Measure success with Spark Hire Meet

Our ROI calculator is a great framework for how to think about your success with Spark Hire Meet and relaying it to stakeholders.

From a quantitative perspective, most customers are aiming to see an improvement in a north-star metric like:

• Time-to-hire: Compare the average time it takes to fill a position before and after implementing Spark Hire.
• Cost-per-hire: Measure cost reductions from fewer in-person interviews, lower recruiter workload, and improved efficiency.
• Quality of hire: Measure the retention rates and performance of employees hired after completing a Spark Hire assessment.

These are nice goals to have in mind, but they are sometimes difficult to measure and things like quality of hire are not really evident “early on.”

So, a better way to think about measuring success with Spark Hire in the short term include:

• Interview-to-Hire Ratio: Compare how many candidates need to be interviewed face-to-face to make a hire before and after Spark Hire. A decreasing number means that you’re improving the quality of candidates you’re getting in front of hiring managers.
• Hiring Manager Satisfaction Score: Run an internal survey among hiring managers to quantify their satisfaction with the new process.

From a qualitative perspective, you can create a worksheet and interval surveys to answer the following:

Faster Screening Decisions

• Are hiring managers moving candidates to the next stage more quickly?
• Is there less back-and-forth scheduling?

More Engagement from Hiring Teams

• Are hiring managers reviewing candidates more proactively instead of delaying decisions?
• Are more team members involved in the decision-making process?

Reduction in Unqualified Interviews

• If fewer low-quality candidates are making it to the final interview stage, Spark Hire is filtering effectively.

Better Alignment in Hiring Decisions

• Are there fewer internal debates about candidates because decision-makers see them early in the process?

Hiring Manager and Recruiter Feedback

• Are they saying the process is faster, easier, or more effective?
• Are they reviewing more candidates in less time and finding better fits?
• Do they feel they’re making better-informed hiring decisions?

Company Branding & Candidate Reach

• Does Spark Hire allow you to reach a broader talent pool, including distributed candidates?
• Is it helping your brand appear more tech-forward and efficient in the hiring process?

New customers should track both quantitative and qualitative indicators, even if they don’t have a strong baseline yet. Early signs like faster screening, fewer scheduling bottlenecks, and positive hiring manager feedback can signal that Spark Hire is working. Over time, they should formalize tracking for time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and interview efficiency to quantify ROI.

Expectations for assessment completion rates

Many customers ask us for an "average completion rate" with other customers, but the reality is that there are so many variables at place, an "average" is not likely to be relevant to you.

When candidates start an assessment on Spark HIre Meet, the completion rate is over 95%. This indicates that the majority of candidate drop-off happens before they interact with the Spark Hire solution.

While those are the benchmarks across all customers, it’s important to note that every organization is different and there are many factors to consider such as…

• Employer brand: the more well known your organization is, the more likely candidates are to proceed in the process.
• Job desirability: if the job is highly desired (e.g. high paying, exciting industry, etc.), candidates are more likely to invest more effort in the hiring process.
• Candidate engagement: the more your candidates know about your organization and the role, the better. If you’re implementing a Spark Hire assessment very early in the hiring process and the candidate doesn’t have key information, they’re not as likely to put forth much effort because they don’t have a good sense of whether they’re truly interested or not.

So, when starting out, our suggestion is to keep an open mind.

Most customers manage their expectations knowing that there’s going to be a natural rate of dropoff (disengaged or uninterested candidates) and that’s a good thing so you’re not investing time in candidates who aren’t really motivated to go through your hiring process.

In addition, customers know that they can make adaptations to their strategy to continuously improve how they inform and communicate with their candidates which leads to increased interest levels earlier in the hiring process and, as a result, higher assessment completion rates.

What other variables may impact candidate completion rates?

There are many variables that may impact candidate completion rates, positively or negatively. Some of these factors are in your control whereas others may be outside of your control.

The things that are in your control include:

💬 Communication with candidates
How you inform candidates of where Spark Hire fits in your process, why you’re using the solution and what they can expect plays a big role in their success.

👀 Information transparency
The more information you can include about the job and your organization at each step of the process, the better. Candidates need the information so they can determine if they want to continue in the process which saves you from investing time on people who aren’t interested.

⏳ Timeliness between stages
The speed you move between hiring steps is a major factor in candidate responsiveness. For example, a hiring team that reviews resumes in 2 days vs. 7 days 7 days will have a higher chance of connecting with candidates during the next stage.

📋 Order of hiring steps
The earlier in your hiring process that you place an assessment step, the lower your conversion rate will be since candidates don’t know as much about the job or your organization, but that’s actually a helpful barometer to measure candidate interest.

The things that are a little more outside of your control and contribute to a natural candidate dropoff rate include:

👋 No longer interested
The “easy-apply” era has led to candidates applying to so many jobs at once that they don’t even remember all of them. Many candidates may simply opt-out of your process when they re-read the job description after being invited to a next step.

🤝 Accepted another offer
While you may be moving fast in your hiring process, timing also plays a role. You’ll have candidates in your hiring process that are in “later stages” with other organizations just based on when they applied for those roles vs. yours.

⏸️ Delay in their job search
So many factors can lead to candidates pausing or stopping their job search altogether for reasons that have nothing to do with you or your organization. For example, a candidate may have received a promotion at their current job and decided to stay.

🤒 Personal circumstance
A benefit of on-demand assessment solutions is that candidates can do it on their own time, but keep in mind that candidates have things going on in their lives that may prevent them from meeting a deadline.