Recruiting Benchmarks 2018: New Jobvite Data

Adrian Dixon

March 29, 2018

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Industry leader Jobvite just released their annual recruiting benchmark report.

recruiting benchmarks 2018 jobvite

Overall, their YoY numbers show fewer interviews, more offers, and more candidates hired in 2017. Recruiters conducted fewer interviews to get to an offer: the number of interviews decreased while the number of offers increased.

Jobvite has three explanations for these improved conversion rates:

  • Fewer applicants in today’s competitive talent marketplace.
  • More data and tools like AI to help recruiters find and screen candidates more quickly.
  • Recruiters are better equipped to screen out unqualified candidates earlier so candidates who reach the interview stage are more qualified.

Let’s take a closer look at their conversion rates for 2017 below.

Visitors to applicants rate

The percentage of visitors to a company’s career site who convert to applicants increased from 9% from 2016 to 12% in 2017.

On average, this means that 8 visitors to your career site are needed to get one applicant.

Jobvite’s key recommendation for nurturing active candidates is:

  • use AI like chatbots to improve engagement and efficiency with candidates

Applicants to interviews rate

The percentage of applicants who move forward to the interview stage was 12%, a decrease from 15% in 2016.

Jobvite suggests automating your workflow and leveraging AI to improve this part of the process. For example, using AI to analyze the pool of candidates based on factors like who is most likely to accept an offer and shortlist, rank, and grade them so recruiters know who to focus on.

Interviews to offers rate

The percentage of interviews that result in offers is the biggest increase in the 2017 data: from 19% in 2016 to 28% in 2017.

That translates to interviewing approximately 4 people to make one offer. Jobvite believes:

The increased use of AI and machine learning to automate operational tasks is creating new efficiencies that free up recruiters’ time to focus on the human work of relationship building and nurturing passive candidates.

Offers to hires rate

The percentage of candidates given an offer who then become hires increased from 83% in 2016 to 90% in 2017.

The average top-to-bottom recruiting funnel conversion rate improved from 0.28% to 0.37%. Overall, this means you need 270 people to come to a job posting in order to get one hire.

Other interesting things to note

In 2017, most applicants still came from job boards and career sites, accounting for almost 90% of all applicants followed by referrals and job agencies.

When it comes to source of hire, however, the most efficient source of hires were custom campaign, social media shares, and internal hires.

Contrary to popular belief, enterprises and companies above $50M in revenue have the fastest recruiting process and the most efficient hiring process: they don’t need to conduct as many interviews or attract as many candidates to get to one hire.