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by drewgross 1425 days ago
0.1-1% hire rate based on applicants, or based on candidates interviewed? 0.1% hire rate of candidates interviewed doesn't seem compatible with your described growth rate, even if you very conservatively assumes you spend 1 hour interviewing each candidate, thats 25 weeks of straight interviewing per candidate hired. And thats 1 hour of time across the whole company, if you have 2 interviewers spend an hour each, thats now 50 employee-weeks, or an entire year. To double the company size in 5 years, you would have needed to spend 1/5th of your entire tenure interviewing. If you go up to 10 total hours spent per candidate (including all interviewers, recruiters, and time spend in discussion and negotiation) it becomes straight up impossible.
2 comments

Surely it's not based on interviews. You'll lose the will to live if one in a thousand interviewees gets the job.

Based on applicants it's ok, went all seen how any job ad attracts piles and piles of spam applications.

Oh, for sure, that would be nuts. 0.1–1% of applicants.
So to be clear for a given position you get 100 to 1000 resumes, then interview how many of those before deciding on 1 person? I am curious what the funnel looks like.
It depends entirely on the size and quality of the candidate pool, but I'd say very roughly:

* Initial candidate screening reduces the pool by 85–95% (leaving 5–15% of the initial pool) * Interview #1 reduces the pool further by 50–66% (leaving ~3–4% of the initial pool) * Interview #2 reduces the pool further by another 66–75% (leaving ~1–2% of the initial pool) * Final chat usually doesn't reduce the pool, but it's one last pass for additional signal * We choose a single candidate of whoever remains

For a position with 400 applicants, it could look like

* Initial screening leaves 40 candidates for interview #1 * Interview #1 leaves 15 candidates for interview #2 * Interview #2 leaves 4 candidates for final chat * We pick from those final 4