Latest articles
29 articles · 1/3
Cost per hire: the formula, the hidden costs, and a worked example
Most cost-per-hire numbers are wrong in the same direction. They count agency fees and job board spend, and quietly omit the largest cost in the process.
Applications per hire is a broken metric on its own
The number has roughly tripled across the industry in five years. Almost every reading of that shift is wrong, because the metric conflates three different changes.
Source quality: which channels actually convert to hires
The channel producing the most applications is usually the worst channel. Budgeting on volume is the most common way recruiting money gets misallocated.
The interview scorecard, done properly: three role-specific examples
Generic scorecards get filled in generically. These three are written for specific roles, with the criteria defined tightly enough that two interviewers would score the same candidate the same way.
How to run a structured interview loop
Structured interviewing is usually explained as asking everyone the same questions. That is the least important part of it, and doing only that changes almost nothing.
Screening questions that cut the pile in half
Two or three well-chosen questions remove most clearly unsuitable applications before a human reads anything. Most application forms ask none of them, then ask six of the wrong ones.
A job description that gets qualified applicants: six edits
Six changes that raise the qualified application rate without touching a single requirement, shown as before and after.
Debriefs that produce decisions, not opinions
The debrief is where a structured process usually collapses back into a conversation about who liked whom. Three rules prevent it.
Rejection emails: five templates by stage
Most rejections are either silence or a template so generic it reads as an insult. Five messages, one per stage, that take no longer to send.
Offer acceptance: seven practices that move the rate
A declined offer is the most expensive failure in hiring, and almost all of the causes are upstream of the offer itself.
Employee referral programmes: structure, rewards, and the maths
Referrals are usually the highest-quality channel and almost always the worst-resourced, because they arrive without an invoice to argue for them.
The intake meeting: nine things to agree before opening a role
Most slow hiring processes were slow before the role was published, because the recruiter and the hiring manager never agreed what they were looking for.
Browse by topic
Find the playbooks most relevant to your team.
Data & benchmarks
Time-to-hire, cost-per-hire and funnel metrics, with the formulas.
4 articlesHiring & process
Interview loops, scorecards, screening and buying an ATS.
16 articlesProduct & AI
How Hireall works, how the scoring is built, and what we ship next.
8 articlesCulture & employer brand
Candidate experience and employer branding that works without a marketing team.
2 articlesGet hiring insights in your inbox
One email a week — the best playbooks, benchmarks and product updates. No spam.