Reporting on Candidates vs Applications

This document summarizes the case for reporting on applications as a subject rather than candidates. Applications contain the meaningful features, such as job, department, and interview details that often drive the metrics of interest. As a single candidate can have many applications, our recommendation is to report metrics based on applications.

In the recruiting process and reporting context we naturally speak of and refer to candidates. That's a natural inclination as we're often discussing the person under the resume. However, given a single candidate can have multiple applications, the details about the individual application start to matter when it comes to reporting. This is sometimes called a one-to-many relationship: one candidate, many applications.

The most common features of reporting are, in almost all cases, derived from the candidate's Application. The application contains such details as:

This isn't a comprehensive list, but the key take away is that the above features are unique to the application, and therefore can be different for each application even if the underlying candidate is the same person.

If a single candidate has two different job applications, each of which go through an interview cycle and ultimately result in a hire (or not) for one job, you want your reporting to capture the entirety of your team's invested efforts. If two applications from the same candidate got a the full treatment of panel interviews and scheduling you'll capture that by reporting at the application level.

There are times where counting the underlying candidates may make sense, and Ashby permits you to do that level of reporting if needed. However, in our experience, it is often quite rare that such reports are informative or actionable. A good heuristic is if you find yourself wanting to incorporate any of the reporting features summarized above (e.g. department, or interview stage), you should be reporting on Applications.