SmartRecruiters Blog

Hiring Success 2020 Awards!

Historically we’ve tracked and measured hundreds of metrics in our customers’ hiring activities inside the SmartRecruiters platform. This year, we have distilled that number down to 15 metrics that have the highest correlation with the health and performance of talent acquisition organizations as witnessed by our previous analysis. 

These metrics reflect our customers’ hiring performance in 5 important categories: Hiring Team Engagement, Recruiting Team Performance, Candidate Experience Management, and Company Internal Engagement.

Additionally, we have focused on metrics that are least impacted by variables such as company size, industry, type of roles typically hired, size of hiring teams, etc. 1) For each award, we use a combination of 3+ metrics that measure different aspects to support the selection. 2) We normalize the metrics with interfering variables to prevent favoring any particular type or company size.  

The winners will be selected from customers with the best performance across those metrics from Jan 1, 2019, to Dec 31, 2019. 

Most Compelling Candidate Experience Award

Candidates say the No.1 frustration during the overall job search is the lack of response from employers. The Candidate Experience Award applauds employers who take the time to continuously communicate status updates to their candidates at all stages in the hiring process. The award measures three factors: the response rate to all applicants, the response rate to interviewed and rejected candidates, and the speed of the first response. 

Most Productive Recruiting Team Award

A recruiting team’s success requires a combination of timely hires and systematic pipeline management. Successful recruiting teams make more hires on time and manage their candidate pipelines with intention. The Recruiting Team Award measures three important aspects of recruiters: their ability to fulfill the companies’ hiring needs, their efficiency, and their management of the candidate pipeline. 

Most Collaborative Hiring Team Award

Hiring the best talent takes a tremendous amount of teamwork. The Hiring Team Award recognizes a highly structured, efficient, and collaborative hiring team. The award measures three important factors: the level of involvement from hiring team members, the robustness of the hiring process, and the efficiency of individual interviewers.  

Most Active Company Award

Achieving hiring success takes more than the hard work from talent acquisition practitioners. The Company Award is measured by three important factors that gauge company-wide involvement with recruiting: how successfully employees are engaging with internal opportunities, the relative size of active user base, and the product usage level and user feedback in helping us build a better product.  

And without further ado the winners for 2019!

Most Compelling Candidate Experience

1. Equinox

Equinox prides itself on being the best of the best when it comes to high-quality fitness clubs. With such a top tier customer experience, Equinox needed a way to create the same experience of excellence when it came to candidate experience. Equinox uses a decentralized system for recruitment in which local branch managers conduct their own hiring based on their requirements. This approach utilizes around 20 full-time recruiters supported by over 300 local hiring managers who also often carry out many other Equinox activities on a day-to-day basis. SmartRecruiters decentralized systems to enable Equinox to increase speed and communication between hiring teams and candidates. 

  1. Home Instead 
  2. Devoteam
  3. Wipro Digital 
  4. RLH Corp 
  5. Colliers International
  6. Uncommon Schools
  7. Dungarvin
  8. International SOS
  9. Allstate

Most Productive Recruiting Team

1. Public Storage

Public storage knows how important a productive recruiting team is to business success. With over 2,000 locations public storage needs to move quickly in order to meet the high growth demands of the company. Nathan Tan Head of Talent Acquisition & Workforce Analytics at Public Storage notes how velocity and cost metrics allow you to analyze whether the hiring processes in place are efficient and effective and adapt accordingly.

  1. The Nature’s Bounty   
  2. WAREMA
  3. Evolution Gaming 
  4. Uplift Education
  5. Arkadin  
  6. BlueScope
  7. Uncommon Schools
  8. Leidos
  9. Abercrombie and Fitch Co.

Most Collaborative Hiring Team

1. Astreya

Astreya understands the importance of hiring the right people and to get that done requires communication and collaboration across hiring teams. Priding itself on providing both its clients and employees with unwavering happiness, Astreya relies heavily on hiring collaboration in order to assure a robust and fast-moving hiring process. 

  1. Marc Jacobs 
  2. BlueScope
  3. Education Development Center 
  4. Numberly 
  5. City of Philadelphia 
  6. Play Octopus
  7. Jack Link’s Protein Snacks
  8. Broadridge
  9. Merkle Inc.

Most Active Company

1. Visa 

 With over 19,000 employees in 2019, it’s no surprise that Visa deals with a massive volume of candidates. SmartRecruiters ATS allows them increased engagement and collaboration across the board. With a high rate of user adoption at Visa, hiring teams have been able to achieve fast turnaround rates that increases the offer acceptance rate.

  1. Biogen 
  2. IKEA 
  3. BlueScope
  4. Square
  5. FireEye
  6. Mitie
  7. American Iron and Metal
  8. The Warehouse Group
  9. Expeditors

The Methodology for Hiring Success 20 Awards is as follows. 


Methodology Used to Determine the Winners:

1) Most Collaborative Hiring Team Award

Metric 1 |Percentage of Jobs With at Least 1 Assigned Interviewer

Why: This metric reflects how structured the interview process is.


Metric 2 | Average Time to Complete a Review 

Why: This metric reflects hiring managers’ efficiency at completing their tasks to move the hiring process along.  


Metric 3 | Average Number of Distinct Users Involved per Interviewed Application 

Why: This metric reflects the hiring team’s level of involvement and the robustness of the hiring process. 


Metric 4| Percentage of Interviews With Ratings Submitted 

Why: This metric reflects hiring team’s participation at completing their tasks to move the hiring process along.  

2) Most Productive Recruiting Team Award

Metric 1 | Percentage of Candidates Moved out of New Stage 

Why: This metric reflects how well recruiters manage the candidate pipeline. 


Metric 2 | Completion Rate 

Why: This metric reflects the recruiters’ ability to fulfill the companies’ hiring needs. 


Metric 3 | Percentage of Positions Filled on Time

Why: This metric reflects both recruiters’ ability to hire and their efficiency (hiring on time). 

3) Most Compelling Candidate Experience Award

Metric 1 | Percentage of Applicants Who Receive a Response

Why: This metric reflects the experience of all applicants in terms of the company’s responsiveness. 


Metric 2 | Percentage of Rejected Candidates Who Receive Rejection Messages 

Why: This metric reflects the experience of candidates that do not move forward to be hired, but have at least one personal interaction with the company.  


Metric 3 | Average Time to Reply to a Candidate 

Why: This metric measures the experience of the candidates in terms of wait time. 


Metric 4 | Percentage of Candidates That Are Still in an Active Stage

Why: This metric measures the experience of the candidates in terms of closure and notification. 


Metric 5 | Percentage of Abandoned Candidates 

Why: This metric measures the experience of the candidates in terms of followup and closure. 

4) Most Active Company Award

Metric 1| Percentage of Hires That Are Internal Candidates OR Referral 

Why: This metric reflects how actively and successfully employees are engaging with internal opportunities. 


Metric 2 | % of User Base That Are MAU 

Why: This metric reflects how active the user base is on SmartRecruiters platform.


Metric 3 | UserVoice Upvotes and Requests

Why: This metric reflects the employees’ product usage level and their support of getting us to build a better product.

Congratulations to the winners! Be sure to tune in next year for the 2021 Hiring Success Awards!

Noah Schreiber

Marketing Operations at SmartRecruiters.