The Science of Sourcing

Benchmarks for
Recruiting Success
Table of Contents

1 The Efficiency of Candidate Sourcing

2 The Science Behind Candidate Response Rates

3 The Impact of Lever Nurture on Sourcing Success

Introduction

Sourcing candidates is far from easy. For many recruiters, it can be geographies, Lever Nurture is revolutionizing how companies source top
time-consuming and riddled with rejection. Still, it stands tall as one of the candidates today. No longer deterred by low response rates and hundreds
most efficient ways to hire - compared to applicants, it takes about half as of manual follow-ups, teams are using automation, personalization, and
many sourced candidates to make a hire.¹ metrics to see the sourcing results they want.

So, how can you make the most of this game-changing recruiting method?
By getting strategic and leveraging the right tools to make your job easier.
In this benchmarks report, we unpack the strategies your peers are
employing to source successfully. Along the way, we answer questions like:
— How many emails does it take to earn a candidate response?
To write this report, we analyzed over 147,000 Nurture campaigns targeting
135,000 candidates. In the process, we discovered that teams are using
Lever Nurture to nearly halve their time to hire and seriously scale back
agency spend.
But first, we looked at where your sourcing success stacks up.

— How does your candidate response rate compare to the average?

— Which roles are most likely to respond to a cold reachout?

— How does sourcing impact time to hire?

— How does sourcing impact agency spending?

Additionally, if your sourcing success is not right where you want it to be,
we have a solution that might help. Across a wide range of industries and

¹ The Little Grey Book of Recruiting Benchmarks, Lever, 2016

4 5
 The Efficiency of
Candidate Sourcing

Our data shows that: Takeaway

1 in 100 total candidates get hired Sourcing wins. Overall, teams need 17 percent fewer sourced candi-
1 in 152 applicants get hired dates to make one hire than the aggregate of candidates from all
origins - including referrals, applicants, and sourced candidates.
1 in 72 sourced candidates get hired
Furthermore, it’s worth restating that half as many sourced candidates
as applicants are needed to make one hire, meaning that sourcing is
twice as efficient. This proves that doubling down on your sourcing
efforts will help you hire great talent faster.
Candidates per hire by origin

Applicant
Words from the wise

All Origins
“The days of post and pray are gone. Today’s modern recruiting
function is taking ownership of the talent pipeline, and the best
Sourced
way to be proactive is to attract talent through sourcing.”

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 Stacy Zapar

Founder, Tenfold & The Talent Agency
Number of candidates

6 7
The Science Behind
Candidate Response Rates

How many emails does it take Takeaway

to earn a candidate response? Sourcing is far more effective when you persistently follow up. This is
why automating your sourcing outreach and activities is critical to driving
success at scale.

With two emails rather than one, you get 71 percent more responses.

Candidate Responses by Number of Emails With three emails rather than one, you get 100 percent more responses.

As you can see, nearly 100 percent of candidates who eventually respond
100%
99.9%
do so by the third email. Therefore, we suggest setting up 3 automated
98.8%
90% emails as a starting point for your Nurture campaign, and increasing to
80% 84.7% 4 or 5 emails if you still don’t hear back from your candidate.
Percent of Candidates Responded

70%

60%

50%
49.5% Words from the wise
40%

30% “Always follow up, but keep it short. Add touchpoints that
20% come from other people in the company. If two people have
10% contacted the candidate, they’re more likely to feel a little
0% rude if they don’t reply.”
1 2 3 4

Number of emails Amy Cherette

Talent Lead, Hipcamp
8 9
Does company size impact
candidate response rates?

Takeaway
Company size or brand are not the driving factors for response rate.
The content of the reachout, and following up as noted in the previous
Number of full time employees Response rate
section, is a significant contributor. Do your research on your candidate
- through LinkedIn or social media profiles, for example - and commit
1 - 50 41.6%
to tailoring your message accordingly. Give your candidate a compelling
reason to respond.
51 - 200 38.6%

201 - 1000 41.6%

Words from the wise

1000+ 44.7%

“Every time you write a recruiting email, close it with a question.

Grand total 41.6%
When you don’t pose even a brief one, you essentially end the
conversation. Emails with 1-3 questions, on the other hand, are
50 percent more likely to get a response.”
We examined over 126,000 emails sent via Lever Nurture and saw a 41.6
percent response rate on average. While companies with over 1,000 Johnny Campbell
employees did see about a 3 percent higher response rate - likely because Founder and CEO of Social Talent, Social Talent
of their stronger brand name - any other differences are relatively small.
Companies across all segments see approximately the same average
response rate.

10 11
 Which roles are most likely to
respond to a cold reachout?
Takeaway
No matter what roles you’re recruiting for, it’s challenging to maintain a
high response rate. Still, the average does vary across different roles.
Candidate Response Rate by Role
Engineers have the lowest response rate to cold outreach at 35 percent,
while sales candidates have the second lowest at 41 percent.
Design
Design candidates, on the other hand, take the lead on responsiveness
Product Management at 59 percent. While some roles may be more receptive to cold outreach
than others, it’s vital to keep the bar high for all of your reachouts.
Marketing
To catch the attention of candidates who already hear from dozens
of other recruiters, try something different such as sending as the hiring
Recruiting
manager or even the department’s executive. Or, try reaching out to them
in different online forums like Reddit, Medium, or Twitter.
Data & Analytics

Sales & Account Management

Words from the wise

Engineering
“Be someone else. Send as an engineer. Send as a manager.
Send as a founder. Get their permission first so they know what
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70%
you’re up to. It’s their reputation you’re representing. You can
do this with a couple of clicks within Lever.”

Chris Shaw
Head of Talent, Meteor

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How long does it take to schedule
an interview after sending the
first cold reachout? Lever Nurture power users

Button’s average time to interview is 8 days

Time to interview - refers to the period between the first cold reachout
“We respond in less than 24 hours to all candidate emails
and the day the first interview (onsite or phone) is scheduled.
and questions. We know there are a lot of companies out
The average time to interview for sourced candidates across all
there; we strive to make the candidate experience with
companies is 17 days.
Button exceptional.”

Stephanie Mardell
Days to interview Head of People, Button

Average 17 days

0d 5d 10d 15d 20d 25d 30d Words from the wise

“I needed to get innovative with a candidate who wasn’t

Takeaway
Do you know what your time to interview is? If not, dig into your recruiting
metrics and see where you stack up against the average. If your time to
interview is higher, sending additional follow ups could warm even the
most in-demand candidate to the idea of having a conversation sooner.
We also recommend looking in under-tapped spaces such as Slack groups
or Meetups for high quality candidates - getting creative with where you
look can be your golden ticket.
responding. So I tweeted at her, and eventually got her on
the phone. I’m a big fan of reaching out to candidates through
social channels. I’ll follow conference hashtags and slack
channels where people are passionate about a specific area.”
Walta Nemariam
Technical Recruiter, Netflix

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The Impact of Lever Nurture
on Sourcing Success

So, what is Lever Nurture anyway?

Lever Nurture is sourcing automation software that allows teams to into the Lever applicant tracking system so that candidate records
deliver consistent, effective, and personalized communications to passive are always complete, which allows companies to track the impact
candidates at scale. Lever Nurture brings the power of proven marketing of their sourcing strategy all the way to hire.
strategies and technology into recruiting. Teams use Nurture Campaigns
Next, we show the massive sourcing gains teams have seen with
to automate candidate outreach and follow ups, Nurture Recommendations
Lever Nurture:
to intelligently surface candidates from talent databases for new roles, and
Nurture Reports to optimize their sourcing strategy. Lever Nurture is built

16 17
Boost in sourced hires
A sourced hire was once a passive candidate. After responding to cold Takeaway
outreach and progressing through interview process, they eventually
To actually hire the passive candidates you source, it’s important to
elected to join the team.
creatively engage them over time rather than rely on one cold email.

Companies increase their number of sourced hires by 19 percent by This means investing in more unique personalization, often with the

investing in Lever Nurture. help of your teammates. Using Lever Nurture, teams are able to seamlessly
customize their reachouts in only a few clicks. They can also send
messages for any team member, including executives, hiring managers,
or peers.

Building meaningful candidate relationships also requires regular check-

Change in sourced hires with Lever Nurture
ins. Teams can add touchpoints to any Lever Nurture campaign, then
automate follow ups so that they don’t have to worry about about losing
30%
the interest of passive candidates.

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0%

Before Lever Nurture After Lever Nurture

18 19
 Lever Nurture power users Words from the wise

Medallia increased sourced hires by 177 percent “Keep it personal: Your emails need to seem personal, even if
they’re not. Avoid sending out emails that look like impersonal
“Lever Nurture helps us automate the process of building
mass spam, by pulling in unique details about each candidate
relationships with our passive candidates. Our team has
you are reaching out to.”
noticed a significant increase in our engagement and
conversion rates among sourced prospects.”
Chris Long
Program Resource Manager, NSW
Cathy Taylor
Senior Manager, Global Talent Sourcing, Medallia

Thread doubled sourced hires
“Lever Nurture has been a game changer. We’ve saved time
automating our follow-ups instead of manually sending new
emails each time, and we can adjust our campaigns based
on candidate engagement. Also, our response rate has jumped
from roughly 40 to 60 percent.”
“I get a little crazy with email subject lines to candidates. I get
dad-jokey, and I call them my laffy taffy jokes. Oftentimes,
I even use song lyrics. Once, I said, ‘Hello, is it your xcode skills
I’m looking for?”
Mary Ann Bailey
Senior Technical Sourcer, Vevo

Melissa Trahan
Head of Talent, Thread

20 21
Reduction in time to hire
Time to hire refers to the number of days elapsed between when a
Lever Nurture power users
candidate enters your pipeline and when they are hired.

Before investing in Lever Nurture, the average time to hire for sourced
candidates was 61 days. With Lever Nurture, the average time to hire for
sourced candidates is 38 days.
Companies experience a 38 percent decrease in time to hire for
sourced candidates with Lever Nurture.
Time to hire for sourced candidates
Veon decreased time to hire by 45 percent
“In large part, our decrease in time to hire has been the result
of intense partnerships with recruitment and hiring managers.
Also, we rolled out a flexible 360° recruitment solution for all
our teams - combining mature end-to-end process, modern
technologies like Lever, and automated reporting.”

Before Lever Nurture

Heather Luth
Project Manager of Strategic Initiatives for
After Lever Nurture
Talent Acquisition, VEON

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

Time to hire (days)

Takeaway
Successful recruiters zero in on sourcing only candidates that are highly
qualified. Through engaging candidates who are a strong fit early on,
teams don’t have to spend as much time evaluating candidates later on
in the process.
Also, teams can drill down into their recruiting metrics to double down
on the sourcing strategies that are working and shave off hours spent on
strategies that aren’t. By tracking opens, clicks and responses across all
Words from the wise
“With industry recruiting benchmarks to measure your
sourcing success against, you can hold yourself and your
team accountable to better results. You can also understand
what’s working well in your process and what’s not.”
Johnny Campbell
Founder & CEO of Social Talent

candidate touchpoints, they determine what is engaging candidates.

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Decrease in agency spend

Agency hires are those who were successfully recruited by a third-party
recruiting agency. Typically, the agency receives 15-30 percent of the
new hire’s salary as compensation, which serves as an extra cost for the
company. Also, agencies often target harder to fill positions with higher
salaries like executives and engineers, which drives the cost up further.
After investing in Lever Nurture, companies decreased their agency
hires on average by 31 percent.
Takeaway
Teams often turn to agencies when - bogged down by manual tasks like
emailing candidates - they have no time to strategically recruit. Lever
Nurture uses the power of automation to give recruiters their time back.
Rather than tracking responses and writing repetitive messages, recruit-
ers can focus on finding highly qualified candidates and personalizing
their outreach. As teams see more sourcing success, it’s goodbye agencies
and hello money savings.

Lever customers have saved millions on agency fees. BPM, for example - a
500 person accounting firm - saved $900k and counting with Lever.
Change in Agency Hires

6%

Lever Nurture power users

5%

4% Veon decreased their agency hires by 83 percent

3%
“Using Lever to manage pipelines, share profiles with the
business, and present shortlists has increased the internal
2% reputation of Talent Acquisition, and thus decreased the
need for reliance on expensive external agencies.”
1%

0%
Heather Luth
Before Lever Nurture After Lever Nurture Project Manager of Strategic Initiatives for
Talent Acquisition, VEON

24 25
Conclusion
There’s no denying that sourcing is a difficult craft to master. You may
have to send several followups to earn a candidate response regardless
of your team’s reputation, and certain roles are more likely to respond
to cold messages than others.
Yet despite sourcing’s trickiness, there is a formula for success - one
that’s rooted in using metrics, persistence, creativity, and automation to
inform your strategy. Armed with the ‘words from the wise’ above and
tools like Lever Nurture, those high response rates are yours for the taking.
Methodology
We analyzed over 147,000 Lever Nurture campaigns targeting 135,000
candidates during the period from January 2017 through January 2018.
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About Lever
Lever’s mission is to help the world hire with conviction. Our Talent
Acquisition Suite draws the entire team together to efficiently source,
nurture, interview, and hire top talent through effortless collaboration.
Incorporating best-of-breed automation, intelligence and design, Lever
helps employers develop stronger candidate relationships in fewer
clicks, by combining powerful ATS and CRM functionality in one
modern platform - and measure the results with confidence.
Lever was founded in 2012 and supports the hiring needs of over 1,500
leading companies around the globe including the teams at Netflix, KPMG
NZ, Hot Topic, and Cirque du Soleil. With an overall gender ratio of 50:50,
Lever is also fiercely committed to building a team culture that celebrates
diversity and inclusion. For more information, visit https://www.lever.co.
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