Offer acceptance rate = offers accepted ÷ offers extended over a window. Eight accepted out of ten extended is 80%.
A declined offer is the most expensive rejection in the funnel: by the time it happens you have paid for sourcing, screening, several interviews and the panel's time — and often already told the runner-up no. Declines cluster around three causes:
- Compensation below the candidate's actual market — the offer confirms a salary-band mismatch the process should have surfaced at screening.
- Speed — a competing process concluded while yours was assembling approvals; counter-offers thrive in that gap.
- Late surprises — on-call duty, office policy, contract type or scope revealed at offer stage instead of on the first call.
At a 5–200-person scale the denominator is small, so read cases before percentages: three declines a year are three specific stories, and each one names its own fix — reset the bands, shorten the last mile, or move the surprise to the first conversation.
In Helia, offers move draft → sent → accepted or declined, and the candidate can accept directly from a tokenized offer link; recruiting analytics count offers per recruiter next to hires — so both sides of the ratio are recorded as they happen, per job and per person.