Bad Offer Acceptance Rate? Use Candidate Feedback

Your offer acceptance rate is the metric showing you the percentage of candidates who accepted your job offer. 
You can calculate it as shown below:

Normally, your offer acceptance rate would only include final, official offers to external candidates; and yet, Candidate Experience feedback can help you have fewer dropouts throughout your entire hiring process. 

You can’t improve what you don’t measure, but what’s a good benchmark, you ask? When it comes to your offer acceptance rate, data shows that 90% is an ambitious yet reasonable goal.

Now, in order to understand how to improve your offer acceptance rate, you should start by asking yourself what the causes for it can be. We drafted a list of possible reasons for you. Your candidates:

1. Had a poor Candidate Experience 
2. Are dissatisfied with the offered salary or benefits
3. Received a better offer from another employer
4. Weren’t sure about leaving their current job
5. Disliked your company culture or senior leadership
6. Didn’t see any true challenge or opportunity in the role

As previously mentioned, one thing is when a candidate refuses your offer - it’s something else if they withdraw their application. The reasons for such an occurrence have to do with the effectiveness of your recruiting process and their experience throughout it.

Perhaps there was a disconnect on a personal level between the candidate and the recruiter or the hiring manager; or maybe the hiring process was far too long and boring; it could have been your communication with the candidate being off, your company values didn’t shine through during the application, or the job and role didn’t meet their expectations.

Whatever the reason for your candidates’ refusal or withdrawal, Candidate Experience feedback will help you get to the bottom of. You’ll be able to identify the reasons behind their actions, and point out your areas of improvement within your hiring process.

But how?

By using a feedback solution integrated with your ATS - Starred will do just that as it helps you collect feedback from your candidates, including hired and rejected candidates, as well as those who withdrew their applications or rejected your offers.

It works like this: since Starred connects to your ATS, it will automatically send customized surveys with relevant questions to all of your candidates. They, in turn, will explain their experience and give their feedback. 

The feedback will be collected and instantly translated into insights that you can use to work on your recruitment process and deliver a better Candidate Experience, which will improve your offer acceptance rate. Furthermore, fewer candidates will abandon your funnel, your quality of hire will become stronger, and the time to hire will shorten. 

The feedback from the withdrawn candidates and those who rejected your offer will tell you the reasons behind their choices. These will be listed in order, so you’re aware of what your priorities are.

Don't stop there

Obtaining these insights is essential, especially since you can hear your candidates’ opinions straight from the horse’s mouth, but that’s not where your efforts end. In fact, you also need:

1. Data segmentation. Treating all your candidates’ feedback the same way isn’t correct - that’s what filtering is for. Data segmentation will make your insights more granular. A software developer in Eastern Europe and a sales manager in Silicon Valley might be experiencing different pains. This means that you want to filter your data based on: job roles, departments, countries, and perhaps even cities. 
2. Connect your candidate feedback to your recruiters, interviewers and hiring managers. Your candidates’ experiences can be linked back to them and you can use their feedback data to train and coach your staff so they deliver better experiences throughout your hiring process. The Starred recruiter performance matrix and hiring manager matrix are great examples of tools you can use to train the team and business. 

3. If you end up with too much data to digest all at once, the Starred Priority Matrix utilizes statistical analysis to portray the biggest drivers behind your overall Candidate Experience. It even ranks your priorities for you. 

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TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read)

In this piece we explored how Candidate Experience feedback can help you improve your offer acceptance rate, and more.

In fact, your offer acceptance rate only considers final, official offers, but Candidate Experience feedback can also help you make sure to reduce the number of application withdrawals.

What you need to solve this issue is a feedback solution integrated with your ATS. At Starred, we offer just that. We help you send out customized surveys, segment your data, connect your feedback to your recruiters, interviewers and hiring managers, and help you prioritize your next moves.