SHRM Talent Acquisition & Workforce Planning 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which metric measures the percentage of job offers that candidates accept?
- Yield ratio
- Offer acceptance rate (Correct answer)
- Time-to-start
- Quality of hire
Correct answer: Offer acceptance rate
Offer acceptance rate is calculated by dividing the number of offers accepted by the total number of offers extended.
Question 2: An organization is experiencing high turnover among new hires within their first 90 days. Which talent acquisition practice is most likely to address this?
- Increasing screening assessments
- Improving the onboarding experience and setting clear 30-60-90 day expectations (Correct answer)
- Reducing the length of the hiring process
- Expanding the candidate search geography
Correct answer: Improving the onboarding experience and setting clear 30-60-90 day expectations
Poor onboarding is a leading cause of early turnover; structured onboarding with clear milestones improves new hire retention.
Question 3: What is the primary legal risk associated with using credit history checks in the employee selection process?
- Violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act
- Potential disparate impact discrimination under Title VII (Correct answer)
- Breach of applicant privacy under HIPAA
- Non-compliance with the National Labor Relations Act
Correct answer: Potential disparate impact discrimination under Title VII
Credit checks can disproportionately screen out minority applicants and must be job-related and consistent with business necessity to avoid disparate impact claims.
Question 4: In scenario-based workforce planning, which technique involves creating multiple possible future states to prepare for uncertainty?
- Regression analysis
- Trend analysis
- Scenario planning (Correct answer)
- Replacement charting
Correct answer: Scenario planning
Scenario planning develops several plausible future states so organizations can prepare flexible workforce strategies.
Question 5: Which sourcing method is generally most cost-effective for high-volume, entry-level hiring?
- Executive search firms
- Employee referral programs
- Programmatic job advertising (Correct answer)
- University partnerships
Correct answer: Programmatic job advertising
Programmatic advertising uses algorithms to automatically buy and optimize job ad placements, delivering high volumes of applicants at a lower cost-per-applicant.
Question 6: Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), when can an employer legally ask about an applicant's disability?
- During the initial application review
- Only after a conditional offer of employment has been made (Correct answer)
- During any stage if the disability is apparent
- Only if the applicant volunteers the information first
Correct answer: Only after a conditional offer of employment has been made
The ADA prohibits disability-related inquiries and medical examinations until after a conditional job offer is extended.
Question 7: A recruiter calculates that 1 in 8 applicants reaches the interview stage. This ratio is an example of which recruitment metric?
- Cost per hire
- Source effectiveness
- Yield ratio (Correct answer)
- Selection rate
Correct answer: Yield ratio
A yield ratio measures the proportion of candidates who move from one stage of the hiring process to the next.
SHRM Talent Acquisition & Workforce Planning 4
Which metric measures the percentage of job offers that candidates accept?