What the application abandonment rate is
The application abandonment rate (معدل الطلبات المهجورة) is the share of people who began filling in an application for a job and did not submit it, out of everyone who began one in the same period. The numerator is the people who started and stopped. The denominator is everyone who started, whether they went on to submit or not, and both are counted over the same period.
In Arabic the measure also goes by a second name, معدل التخلي عن الطلب. It is one of the operational measures of candidate experience that is available without any survey, because it comes from what applicants did on the form rather than from what they said about it afterwards.
The application abandonment rate is the counterpart of the application completion rate (معدل إتمام التقديم). One counts the people who began and did not submit; the other counts the people who began and did submit. How the denominator is defined, the point at which an application counts as begun, and the conditions under which the two figures add up to 100% are part of the definition of the application completion rate, and the abandonment rate takes them as given rather than setting them again.
Why a single application abandonment rate is not enough
An application abandonment rate of 35% says that just over a third of the people who began an application did not finish it. It does not say where they stopped.
A figure that can be acted on is spread across the steps of the form: how many people entered each step, and how many left it. For any one step, the number who left is the number who entered that step less the number who entered the step after it. Laid out in that way, the overall rate becomes a sequence of smaller losses, each attached to a particular part of the form.
Producing that sequence requires an event to be recorded at each step, rather than a measurement of the final outcome alone. A form that records only whether an application was submitted can give the overall rate, but it cannot show which step lost the applicants.
How the losses are distributed decides the response they call for. A single step that loses half of the people who enter it is a specific place to examine. Five steps that each lose a small share are a question of the form’s length, not of a fault in any one step.
The cases an application abandonment rate combines
Three different cases sit behind the same application abandonment rate:
- Withdrawal. The applicant began and then decided not to apply, for a reason connected with the job, the pay or the place of work.
- Obstruction. The applicant wanted to submit and could not, because a field rejected what they entered or a file failed to upload.
- Return. The applicant left the application and submitted it some days later, so the same application is counted as abandoned in one period and as completed in another.
Of the three, only obstruction is a fault to be fixed. The applicant intended to apply and the form prevented it, so the loss comes from the form and not from the applicant’s decision.
Withdrawal can be useful. An advertisement that is explicit about the requirements, the pay and the place of work turns away the people it does not fit before they send an application that would be excluded later. An applicant who leaves at that point adds nothing to the work of screening, whereas the same applicant submitting would add an application to be read and then set aside.
A return changes the figures for two periods at once. The rate for the period in which the application was begun counts it as abandoned, although it was eventually submitted, and the period in which it was submitted records a completion whose start falls outside it.
What an application abandonment rate can indicate
A rise in the rate while the number of visits stays steady directs the examination to the form before the advertisement. The number of people arriving has not changed; if more of them leave, the change lies in what they meet once they have arrived. When the rate jumps straight after a change to the form, that timing connects the effect to that change directly.
When the rise comes with a rise in visits, it may have a different cause: a campaign that reached an audience wider than the role itself, so people the role did not fit entered the form and then left it. In that situation a higher rate can reflect who arrived rather than what the form asked of them, and the form is not necessarily the cause.
The rate also needs enough applications behind it before it says anything. For a vacancy whose application was begun by 12 people, no conclusion can be built on the percentage, because one or two applicants can move it a long way. The useful review at that scale is to go through the twelve cases one at a time.
What lowering the application abandonment rate does not solve
Lowering the rate is an intermediate goal, not an end in itself. A form cut down to three fields raises completion, and moves the burden of exclusion to the first screening stage of the candidate pipeline (خط إمداد المرشحين), whether that stage is a reading of applications or a prescreening interview. A form with fewer fields asks fewer questions, so fewer people stop at a question, and more applications arrive from people who would otherwise have stopped.
The cost has moved rather than disappeared, and it is borne by whoever does the screening. Those screening hours are among the internal costs that cost per hire counts.
For that reason the application abandonment rate is examined alongside what comes after it: how many of the submitted applications moved on to the next stage, and how many of them met the stated requirements in the first place.
What counts towards an application abandonment rate and what does not
An application rejected after it was submitted is not abandoned. Abandonment is an event that happens before submission, and submission ends the possibility of it. It has no connection with the organisation’s decision about the candidate.
The same holds for an application submitted with gaps. It counts as completed in this measurement, and what is missing from it is a question of data quality, not of abandonment.
This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.
A standalone Saudi HR system
One employee file holding the contract, the documents and their expiry dates, the attendance record, leave, salary and end-of-service entitlements. End-of-service, overtime and leave-balance calculations are built into the system.
A standalone system on its own subscription. The connection to Qoyod Accounting is now available.