Click any number to adjust it, or drag conversion rate sliders for live updates Tap any stage to adjust its number or conversion rate
A recruiting funnel calculator answers the question every hiring plan starts with: how many candidates do we need to talk to in order to make the hires we need? The funnel above is the Recruiting preset — Contacts → Recruiter Screen → Hiring Manager Interview → Second Round → Presentation / Technical → Final Round → Offer → Hired. Set the number of hires at the bottom, put your interview-stage pass rates on each transition, and read the sourcing volume at the top.
Because the model runs both ways, it also forecasts. If a sourcer can reach 300 contacts a month, anchor the Contacts stage and see how many hires that produces — and how many interview hours it costs the hiring team on the way. Everything is free and runs in the browser; nothing is uploaded unless you choose to save or share it. Rates for other pipelines live on their own pages: sales, SaaS, e-commerce.
There are three honest ways to use a funnel calculator. They look the same but the workflow differs:
For all three, the calculator's 8 presets (Recruiting, Sales, SaaS, E-commerce, Marketing, Fundraising, Support, Product Adoption) give you a labeled starting point — duplicate a preset, rename stages, and tune the rates.
Benchmarks are starting anchors, not targets. Your own data — once you have a few months of it — beats any industry average. The ranges below come from public B2B/B2C reports and are intended to help you sanity-check whether a stage is in the ballpark or is genuinely an outlier.
| Stage transition | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Sourced contact → Reply / application | 8–15% |
| Application → Recruiter screen | 25–40% |
| Recruiter screen → Hiring manager interview | 50–75% |
| Hiring manager interview → Onsite / final round | 30–50% |
| Onsite → Offer | 40–60% |
| Offer → Accepted | 60–80% |
| Overall application → Hire | 1–3% |
| Overall onsite interviews per hire | 3–5 |
If your stage is materially below the bottom of the range, there's a real problem to investigate. If it's near the middle, the stage is performing in line with the industry and you'll get more leverage by improving a stage that's further below. If it's above the top of the range, double-check your tracking — measurement bugs are more common than truly exceptional funnels.
Most funnels fail in predictable ways. These are the four patterns you'll see most often:
Every downstream stage is healthy but the absolute output is too low. Conversion rates won't fix this — you need more leads, more applicants, more sourced candidates, or more traffic. Look upstream at acquisition channels, not at process changes.
One stage early in the funnel drops dramatically below benchmark — typically the first qualification step. This usually means the top-of-funnel sources are not well-matched: the right people aren't applying, demoing, or shopping. Tighten the targeting upstream rather than building more downstream process.
A stage in the middle (typically demo-to-trial, second-interview-to-onsite, or evaluation-to-decision) has a low rate that's also volatile month-to-month. This is usually a process or follow-through problem: handoffs between teams, missing nurture, or slow response time after initial engagement.
The final stage trends downward over multiple quarters. Pricing, competition, or product-market fit drift cause this — not "bad sales execution." When you see this pattern, the conversation belongs at the strategy level, not the rep performance level.
A recruiting funnel calculator models how candidates move through each stage of a hiring process — sourced contact, recruiter screen, hiring manager interview, onsite, offer, hire — using a pass rate for each transition. Set the hires you need and it works backwards to the number of candidates you must source; set the candidates you can source and it forecasts the hires. Editing any stage recomputes the rest.
Across most roles, roughly 25–40% of applicants pass a recruiter screen, 50–75% of those pass the hiring manager interview, 30–50% of those reach a final round or onsite, and 40–60% of onsite candidates receive an offer, of which 60–80% accept. Compounded, that is about 3–5 onsite interviews per hire and 1–3% of applicants hired. Senior and specialised roles run tighter at the top and looser at offer stage; high-volume roles are the reverse.
With benchmark rates, one hire takes roughly 10–15 recruiter screens, 30–40 applications and a few hundred sourced contacts, though the range is wide. The calculator gives you your own number: set Hired to 1, enter your pass rates, and the Contacts stage is your answer. Multiply by the hires in your plan and divide by your team's monthly sourcing capacity to see whether the timeline is realistic.
Between 60% and 80%. Below 60% usually means compensation is out of band or the process was slow enough that candidates accepted elsewhere first; both are visible in the funnel as a healthy Onsite to Offer rate followed by a cliff at Offer to Hired. Above 90% often means offers are being extended too conservatively — you may be losing good candidates at the Final Round stage instead.
Most often the hiring manager interview: it is the first stage owned by someone outside the recruiting team, so scheduling delay and inconsistent criteria show up there as a low or volatile pass rate. The second most common is Onsite to Offer, where a low rate paired with a healthy earlier funnel points to a calibration gap between what recruiters screen for and what the panel decides on. Compare each stage's rate with the benchmarks above; the largest gap is where to spend the next debrief.
Read the count at each interview stage off the calculator and multiply by the hours that stage takes. With the preset's rates, 14 hires need about 140 hiring manager interviews, 100 second rounds, 50 technical presentations and 26 final rounds; at 1, 2, 2 and 4 panel-hours each that is roughly 550 hours of interviewer time before anyone is hired. Raising the recruiter screen pass rate by tightening the sourcing profile is often the cheapest way to cut it.