Improving your offer acceptance rate can decrease your time to fill and spend per hire, and increase your retention rate. Read on to show your executive team the effectiveness and cost savings that HR and recruiting can achieve.
The offer acceptance rate (OAR) is the percentage of accepted offers versus the number of offers the organization sends out.
Understanding the OAR is an essential step in understanding the effectiveness of your organization's recruiting process.
The OAR is a straightforward calculation. You take the number of offers accepted and divide it by the number of offers given. You can track this in a way that works best for your organization’s needs, so make these calculations based on your organization’s normal reporting cadence. If your organization normally reports metrics monthly, quarterly or semi-annually, you can prepare this number as one of the analytics to show the effectiveness of your recruiting process and your candidate experience. It can be helpful to present one number that presents the overall measurement and another set of numbers to break it down between different departments to give a more complete picture.
The main way to increase your OAR is to ensure that your candidates have a great candidate experience along the way. This includes researching competitive
salary ranges, giving clear explanations of the recruiting process and what to expect, keeping your recruiting process as simple as possible, posting the job with the salary in the
job post, and clearly defining the role and expectations.
People will not accept offers when they thought the job was one thing and it ended up being something completely different. This can range from a change in responsibilities to a change of job title, or a misalignment of salary expectations. Being clear about all of these items is important from the first job posting to the sourcing emails and any other initial communications with prospective candidates.
To ensure clear communication between the candidate and the organization’s expectations, make sure you are asking the correct screening and discovery questions. Ensure that the salary posted in the job description meets the requirements the candidate is seeking. Look for their hopes with the position. See what their longer term career goals might be and help the candidate to see how the organization can help them meet those goals. If your recruiting process is not concise and clearly explained throughout the process, the candidate may not be interested when the offer is presented.