Candidates per Opening

What is Candidates per Opening?

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 Opening:

Total # of candidate applications over a period / Total # open positions of the same role over the same period = Candidates per Opening

Pros:

This metric will give you an overview of your hiring marketing efforts over a set period of time.

You can further segment the metric not just by role, but by department or seniority to give you more detail on specific marketing campaigns.

You can also cross-reference this metric with Source of Hire to help focus your marketing on either existing candidate channels or help explore new candidate channels.

Cons:

You’ll also need to be aware of how your Applicant Tracking Software populates the total number of applications or candidates you have. Some systems will merge duplicate applications from the same person, others will leave them separate.

This metric is part of a wider group of hiring KPI’s, and should be used in conjunction with them to understand the big picture of what’s happening.

As a stand-alone KPI this metric is too broad and doesn’t go into the detail of whether your marketing efforts have actually secured you a successful hire for your company.