Spotlight Online for College Employment and Recruiting Professionals, February 21, 2008
Respondents to NACE's 2007 Recruiting Benchmarks Survey extended job offers to an average of 38.8 percent of the new college graduates they interviewed. An average of 66.5 percent accepted their offers. Based on these averages, employers interviewed 3.9 new college graduates for every hire they made.
How does your organization's offer/acceptance rate compare? While you will want to compare your offer/acceptance rate with the rates of others as a whole, you also should benchmark with similar organizations to determine the "norm" in your industry or geographic location.
No measure exists in isolation, but your offer/acceptance rate can not only help you identify areas in your recruiting program that may need improvement, but to see the things that are going well. For example, if your offer/acceptance rate is lower than "average," you will want to look at why. Is the problem in what you're offering to candidates? Is your offer competitive? Are you trying to hire for locations many candidates consider unattractive?
On the other hand, you can also look at which schools give you the best offer/acceptance rate to see where your efforts are getting the best return.
How to determine your acceptance rate:
Divide number of acceptances by number of offers; multiply by 100. This gives you the percentage of offers that are accepted.
Example: (175 acceptances/225 offers) x 100 = 77.7 percent acceptance rate.
- Number of offers = _____
- Number of acceptances = _____
- (Number of acceptances) ___ / ___ (number of offers) = ___
- Multiply your answer to #3 by 100: ___ x 100 = ___ percent acceptance rate
OR
You can determine the ratio of offers to acceptances by dividing the number of offers by the number of acceptances. This gives you the number of offers you must make to achieve one acceptance.
Example: 225 offers/175 acceptances = 1.3 offers to 1 acceptance.
- Number of offers = _____
- Number of acceptances = _____
- (Number of offers) ____ / ____ (Number of acceptances) = ____ number of offers to achieve one acceptance
You’ll find an offer/acceptance worksheet at How to Calculate Offer and Acceptance Rates.