Can you predict candidate quality?

As the consideration funnel gets longer (41% in the last two years by our data), we worry that this leads to more opportunities for candidates to get lost or simply lose interest. If we invest heavily in driving candidate awareness with ads and job board posts, are we letting that slip away by not converting quickly?But common sense (and millions of hours of shared experience) says that candidates who do more research on the company are generally better candidates and better fits. So we wondered: is there a link between the number of stops in the candidate journey and the overall quality of a candidate?In the last year, I’ve heard less and less about the need to find more applicants. Filling the pipeline with names for each role is no longer much of an issue. Instead, I’ve been hearing more and more about the need to increase candidate quality.Sometimes, that conversation comes in the form of “fit” and sometimes in the form of “length of interview process.” Sometimes it’s just a conversation about hiring developers in San Francisco. But the issue is the same: how can we get better candidates?[pullquote]The more content a candidate reviews and considers before applying, the higher the likelihood that they will be deemed a higher quality candidate and hired.[/pullquote]Of course, too few companies actually do the hard work to report back into their ATS the quality level of most of their candidates, so trying to determine what channels are driving quality is nearly impossible. Instead, we were looking at an interesting metric: the number of candidates per hire for each channel.What we’re looking for is the relative density of candidate quality. So if Channel A has 100 candidates per hire and Channel B has 20 candidates per hire, Channel B has a far higher density of quality candidates (we are assuming a company only hires candidates of quality).In evaluating a huge retailing and logistics company, someone who hires blue and white collar candidates all across the country, we discovered that candidates from Glassdoor were being hired at a significantly higher rate than outside of Glassdoor. While I can’t reveal numbers, the relative density of candidates from Glassdoor was 60% higher than from outside of Glassdoor.At the same time, candidates from Glassdoor also made twice as many stops through the consideration funnel as those outside Glassdoor.While this says positive things about Glassdoor, the potentially more important takeaway is that there’s a clear correlation between the amount of content a candidate consumes about the job and brand within the consideration process and the candidate’s quality level. The more content a candidate reviews and considers before applying, the higher the likelihood that they will be deemed a higher quality candidate and hired.When I first reviewed the data, I assumed that this was mostly for higher-status roles, where candidates tended to be more selective about where they applied. But this client hires a huge number of entry-level and blue-collar workers across all channels.

While we intend to look at this result across multiple companies to confirm its validity, this is a strong first indication that content drives quality candidates.