<aside> 💡 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.

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Section overview:

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 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

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 segmentation analysis, e.g. by department or interview stage group, helps identify dominant reasons.

<aside> 💡 A pitfall to avoid: ambiguous reasons. You want your reasons taken in aggregate to be informative.

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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.