New Research Shows Three Touchpoints Is Magic Number When Proactively Sourcing Potential Job Candidates

SAN FRANCISCO, April 10, 2018 -- In today’s competitive hiring environment, it takes three touchpoints to earn a candidate response to cold outreach, according to a new study from Lever, the recruiting software for more than 1,500 fast-growing companies around the world. Lever examined communication between 135,000 sourced candidates and recruiters in Lever Nurture and found that consistent follow-up was vital for hiring success. Just under 50 percent of candidate responses come in after the first outreach, while a further 35 percent come in after two emails (84.7 percent) and three candidate touches earn almost 100 percent of responses.

The study also examined the types of candidate roles most receptive to proactive candidate sourcing via Lever Nurture. Engineers had the lowest response rate to cold outreach at 35 percent, with sales candidates coming in just below with a response rate of 41 percent. This is likely due to sales and engineering candidates being in high demand, and often the recipients of weekly recruiter contact. Design candidates, on the other hand, were most responsive to cold outreach, with 59 percent responding.

“The best hires aren’t always the easiest to find. Today’s competitive hiring climate requires companies to be proactive and patient in order to find and recruit the best candidates,” said Sarah Nahm, CEO, Lever. “To succeed in sourcing and hiring passive candidates, it’s vital to nurture them through consistent, compelling, and most importantly, personalized contact.”

“We've found that sourcing passive prospects, in the end, costs one fourth of the acquisition cost of active channels,” said Jer Langhans, Co-founder & Principal Growth Hacker, Paired Sourcing, LLC. “You're not going to get pivotal talent to just walk in the door without spending even more on passive channels than active ones.”

Lastly, Lever’s research found that brand may be less important than one might think in eliciting a response from cold outreach. Companies with more than 1,000 employees saw an average response rate of 44.7 percent using Lever Nurture, roughly three percent higher than smaller companies, likely due to stronger brand recognition - but companies with as few as 50 employees were seen to average a response rate of over 41 percent using Lever Nurture. This relatively small discrepancy shows company size or brand is not the driving factor for response rate. Crafting great content for the outreach is critical.

The full report, entitled “The Science of Sourcing: Benchmarks for Recruiting Success” is available for download here.

Lever Nurture is a sourcing automation technology that allows teams to deliver consistent, effective, and personalized communications to passive candidates. Lever Nurture is built natively inside Lever’s applicant tracking system, and allows recruiters to use metrics to identify the most effective sourcing tactics and build meaningful candidate relationships at scale.

Methodology
Lever’s report aggregates data from over 147,000 Lever Nurture campaigns targeting 135,000 candidates from January 2017- January 2018. For data integrity reasons, data for every metric was not included for every customer, and some began using Lever midway through the period studied.

About Lever
Lever is on a mission to help the world hire with conviction. Built with the belief that recruiting is the responsibility of everyone at the company, Lever’s applicant tracking and sourcing technology draws the entire team together to source, nurture, interview, and hire top talent through effortless collaboration. Lever has been intentionally designed with integrated ATS and CRM functionality, and features a modern interface that helps employers develop stronger candidate relationships in fewer clicks. 

Lever was founded in 2012 in San Francisco. The company has raised more than $73 million in funding from Adams Street Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, Y Combinator, Redpoint Ventures, and Correlation Ventures among others. Lever supports the hiring needs of over 1,500 companies around the globe including the teams at Netflix, Shopify, Hot Topic, KPMG New Zealand, 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.

MEDIA CONTACT:
Ashley Cohen
Traeger Communications
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303-522-0783