Candidate experience has always been a top priority for hiring and recruitment teams.

That said, the current candidate-focussed job market has pushed this even further into the spotlight.

Fortunately, in today’s data-driven recruiting world, certain metrics can help keep track of your candidate experience.

Why Do You Need to Measure Candidate Experience?

Candidate experience is something that will be unique to all organizations.

So, something that works for you may not work for another organization.

To better understand your candidate experience, keeping track of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will help you optimize your recruiting efforts and talent acquisition strategies for the best results.

Candidate experience can be pretty subjective as it differs from company to company. However, recruiters can quickly gauge the most relevant data to improve their strategies with the right metrics.

Measuring candidate experience KPIs can help you quantify the efficacy of your recruitment process.

Along with this, KPIs use data to provide insights into how effectively you achieve your recruiting goals.

This data allows recruiters to make more informed decisions about allocating their resources and which stages to prioritize.

Of course, you want to choose the best KPIs aligned with your overall strategies and goals.

Read more: 5 tools that’ll help recruiters provide the best candidate experience.

To help you get started, here are the top five KPIs you should keep track of.

1. Time-to-Hire

Tracking the length of time from application to offer is a classic recruiter KPI that is even more important for optimizing candidate experience.

Time to hire is often synonymous with “time to fill”; however, both are different.

The time to fill metric measures the number of days it takes from when a job opening is posted to when an offer is accepted. Time to hire measures the duration of when a candidate enters the pipeline until the candidate accepts the offer.

Measuring hiring time can help you identify weak spots in your candidate experience strategies and optimize them accordingly.

In addition, keeping track of your time-to-hire metric can help you understand how quick and efficient your hiring process is. Conversely, the slower your hiring process is, the higher the chances of your candidates losing interest.

Keeping track of your time to hire is also an excellent way to understand which stages of the hiring process are taking the longest, improving your productivity.

2. Interview-to-Offer Ratio

Interviewing can be highly time-consuming. If your interview-to-offer ratio is low, your investment is not paying off.

If this sounds like an issue you are facing, consider strengthening the candidate screening stage.

Moreover, the fewer candidates you have to reject after an interview, the better their candidate experience. Remember that a time-consuming and lengthy interview process reflects poorly on candidates.

Measuring your interview-to-offer ratio also ensures overall hiring efficiency, as this metric reveals how effective your recruitment process is. Consequently, more efficiency will equate to a better candidate experience!

3. Candidate Drop-Off

A complicated and lengthy application is a massive turn-off for candidates.

For example, 60% of job seekers have abandoned a job application due to its length and complexity. This figure speaks volumes about how important it is for recruiters to evaluate their application process for candidates.

The application stage significantly impacts the candidate experience, which is why tracking the candidate drop-off rate is crucial. Keeping track of this metric helps explain why candidates abandon their applications.

Tracking this metric works excellently by reflecting the bounce rate from your applications.

If your application process is not user-friendly, mobile-friendly, and takes way too long to complete, you are bound to face a high number of candidate drop-offs.

4. Offer Acceptance Rate

The offer to acceptance ratio significantly indicates an organization’s candidate experience efforts.

A high offer acceptance rate results from good communication and a positive candidate experience. Without a doubt, a poor candidate experience will result in low candidate acceptances, which will negatively reflect on your employer brand.

Ideally, organizations should be aiming for an offer acceptance rate of at least 90%, depending on the seniority of the role and industry. To measure this ratio, divide the number of offers accepted by the number of offers.

An excellent way to tackle low offer acceptance rates is to understand why candidates turned you down. As a result, a positive candidate experience is the first step to persuading top talent to accept your offer.

5. Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a common metric used to gauge customer satisfaction, but today, recruiters use this metric to track candidate experience too. In short, NPS measures how candidates rate their experience with your company.

Net Promoter Score sounds overwhelming to calculate, but we promise it’s not.

To calculate this score, candidates are asked to rate their experience on a scale typically of 1 to 10.

  • Candidates that give a rating of 9 and 10 are considered as “promoters.”
  • Candidates that give a rating between 1 and 6 are considered “detractors.”
  • Ratings between 7 and 8 are considered “passive.”

The score itself is a number ranging from -100 to 100. If there are only detractors, your net promoter score will be -100. If there are only promoters, the score will be 100.

As a result, a positive NPS reflects that your promoters outnumber your detractors. An NPS at 50 or above is considered excellent. If the score is closer to 100, you have a majority of promoters.

Read more: 8 free candidate experience questions & templates for use in 2022.

Recruiters can only implement a compelling candidate experience strategy with the right data and metrics. Keeping track of these KPIs will provide detailed insight into the bottlenecks in your candidate experience.

With this data, recruiters can pinpoint precisely where they need to improve.

Once you have chosen which metrics to measure, set up quarterly or annual benchmarking reviews to reconfigure your candidate approach.

With a data-driven approach to recruiting, nothing can keep recruiters away from their goals!