Tracking response rates

The metric no careers service tracks: what happens after "Applied"

What happens after the application?
Most careers services don't know.

Careers services measure the front end well — workshops, CV reviews, applications sent. Very few measure what happens after the application lands, even though that's where a student's real experience is formed.

📌 Context Just 27 advertisers out of over 35,000 (0.08%) accounted for nearly 14% of all postings we analysed — a small number of high-volume partners generate a disproportionate share of the applications your students actually submit. Response-rate tracking matters most exactly where it's least likely to happen informally: at the handful of partners students interact with constantly.

Why this gap matters

A student who applies to ten roles through a partner and hears nothing back from any of them will draw conclusions — about their own employability, about the partner, about the process — that may have nothing to do with their actual candidacy. If that partner has a structurally low response rate across all candidates, the student is absorbing a systemic problem as a personal one. Your office is well positioned to catch that distinction, but only if you're tracking response behaviour at the partner level.

⏱️ Time-to-first-response

By partner, aggregated across your cohort over a term.

👻 Ghosting rate

Proportion of applications receiving no status update within, say, three weeks.

🔀 Funnel conversion

Applied → response → interview → outcome, by partner, to see where students drop out.

🎯 Use this constructively
Most response gaps come from mundane causes — understaffed teams, high application volume, seasonal pauses — not bad faith. Going to a partner with "our students report an average six-week silence" is a far stronger basis for a productive conversation than an anecdote, and protects the relationship rather than damaging it.

A note on this piece: posting-side statistics (volume, salary disclosure, reposting) are what we've measured directly so far. Response-rate and ghosting data — the funnel side — is the next phase of this work, not something we have numbers on yet. The framework above is a starting point, not a report of findings.

Track what happens after "Applied"

GetJobzi tracks advertiser-level response and outcome data — institutional partners get aggregate access for their own student cohorts.

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