If you belong to a recruitment organization that’s concerned with candidate experience and recruiting metrics, you’re on the right track. Today’s recruiting environment is tough. Most of the best candidates are already employed and not particularly motivated to jump through hoops to engage your recruiters if it means a long and difficult application. Or a non-mobile browsing experience on your career site. Or a complete lack of communication after submitting an application. Or even an outdated online experience that makes your company look like they don’t know what they’re doing.
So being focused on making candidates happy and satisfied any time they interface with your company is a great step in the right direction.
But so many companies don’t go deep enough. Sure, you may bend over backwards to understand and optimize the candidate experience for the candidates you know. But what about the ones you don’t know? Anonymous candidate experience surveys can help uncover insights from every stage of the hiring journey—even from those who drop off or never make it to the interview.
Think about your career site. On average, about 1 percent of the people who visit your career site ever complete an application. So if you have a great candidate experience for that 1 percent, then you are absolutely ignoring 99 percent of your potential candidate pool.
These are important recruitment metrics. Because if you could increase that 1 percent applicant rate by one half of one percent, you’d increase your candidates per open job by 50 percent.
Let that sink in for a second.
I know what you’re saying. We already have too many unqualified candidates for our open jobs. We don’t need more.
Right. That’s the point.
Most organizations’ candidate experience is passively designed to screen out the casual candidates and engage the active ones. In other words, the worse your candidate experience is, the more it will repel candidates who already have a job and don’t have the motivation to stick with it.
Think about your important job families. Technical. Healthcare. Operations management. Do you really have the luxury of not trying to get everyone into the pool?
Whether you’ve ignored your online candidate experience or invested heavily in employer branding and career site design and content, do you know whether it’s working for your target audience? Could your message be clearer? Your visitor to applicant rate higher? Are you engaging casual candidates or filtering them out?
The answers lie in understanding the other 99 percent.
This is where your recruitment dashboard becomes critical. A good dashboard doesn’t just report how many people applied or how fast roles were filled. It should show where your applicants came from, how they moved through the process, and where they dropped off. This is not just a tracking tool. It is your lens into the parts of the funnel that are most often overlooked.
If your dashboard template only focuses on the final result, you’re missing the point. You need to measure everything that happens before the apply button is even clicked. That’s where real candidate behavior lives.
So how do you do this?
Start by understanding where people come from. Look at referral traffic, social media clicks, and paid ad conversions. Measure how long they stay on your site. How far they scroll. Whether they watch your videos or read your job content. These are silent signals. They tell you whether your message is connecting.
Next, tie that behavior to applications. Do people who spend more than a minute on your job page apply at a higher rate? What about mobile users? Do they apply more often when the experience is fast and smooth?
When you make small changes to improve this experience, even slight lifts in your conversion rate create real value. That’s why the 1 percent matters. Because the improvement is exponential.
Let’s say you increase your apply rate from 1 percent to 1.5 percent. That might not sound like much. But it gives you 50 percent more applicants without spending another dollar on sourcing.
That’s not theory. That’s math.
And that’s the value of KPIs for recruitment that focus on early-stage activity. Too many teams only measure results. But when you focus on measuring intent and behavior, you start to learn what keeps qualified candidates from applying in the first place.
You also learn which messages are working. Which pages are too long. Which roles get abandoned. And which types of content keep people engaged.
You start learning not just who applied, but who almost applied.
And once you understand that, you can fix it.
None of this happens if you only look at completed applications. You need data from the top of the funnel, all the way through. Otherwise, your recruitment management strategy is incomplete.
The good news is this doesn’t have to be hard. Survale’s platform captures this data automatically. It helps you understand behavior before people apply, and it ties that back to your recruiting metrics.
It also helps you gather feedback from candidates who apply and those who don’t. This makes your numbers more than just numbers. It gives them meaning.
And it gives your team something to act on.
Improving your career site and online experience is not about design awards. It’s about getting more of the right people to say yes to your process. Even small improvements make a difference. Because every single qualified candidate you lose at the start is one less shot at filling a key role.
So yes, the 1 percent matters. A lot.
And if you’re serious about hiring better, you’ll focus on making that 1 percent stronger. Not by adding more traffic. But by making the experience better for the traffic you already have.
FAQs
What is a recruitment metric?
A recruitment metric is a data point that tracks part of the hiring process. Common ones include time to fill, cost per hire, and applicant conversion rate.
What are the 5 C’s of recruitment?
The 5 C’s often refer to clarity, culture, communication, connection, and compliance. These help shape the full recruiting experience.
What are the KPIs for recruitment?
Key KPIs include time to hire, source of hire, cost per hire, candidate satisfaction, and applicant drop-off rates.
What are the 3 P’s of recruitment?
The 3 P’s typically refer to people, process, and performance. These form the base of a structured recruitment strategy.
