Candidate Drop-off Rate and How Hiring Intelligence Can Help

You're not alone if you’re having more difficulty securing and retaining quality hires.

A Blind survey of over 5,000 professionals found that candidates and employees are leaving work and reneging on job offers at higher rates. 

One in 10 workers have rejected a job after officially signing a job contract:

• JPMorgan Chase: 20 percent renege rate
• Oracle: 19 percent renege rate
• Intel Corporation: 16 percent renege rate
• VMware: 14 percent renege rate
• Wayfair: 13 percent renege rate

Its study also found that at least 100 employees (6 percent from JPMorgan Chase, 5 percent from Oracle, and three percent from Facebook) quit without saying a word to their employer. Even higher percentages of candidates don’t make it through the application, screening, and assessment phase, which can slow down your hiring process, bring down morale, and cost you tens of thousands of dollars over time. 

What is a candidate drop-off rate?

The opposite of pass-through rate, candidate drop-off is the percentage of candidates who enter your hiring pipeline from sourcing, referrals, etc. but do not get hired. You can also calculate drop-off rates from one step of the hiring funnel to the next, which is often more helpful than measuring your overall drop-off rate. 

What is a good candidate drop-off rate?

Most overall drop-off rates (from application to hire) are more than 99 percent, which is not an issue as long as you are landing quality hires in a cost-effective/timely manner. The more concerning drop-off rates exist from the job ad phase to the application, the application to the screening phase, and the screening phase to the interview stage. 

If you have an unusually high job-ad-to-job-application drop-off rate, then your ads aren’t doing an adequate job of eliciting interest from prospective candidates.

If you’re experiencing a high application drop-off rate, then your application might be too complicated, long, or tedious.

Some of these funnel steps (like job application drop-off rates, which are around 90 percent) are already high on average. Out of 250 applications, most companies will interview only four to six of those applicants on average. Some of these drops will be because candidates have willingly exited the hiring process, and others will be due to you screening them out of the process. 

How to measure candidate drop-off rate?

The candidate drop-off rate is a simple measurement: The number of applicants who left the hiring processes ÷ by the number of total applicants x 100. So if you start with 150 applicants and end with three hires, you have a 98 percent drop-off rate… (147 ÷ 150) x 100. 

You should calculate your drop-off rate for the overall hiring process and at each step of the hiring funnel. It’s also important to look at why candidates are dropping off (are you letting them go, or are they leaving of their own accord). If you’re letting go of a lot of candidates at an unusually high rate, it could be because you aren’t attracting enough qualified candidates through your pipelines. 

How hiring intelligence helps with candidate drop-off rates

Hiring intelligence leverages advanced analytics and data to optimize and improve every hiring step in the hiring funnel. Hiring analytics can give you a bird’s-eye view of the hiring funnel, identifying where you’re sourcing the most qualified candidates, how well your assessment methods are at screening candidates, and how effective your interview panel is. 

With hiring intelligence, you can improve these processes over time by continuously feeding data back into your platform. Over time, your technology can identify which channels are yielding the best quality candidates and what types of experiences and qualities are indicative of the best hires. Hiring intelligence platforms, like Crosschq, can identify passive vs. active candidates, provide external recruiters with tools they need to find the right candidate, reduce unconscious bias, and provide you with post-hire evaluation features to track new-hire performance.

With Crosschq, you can improve your drop-off rates and quality of hire with:

• Crosschq’s opt-in network of highly qualified and active candidates
• Time-saving enhanced search capabilities
• 360 reference check reporting that can gather candidate reports within 48 hours
• A 360 platform that reduces overall turnaround time reduction by 85 percent
• Customizable real-time alerts that provide you with the information you need when you need it
• Candidate data enriched with soft skills, past education, performance, and more

Crosschq and improving candidate drop-off rates

Crosschq offers several advanced hiring intelligence tools to help you improve your drop-off rate, quality of hire, and other key hiring metrics. Advanced digital reference check technology can help inform your interview process, 100+ prebuilt quality-of-hire reports can help you measure your talent against industry benchmarks, and sourcing optimization integrations can improve your ability to attract top talent from the best sources. 

Get a Crosschq demo to see how we can help you get quality candidates through your pipeline.