Learning how to calculate acceptance rate when hiring people is a common mantra strategy in the business world, and it’s particularly true for human resource managers that are continuously hiring. If you’re not keeping track of how many offers are accepted by the candidates, you’ll never be able to tell if your process is working or not.
If you’re not keeping track of your acceptance rate, you’ll never know the actual cost of your hiring process.
Monitor your offer acceptance rate to see if you’re hiring the right people. You don’t want to waste resources on a promising candidate who never accepts an offer. You can adjust your hiring strategy to improve the quality of the candidates you hire. The higher the acceptance rate, the more effective your hiring process is.
An effective hiring process draws high-quality candidates and encourages them to accept your job offers. That said, here are various ways on how to calculate acceptance rate during the hiring process.
1. Collect feedback from candidates who decline offers
Let’s say you ran into a friend at a party. You asked them how they were doing, and they told you their life was fine. But it turns out their partner just left them, they’re going through a divorce, and their kids hate them. In other words, things aren’t so good.
When we ask people how things are going, we tend to get the answer that we want to hear: “Fine.” Candidates don’t want to tell you that you’re doing something wrong in the hiring process, so even if something might be wrong with your process, you probably won’t hear about it from candidates who are declining offers.
That’s why it’s important to collect feedback from candidates who decline offers.
After all, those candidates will have had the most exposure to your company culture and the quality of your hiring process. They’ll be able to provide the most insight into how these factors affect your offer acceptance rate because they’ve seen other opportunities as well.
One thing that many recruiters do is send a survey to candidates who decline an offer to find out why they declined and what they think about the offer acceptance rate in general.
Another strategy is to send out a survey after a candidate declines an offer but before they start at another company. The easiest way of how to calculate acceptance rate is simply to ask candidates why they declined their offers. Collecting feedback from candidates in a survey can help you better understand where you need to improve as an employer.
Why collect feedback?
Hiring is an imperfect process, and there are always reasons why someone decides not to accept an offer. These reasons can vary wildly – the money might be wrong, the candidate might have had a bad interview experience, another opportunity might have come up for them, or perhaps they just didn’t like the work that much.
If you want to be able to improve your hiring strategy, you need to know what these reasons are. This is particularly important if you’re trying to hire at scale, as every time someone declines, it affects your overall hiring velocity.
2. Track Offer Acceptance Rate with Linkedin
LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. Linkedin is a great resource for recruiters to track the success of their hiring process. It can also help on how to calculate acceptance rate.
To use LinkedIn to track your offer acceptance rate, recruiters need to be connected with prospective employees on the site. This connection can be made in two ways: inviting a candidate to connect directly through LinkedIn or automatically adding candidates who apply through your company website or job board.
The latter option is much easier and faster, but it does require some work up front. If you want to add candidates automatically, you’ll need to create an application form on your website that allows applicants to sign in with their LinkedIn information before submitting their applications. This will connect them with your company on the site and enable you to see if they accept an offer from you later on.
3. Manually Inputting Candidate Responses to Offers
If you’re not using an applicant tracking system (ATS) or recruiting software, there are still ways you can gather the data needed to calculate your offer acceptance rate. For example, you could have recruiters manually input candidate responses into a spreadsheet or create a form where candidates can self-report their responses after receiving an offer.
Although this method is time-consuming, it enables you to calculate and analyze your offer acceptance rate while providing insight into which candidates accept and decline offers.
As soon as an offer is extended, add it to your system, whether that’s an excel spreadsheet or another internal system. Make sure to include all relevant details such as candidate name, position, date of the offer, status of the offer, and future follow the update. This will allow you to easily see what offers have been made, where candidates are in the decision-making process, and when follow-up is needed.
You’ll want to update the status of each offer regularly, so you know where each candidate is in the decision-making process. Once a candidate accepts or declines an offer, make sure this is reflected in your reporting system, so you know exactly how many offers have been accepted or declined.
4. Use applicant tracking software to track interviews and offers made
Applicant tracking software (ATS) is a great tool for hiring managers. Not only is it useful for managing your job postings and screening candidates, but it can also help you track and organize the hiring process.
Some applicant tracking systems allow you to track the percentage of people who accept an interview request and whether they are still interested in working for your company or if they have decided to move on which can be very useful data. If you’re looking to improve your hiring process, here are some ways on how to calculate acceptance rate using applicant tracking software.
Once a candidate has gone through the entire hiring process, from submitting their application to receiving an offer letter, the final step is closing out their file in the ATS. After all, there’s no need to keep a record of their information after they’ve been hired or rejected. You can use this opportunity to sort them into categories based on how far they got through the process, whether they were rejected during screening, after an interview, at the reference check stage, or somewhere else.
This information can be quickly analyzed to determine your offer acceptance rate. For example, if you have made 10 offers and three have been accepted, your offer acceptance rate is 30 percent.
The number of applicants who are waiting for an offer will vary depending on your hiring needs, but in most cases, you’ll want to make offers within a couple of weeks. If you have candidates who have been waiting for more than two or three weeks, you should reach out to them and check in about the status of their decision. In some cases, this may be enough to get an applicant who has already accepted another job offer to reconsider.
Here are some good stats to look at when using the Applicant tracking software (ATS):
- The offer acceptance rate, which is calculated by dividing the number of accepted offers by the total number of offers made.
- The interview-to-hire ratio is calculated by dividing the number of applicants hired by the number of applicants interviewed.
These two measures will give you a sense of how many applicants you’re interviewing to fill each position and whether you’re converting those interviews into hires.
If you have a high interview-to-hire ratio or a very low offer acceptance rate, it may indicate that you’re moving too quickly in making offers. It might also be an indication that there’s something wrong with your hiring process or that your job descriptions aren’t attracting the right kind of candidates.
5. Measure your time to fill
To find out how often your job candidates accept offers, look at the time it takes to fill a position. If you’re posting jobs and finding candidates quickly, but they’re taking a long time to accept an offer, there’s something wrong with your process. You need to figure out whether you’re making bad offers or if something else is going on that makes candidates turn down offers.
Measuring your time to fill is a good way to track your hiring process efficiency. It’s also a great indicator of how well you’re screening applicants and assessing whether they’re the right fit for your company.
The faster you fill open positions, the more efficiently you’re operating. And if you can decrease your time to fill over time, that means you’re likely making better hiring decisions and reducing the risk of making bad ones.
To calculate your time to fill, just divide the number of days it took to fill an open position by the total number of days it was open.
6. Use Employee exit or turnover surveys
This is one of the most effective ways on how to calculate acceptance rate in your company. What employees think about your company matters a lot because their feedback will help you improve the aspect of the company that needs improvement. Many companies conduct exit surveys as part of their employee retention program, which makes it easy to capture offer acceptance data.
These surveys can be conducted face-to-face, on paper, via email, or by phone and usually include questions that help you understand the cause of or reason for an employee’s departure. It’s also a good idea to ask about the acceptance status of other offers to gauge the market competition for talent.
Rejecting job offers is a natural part of the hiring process, but when it happens too frequently, it can impact your business. It is essential to consider the time, effort, and money you put into prequalifying candidates before making a job offer. You want to make sure you’re offering the proper position to the right candidate.
Exit surveys are a great way to learn why employees leave your organization. You’ll want to ask some questions about how they were treated during the recruiting process and if they accepted a job offer from another company.
If they did accept a job, ask them why they made that choice by having them rank their top reasons or fill in the blank. This will give you insight into what other companies are doing right and where your organization falls short. It will also help you make better offers to future candidates, keeping more of them in-house.
7. Human Resources Information System (HRIS)
Pulling from HRIS software systems, you can see how many people make it through the entire hiring process from application to offer and then how many of those candidates accept offers versus decline. This information can be pulled by job title, job level, department, or geographic location.
These types of HRIS reports can be beneficial in determining whether you are speaking the right language in your offer letters or whether you need to adjust your benefits package to attract better talent. It also provides a history of candidate behaviors over time so you can determine if there are trends that are impacting your company’s ability to hire top talent.
The Bottom Line
The Offer Acceptance Rate is an excellent metric for employers to analyze because it lets them know how many of the candidates that were extended an offer decided to accept that offer. Like all metrics, the offer acceptance rate can be used at multiple stages during your hiring process and could prove beneficial to your business in many ways.
It is the ultimate metric for determining if you are creating a brand that appeals to job candidates or not. You can also use it to help determine the best-selling points of your company, as well as what areas need work. The offer acceptance rate is an interesting metric for businesses and recruiters alike, although it can be challenging to measure. Take the time to consider all the seven methods presented to use the appropriate one for your business.
