The Math of Candidate Quality

When I get more applicants, the quality goes down! I have to do a lot more work to find interesting and hireable people.

Unfortunately, recruiting is subject to the Law of Large Numbers. The law of large numbers states the larger the sample size, the more the results will trend toward their expected value.

Consider this:

10 applications 4 qualified, 40% Quality

100 applications 14 qualified, 14% Quality

1000 applications, 132 qualified, 13.2% Quality

10,000 applications 1,290 qualified 12.9% Quality

When you only have a few candidates, things can look unnaturally easy. As you get more candidates, you see the quality decrease. But you know what? That’s ok. It’s how math will always work. The more you scale up, the more accurate your measure of quality will actually be.

Ok, so what is a quality candidate, anyway?

The standard way to measure that is simply to figure out what percentage of candidates are actually qualified:

A better way to measure quality

Around 30-40% of candidates will never engage with your recruiting efforts. Whether you call, text, or use smoke signals doesn’t matter. They will simply not respond. We believe the best measure is the percentage of qualified and engaged candidates. Here’s the math:

This is hard to measure if you don’t have a communications hub like Pivot. But when you do, you can analyze your candidate sources for the number of engaged candidates they supply… and you’ll be surprised by the difference between sources. Ultimately, there is one inescapable rule:

You cannot hire people you cannot talk to.