Yield ratios are a key performance indicator used in corporate industries worldwide. It’s a quantitative metric that businesses can use to determine the success potential of nearly anything the formula is used to measure, and in academics, this often applies to the selection of new hires. In fact, using this formula strategically can help you to evaluate your personal management style.

 The definition of a yield ratio can be ambiguous, as it varies depending on the reason it’s used. Once you get familiar with this metric and learn how to calculate it by using the yield ratio formula, you’ll want to use it in your department as a measurement indicator.

Connecting Your Management Style to Yield Ratios

Part of the hiring process involves bringing in multiple candidates for screening, interviews, follow-up interviews, and other stages. The yield ratio metric measures these movements as they transition into new states. To ensure your hiring procedures are fair, efficient, and consistent, you should use the yield ratio to measure how you move candidates from the application stage to the hiring stage.

One benefit of using a yield ratio is determining whether you’re using the right source to fill your open positions. Many higher education campuses and institutions use internal sharing on social media and job posting boards to look for in-house candidates first. After that, they move to alternative platforms, which often require payment for advertising. The question would be whether the candidates provided are worth the cost, and you, as a hiring manager, would help to determine that answer.

Consider, for instance, an institution that spends part of its budget using a specific job platform to primarily source candidates. Using the yield ratio formula, you determined that 500 of the CVs you received came from this platform. However, only 1% of the submissions made it through the screening phase and into the interview process.

That 1% was likely accidental since 99% were unqualified. It could be that your screening process is too rigorous for the job position you’re posting, the advertised job was not clearly explained, which leads back to your management style. It may also be that there aren’t many candidates available in the market, forcing you, as the manager, to decide what to do next to fill that spot.

Or, it could mean that the platform was not doing a capable job of screening the right candidates. If in your yield ratio analysis, you see that Platform K provides a screening success of 1%, while Platform R and S each successfully produce 25% of candidates that make it through screening, you know that the money you’re spending on Platform K is not giving you a return on your investment.

Another essential reason to use a yield ratio is to watch for bias in your interview selection and hiring. This is crucial when it comes to minority hiring rates. Your institution could be predominantly one gender or one race, but if you can show that your yield ratio is consistent and fair, this doesn’t have to reflect on your managerial style.

Your yield rate formula can support you if your campus is accused of discrimination against hiring a specific minority. The formulas could show, for instance, that you didn’t have any people in that minority who applied and made it through the screening process. On the other hand, it could also show that you had multiple people who made it through but didn’t make it to the final interview selection. This eye-opening result shows you there may be implicit bias in you that you didn’t recognize you had.

Calculating Yield Ratio

So how do you find the yield ratio? It’s a simple mathematical formula in which the variables are chosen by you based on what detail you’re attempting to analyze.

The formula base looks like this:

# of candidates with a particular factor applying

# of candidates with that factor that made it through a stage

Dividing those two numbers gives you the yield ratio.     

Let Impactio Guide Your Growth

The field of academic research is full of metrics like yield ratios. These can be complicated to figure out independently, but Impactio’s analytics tools make the job easier. The report features on Impactio’s platform give you the knowledge you need to measure your academic contributions.

At a glance, you’ll understand your citation data through Citation Per Year Graphs, Academic Ranking Radial Plots, Academic Rankings, Citing Institution Maps, Citing Institution Rankings, and the Metrics and Ranks of journals. You’ll also get Publication Data, Metrics, and Journal Rankings. The whole picture provides insights on your research impact to help you move forward with your career.