Hiring Retrospective - Advancement Rate

After interviewing all Summer and Fall, we’ve found the next member of our OfficeLuv Product Team, a talented and thoughtful software engineer.

This hiring cycle, I wanted to approach recruitment as we would a product feature or epic. Part of that, of course, is having a good retrospective. The first post detailed our hiring steps and flow. Here’s the second part, an overview of advancement rates for each stage of our hiring funnel.

Timeline & Sourcing

We had this role open and the job posted for 5 1/2 months (mid-June through the end of November). We received applicants every week (not every day) throughout the cycle, but with most applying in June/July and October/November.

During that time, we syndicated the job on 7 main sources: our open-source projects/site, our company careers page, AngelList, Indeed, LinkedIn, HackerNews (the monthly Who’s Hiring? post), and a couple Chicago-based Slack groups.

For those syndication sites, the ranking by most to fewest applicants was: Indeed, AngelList, career page, HackerNews, LinkedIn, our open-source site, and finally the Chicago Slack groups.

For the final 2 1/2 months, we used recruiters to source additional, higher-quality candidates. In terms of candidate volume, the recruiters ranked somewhere between our career page and HackerNews during their active months.

Throughout the job’s opening, I cold-emailed approximately 20 candidates. I found most of these by scouring Github or Meet-Up groups.

All combined, we sourced approximately 150 candidates throughout the job’s open period.

Advancement Rates

I wrote previously about the steps in this role’s hiring process. Here were the advancement rates through those steps:

• 150 candidates
• 30 phone/coffee/code interviews (20% of candidates)
• 7 on-site interviews (23% of phone interviews)
• 1 offer made (and accepted) (14% of on-site interviews)

Proportionally, we advanced recruiter-referred candidates much more than general applicants. Candidates we reached out to directly also advanced much farther than others. This is the first hiring cycle in which I’ve kept such specific numbers, so I’m not yet aware of how these advancement rates compare to an average hiring flow.

Anecdotally, the rest of the hiring team felt very good about our on-site interviewees. In the past, some on-site interviews have been lackluster, which fatigues the rest of the interviewing team. This cycle, I tried to be pretty liberal in scheduling phone/coffee interviews, so I was a bit surprised to calculate such a low rate of advancing candidates to that second step. Again, rough reasons why candidates did not advance to a further step were outlined in the previous post.

Now we’re ready to compare against this for our next hiring cycle. How does this compare to your current or last hiring flow? I would love to know and share more specifics.