Recruiting benchmarks and the data dividend

What this is

The Benchmarks tab is where Recruiting stops being just your own numbers and starts being your numbers next to everyone else's. It takes the hires you have closed and the retention checkpoints you have logged, and lines them up against an anonymized cohort of peer operators: how long it typically takes a comparable shop to fill a role, how many applicants a typical requisition draws, how often an offer gets accepted, and how many new hires are still around at 90 days and at a year.

Verinode does not rate your recruiting or tell you what to do about a gap. It reads the hiring data already flowing into Recruiting, computes your own figures, and surfaces the peer figure alongside them so you can see where you stand. You decide whether a slow time-to-fill is a sourcing problem, a comp problem, or just a hard-to-staff market this quarter.

The peer side of every row on this tab comes from other operators' anonymized contributions, aggregated by Verinode. As an independent data trust, Verinode never sells this data, or any operator's recruiting data, to carriers. It exists for one purpose: so you and every other contributing operator can see where you actually stand.

Where to find it

Open Recruiting from the sidebar. The route is /recruiting. Recruiting is a switchable, Premier-tier section. If you have not switched it on yet, see the Recruiting overview for what that means and how to turn it on.

Once Recruiting is active, click any tile or drill-in target to open the full-screen cards slider. Benchmarks is the last of its seven tabs, after Findings, Open Roles, Applicants, Pipeline, Talent Pool, and Hires + Retention. You can also jump straight to it from a tab link if one is showing on the home view.

The Data Dividend banner

At the top of the Benchmarks tab sits a colored panel labeled Data Dividend. Its message changes depending on how much peer data is currently available for comparison, and it always appears first, above the metric rows, so you know how to read the numbers below it before you look at them.

• No peer data yet. The panel reads: "Peer comparison unlocks once enough operators in your cohort contribute anonymized hiring data. Every hire you close, and retention checkpoint you capture, makes your benchmarks (and everyone else's) sharper." In this state every peer figure on the tab below shows as a dash. Your own numbers still populate as your hires and retention checkpoints come in.
• Peer data is thin. The panel reads: "Peer values are directional until the cohort grows. Your hires + retention checkpoints contribute to the shared intelligence layer." Peer figures are showing, but treat them as a rough read rather than a settled number until more operators contribute.
• Peer data is established. The panel header reads "Data Dividend" followed by a count of operators currently contributing, and the body reads: "Peer numbers below come from anonymized contributions across the cohort. Verinode aggregates them for you, never resold to carriers."

The operator count in the unlocked banner reflects the cohort behind your Time To Fill comparison specifically, the whole-team, cross-role benchmark for your state (falling back to the national cohort if your state does not yet have enough contributors on its own). It is a live read of how many peers are currently behind that comparison, not a fixed target.

The five benchmark rows

Below the Data Dividend banner sits a stacked list, one row per metric. Each row shows the metric name on the left, your value in bold on the right, and a smaller "peer" figure beside it for comparison. A dash on either side means that figure has not populated yet.

• Time To Fill. The average number of days between a candidate applying to one of your requisitions and the day you hired them, averaged across your recorded hires. The peer figure is the same measure computed across the cohort, at the whole-team level (not broken out by role). Shown in days.
• Applicants Per Req. How many applicants a typical requisition draws, averaged across your open and closed roles that have received at least one applicant.
• Offer Acceptance. The share of offers you extended in the last six months that were accepted, out of offers made in that window. Shown as a percentage.
• Retention 90d. Of the hires you have tracked to their 90-day checkpoint, the share still with you (retained) at that mark. Shown as a percentage.
• Retention 365d. The same measure at the one-year checkpoint. Shown as a percentage.

How the peer figures are built

Peer values on this tab never come from a single competitor's number. Verinode's recruiting aggregator collects anonymized hire records, retention checkpoints, and applicant-channel activity from every consenting, non-demo operator, strips anything that could identify a specific business or person (exact hire dates are rounded to the month, comp figures are bucketed to the nearest thousand dollars, and free-text sourcing channels like "my cousin Dave" or a specific staffing agency name are folded into a small set of standard channels), and rolls the result up into percentiles by role, state, and company size. A peer figure only ever appears once enough distinct operators stand behind it, at the level of the operator, not the level of the hire, so one shop with many hires can never masquerade as "the cohort."

Where your state does not yet have enough contributors of its own, Verinode falls back to the national cohort automatically so you still see a comparison; it never falls back partway and mixes the two silently. The scope you are shown is always internally consistent for that row.

Empty state (no benchmarks at all)

If you have not yet closed a hire, or have closed hires but have not logged any retention checkpoint, the whole tab shows one message instead of the row list:

"Benchmarks load once you have hires with received_at + hired_at and at least one retention checkpoint. Peer values unlock when the cohort hits cohort-min."

In plain terms: Verinode needs at least one completed hire, meaning a requisition where you recorded both when the applicant came in and when you hired them, plus at least one retention checkpoint (a 30, 90, 180, or 365 day check-in on whether that hire is still with you) before it has anything of yours to compare. Log a hire and a retention checkpoint (through Recruiting directly, or by forwarding the relevant email) and this tab starts populating on your next visit. The peer side unlocks separately, once the cohort behind each metric clears its own privacy floor, independent of how much data you personally have logged.

How to use it

1. 1Check the Data Dividend banner first. It tells you whether the peer figures below are a solid comparison or still directional, before you draw any conclusion from a gap.
2. 2Read Time To Fill and both Retention rows first. These are the most consistently populated peer comparisons, and retention in particular is the number worth acting on: a fast time-to-fill that bleeds hires by 90 days is not actually a win.
3. 3If your Time To Fill is running well above the peer figure, look at your open roles on the Open Roles tab for the specific searches dragging the average up, rather than treating the whole function as slow.
4. 4If a retention rate lags peers, check the Hires + Retention tab for which roles or channels the departures are concentrated in before assuming it is a pay problem.
5. 5Come back after you close hires or log checkpoints. Both your own figures and the peer comparisons refresh as more data flows in, on your side and across the cohort.

Best-practice example

Say your Time To Fill reads 34 days against a peer figure of 22 days, while both Retention rows are at or above peer. That combination points at sourcing or screening speed, not a hiring-quality problem, since the people you do hire are sticking. Open the Open Roles tab to see which specific requisitions are stretching the average (a hard-to-staff Lead Technician search versus a routine Office Manager backfill read very differently), and check the Applicants tab for whether the slow roles are simply drawing fewer candidates per week. If Retention 90d were instead running below peers alongside a fast Time To Fill, that would flag the opposite conversation: you are filling roles quickly but the people you bring on are not sticking, worth a look at your screening bar or onboarding before opening the next search.

Related articles

• Recruiting: overview and how the section works
• The Recruiting home: hero, Take Action, and the seven Explore tiles
• Open roles and requisitions
• Applicant scores and the Why-This-Score breakdown
• Benchmarks overview
• How benchmarks work
• Reading a benchmark