Application rejections

Application rejections analysis

This analysis seeks to explore candidates' application to jobs and what the frequency of rejections to these jobs is.

To date, there were over 210 000 distinct applications by candidates to jobs. About 4% of these applications received interview requests and less than 1% ended in offers. We do know that some companies are managing the interview process through off-platform tools, and the incompleteness of the data we have around this means we can't accurately measure how many applications receive a positive response.

For this analysis, we'll be looking at the 200 000 applications that did not receive an interview request or an offer.

The histogram below provides an overview of when these applications without interviews or offers were made.

In total, there are a little over 18 000 rejection records which is significantly less than the 200 000 plus applications that have not received an offer or an interview. As seen in the time series chart below the earliest record of a rejection to an application was on 2020-05-22.

Less than 5% of the applications without interviews and offers have received an explicit rejection, the percentage changes to 6% when we exclude any applications made before the first rejection record in our database. What this tells me is that either a large chunk of employers are not responding to candidate applications, or there are inconsistencies in how rejections are being captured in the database.

The table below shows the rejection rate vs applications without an interview or offer for companies. Corollary to the above, the majority of companies have not explicitly rejected a large number of candidate applications. This excludes applications to jobs that are still open.

The average number of days it takes to reject and application (for applications with explicit rejections) has gone down year on year. Currently, companies that do reject applications are doing so within 8 days on average.

When including applications to jobs that have been closed but do not have an explicit rejection, the count jumps up and has shown little signs of going down for the past three years.

The table below shows the average number of days it takes companies to provide an explicit rejection to an application. Almost 30 companies have taken 20 days or more to reject an application.