Best Practices: Managing & Analyzing Archive Reasons
This guide aims to review what makes for a good set of archive reasons and how to set your team up for success. With archive reasons in place, a set of example analyses to explore results is given, wherein the common field names and report types are reviewed.
Introduction
This article will give a quick overview of utilizing and analyzing archive reasons to understand your recruiting trends. Successfully doing so can yield useful insights for both your top-of-funnel and late-stage recruiting activities, such as understanding trends in offer decline reasons. Before effective analysis can begin, you’ll need to make sure your archive reasons are amenable to analysis, so we’ll start with a basic recommended taxonomy and some comments on special cases.
Once your archive reasons are in good shape, we’ll discuss how to create a custom grouping of reasons to facilitate analysis, and we’ll conclude with some short example analysesexample analyses:
- Looking at archive reasons by stage group
- Taking a closer look filtering and exploring archive reasons
- Examining archive reason trends over time
- Utilizing archive reasons to re-engage candidates
How to set up archive reasons in Ashby
You can add and/or edit archive reasons by heading to Admin > Jobs & Applications > Archive Reasons. Click + New to add a new archive reason, or click on an existing archive reason to make any edits.
Creating an Effective Taxonomy of Archive Reasons
The purpose of adding archive reasons is to facilitate a review of why candidates are being rejected or dropping out, and that why should drive insights that help improve your team’s process. You may find, for example, that the primary offer decline reason shifted from relocation to compensation in the quarter you implemented new policies. This raises the point that you’ll want to examine these reasons, generally speaking, via two broad methods: by trend over time and in aggregate.
The trend in reasons over time to reveal changes due to your team’s process and external market factors.
A pitfall to avoid: ambiguous reasons. You want your reasons taken in aggregate to be informative.
Some recommendations to help identify the archive reasons that matter to your team the most
- What stage of the recruiting process are we most invested in improving? Do the archive reasons we have facilitate that process?
- Do you have any unique factors at your company or team that need to be accounted for? This can show up in archive reasons unique to evaluating certain company values or evaluating a very specific industry experience or skills that go beyond “lacks skills” type reasons.
- Pay close attention to whether the given reason is informative. One of the most common archive reasons we see is “offer declined.” This reason makes sense when doing a very basic analysis of comparing all archives and seeing how many are offer declines. However, given you can group and filter by stage (and other conditions of interest) with Ashby, such a general offer reason does not provide much insight. Six months from now when you analyze offer declines, you’ll want to identify actionable signals about this critical stage in your recruiting process.
- Another common archive reason is “Other”, which in aggregate can be taken to represent what fraction of your candidate archives lack informative categorization. In our experience, the “other” option is a well-intentioned but easy default for recruiting teams that need to move quickly. We recommend checking if “other” is a significant portion of your archive reasons and reviewing your available reasons if so.
- Consider what stage in your process you might use a particular reason. “Not a fit for role” might be acceptable at the application review or screen stage, but for later stages, more specific reasons may match hiring criteria, such as values or skill and level-based reasons can help optimize your process.
- Another common archive reason is “Withdrew.” This, in our opinion, is more of a category than a reason: there are many reasons a candidate may withdraw from the interview process and your analysis should reveal them. Remember to ask yourself whether your archive reason informs a potential insight or action for your team.
- Archive reasons can also help other teams in your organization. For example, using the "Fraudulent candidate" reason can enable your security teams to identify and track suspicious activity more easily through a centralized marker.
If you’re just getting started, or looking to improve your current setup, the next section presents a standard set of archive reasons by category.
Recommendation: An Example of a Set of Archive Reasons
Ashby supports archive reason categories and our Greenhouse customers inherit the Greenhouse categories Rejected by Org or Rejected by Candidate. Lever does not support archive reason categories, but Ashby’s Calculated Fields can help resolve that challenge by creating custom groupings.
Depending on the size of your organization the level of detail in your archive reasons may vary. Typically, larger organizations can support more reasons as the larger volume of applicants permits more specificity. For this reason, there is a judgment call here: if you’re a small team just getting started, you may not want to get too detailed on all the reasons a candidate can exit consideration. For starters, an example set of archive reasons by archive reason groupings is given below.
Category: Rejection by Organization
The reasons your organization will utilize may vary depending on your interview process, industry details, or certain policies. The reasons below are given as a standard starting set, but you may need to add more, e.g. specific values-related reasons.
Rejection by Organization Reason |
|---|
Lacks work authorization |
Role fit: general skills/qualifications |
Role fit: experience level - too senior |
Role fit: experience level - too junior |
Reference/Background Check |
Location - unwilling to relocate / remote policy |
Values fit reason(s), e.g. "Value fit - team player" |
Follow up - Role Filled |
Fraudulent/fake candidate |
Category: Rejection by Candidate Reasons
The offer-specific reasons below are given as a more detailed example. You may not find all of them necessary at your current company size.
Rejection by Candidate Reason | Offer Specific Reasons |
|---|---|
Remain with current company | Offer Declined - Leveling |
Not interested - General | Offer Declined - Compensation Salary |
Not interested - Industry | Offer Declined - Compensation Equity |
Not interested - Role / Project | Offer Declined - Career growth |
Not interested - Career Growth | Offer Declined - Accepted competing offer |
Accepted other offer | Offer Declined - Remain at current company |
Unresponsive | Offer Declined - Other |
Bad Timing | Offer Reneged |
Category: Rejection due to process or data clean up (aka, “Other”)
The reasons that fall in this category should be thought of as those you most likely do not want to include in your archive reason analysis, barring analysis that is looking at, e.g., data quality or re-engagement. For example, when analyzing offer rejection reasons you will want to exclude cases of archiving candidates that were moved to a different role.
Other Reasons |
|---|
Did not respond to outreach |
Position closed / on hold |
Transferred to another role |
Position filled |
Cleanup - Inactivity |
Non-compete |
Custom Groupings with Calculated Fields
If you do specify many reasons you can minimize the fragmentation of reasons by creating custom groupings with Ashby’s Calculated FieldsCalculated Fields feature. Apart from the standard grouping above, you may want to consider special use cases like grouping all archive reasons that permit following up with the candidate at a later date. A custom grouping of the above reasons to select candidates for re-engagement may look like the following.
Custom Grouping Reasons |
|---|
Position filled |
Position closed / on hold |
Location - unwilling to relocate / remote policy |
Follow up / Future consideration |
Hands-On with Ashby Analytics: Analysis Examples
Below we present a few pragmatic examples types related to archive reasons. A short description and recorded example is provided per analysis, but for reference we find the below fields to be some of the most useful when navigating and analyzing archive reasons.
Ashby Fieldname | Why it's helpful |
|---|---|
Archived At | Allows you to select the timeframe in which the applications you want to analyze were archived. |
Furthest Stage Group Reached | Allows you to group by or filter to the furthest stage group the application made it to. |
Archive Reason | Gives the specific archive reason used. |
Archive Reason Type | Gives the broad archive category, rejected by org, rejected by candidate or other. |
The above is just one of many useful fields for analysis, others being Department or Team, Source Type (Origin for Lever users), or potentially hiring team member fields such as Recruiter and Hiring Manager. If you’ve created Calculated Fields for custom grouping, you’ll be able to use those for your analysis, too!
Archive Reason by Stage Group
With Ashby, you can examine archive reasons by the stage group in which the candidate was archived. The composition of reasons should change as candidates progress through your interview process, so this analysis permits you to keep an eye out for things like on-site reasons being appropriately matched to the on-site stage. If you find that candidates are being archived for reasons such as lack of fit, or not interested in relocating, that’s a sign that prior stages which should be screening for such factors are not functioning, resulting in precious time and resources being expended at the on-site.
Narrow the Scope of Analysis & Explore: Onsite Stage Group
We can focus on the previous analysis by examining the onsite stage group specifically. With this narrowed scope we can examine other variables that may be significant factors. In the example below we take a closer look at the onsite rejections by candidate by source type, revealing that agencies result in a higher rate of candidates that weren’t interested in the opportunity. In general, as you proceed with an exploratory analysis consider filtering and grouping your analysis to a specific department, region, or interview stage.
Look at the Trend Over Time
Plotting archive reasons over time can be challenging if your recruiting efforts are not at a sufficient volume. Two approaches to help with that are to look for trends in the broader archive reason categories (e.g. rejected by candidate) or custom groupings or to use longer time periods, such as a quarterly time series as opposed to a weekly time series. This type of analysis is especially important in evaluating policy changes or external market factors. In the example below we see some reasons change quarter to quarter, while others (accepting another offer) remain present, suggesting that time to offer may be a strategic initiative to improve.
Utilize Archive Reasons for Re-engagement
Candidate re-engagement is a cost-effective manner of sourcing talent. With targeted archive reasons you can filter by previously interviewed candidates to drive contextualized outreach at a later date. For example, if your remote work policy changes, you can follow up with all candidates archived under the “relocation / remote policy” reason and let them know of new opportunities.
Conclusions
We hope the above summary is useful as a refresher and recommendation on how to manage and analyze your archive reasons. We covered the rationale for setting up helpful archive reasons, some prompts to evaluate what makes a good archive reason, and how to set your team up for success in the long run with some example analyses.
If you have any feedback, thoughts, or recommendations on this topic we’d love to hear from you! Feel free to reach out to [email protected] - we love hearing from you!