategy (attracting too many applicants with the wrong skillset) or unrealistic expectations for the role or hiring process.

Cons:

This metric will not provide a lot of useful insight when used as average over an entire recruitment period across a number of roles, or for roles that you’ve only made a single hire for. So you’ll need to segment your data in order for it to be a useful predictor of future pipeline hiring or an indicator of the success or failure of either your recruitment marketing or hiring strategy.

As well, using Candidates per Hire for one role will not always be an accurate benchmark for a similar role when different skills are required for the hire. Depending on the complexity of the role, and how often you hire for this role, you can expect this number will vary.

For example, over a 12 month period you may need 47 candidates per each Frontend Engineer you hire, whereas, for a one time hire of an Office Manager, the number of candidates may be 103.