Blog
Why Did You Really Quit Your Last Job?
By Teasha Cable
The recruiter whose offer acceptance rate in enterprise sales hiring sits at 95%...when 70% is considered "winning."
What a 95% Offer Acceptance Rate Actually Costs (Hint: It's Not Sourcing)
I ask a lot of guests on the #DynamicDecisionsPodcast to hand me a number. Most numbers are good. Some are impressive. Then 👑 Joi "The Joiful Recruiter"™ 👑 told me her offer acceptance rate in enterprise sales hiring at Dynatrace sits at 95%, and I made her stop and say it again.
Most companies would take 70% in that world and call it a great year.
I went into that conversation expecting the usual answer: a sourcing trick, a comp advantage, something Dynatrace's brand does for her that other recruiters don't have. What I got instead was a set of habits, small ones, that most recruiters skip entirely.
Why Candidate Experience Beats Candidate Sourcing
When I asked Joi to break down where the 95% actually comes from, she wouldn't give me a single stage. She kept pointing to all of it. Part of the number, she admitted, is just the strength of the Dynatrace name. People already want in.
But the part she actually controls, and the part she kept returning to, is the experience a candidate has from the first conversation through the final decision, including the candidates who never get the job.
Joi follows up with candidates after they get an offer, and she checks in with the people who didn't get the role too, because how a rejection feels is still part of how someone talks about the company afterward.
Most hiring processes I've seen are built to optimize the middle, the interviews and the scorecards, and they quietly ignore the beginning and the end. Joi's number is what happens when someone actually fixes that.
Why She Digs Into Why the Last Person Left
The technique I keep coming back to is what Joi does with backfills, roles that open up because someone left. Most recruiters ask the hiring manager what skills the next person needs. Joi asks why the last person actually left.
Sometimes the answer is simple: better offer, more money, bad timing. But for roles like sales operations or sales enablement, she pushes past the easy answer, building enough trust with the manager to get the honest version instead of the polished one.
That honest answer becomes the raw material for her entire interview. Once she knows what actually pushed someone out the door, she builds questions designed to find out whether the same thing would happen again with a different hire, all without going anywhere near a question that's invasive or illegal.
Joi told me about a candidate who described friction with a past manager by saying he'd had to "go and kind of duke it out" with him.
On its own, that's a throwaway line, the kind of thing that slides past in normal conversation.
Joi didn't let it slide.
To her, that single sentence said more about how this person handles conflict and authority than his resume ever could, and she used it as the seed for a whole line of behavioral questions. Not how would you handle disagreement, but tell me about a real one.
I asked her why that phrase mattered so much, and her answer is the part I want every hiring manager listening to this episode to sit with.
Most interviews are built almost entirely around one question: can this person do the job.
Joi treats that as the floor, not the ceiling, and spends her real energy on the question that rarely gets asked out loud: will this person actually stay, and will the team want to keep them.
A phrase like "duke it out" is a crack in the polish every candidate walks in wearing, and her whole method is built around noticing that crack and working it, carefully, until she has a real answer.
Time to hire down 20%, retention up 30%, that's what it looks like when both questions get answered before the offer instead of six months after the start date.
Money, Timing, and the Line Between Coaching and Recruiting
Joi also runs a salary coaching practice, [Joiful Talent Solutions LLC](https://), which puts her in a strange spot: she's the one extending the offer in her day job, and the one teaching candidates how to negotiate a better one in her coaching practice.
I pushed her on that tension and she didn't dodge it. She wants candidates to get the most money they can in both roles, but she's honest with them about where their actual experience lands inside a posted range.
She's also strict about timing.
Compensation comes up early in her process, not saved for the end, because nobody's time should be wasted chasing a role that was never going to pay what they need.
And when it's time to name a number, she wants the candidate to go first, not to win a game, but because it tells her where their real expectations sit, which she can then work with honestly.
When the Data and the Gut Disagree Later in our conversation I ran Joi through a quick persona assessment I like to use, four decision-making styles: values-driven, strategic long-term thinking, contrarian challenge, and pure data.
She put 95% of herself in the values-driven column and almost nothing in the other three. That number is interesting on its own, but the question I kept asking myself afterward is the one I'd ask any of you: a 95% acceptance rate is a great headline, but it can also be a sign of a pipeline that's quietly narrowed to people who already look like the team.
Joi's own answer to that risk wasn't a metric, it was a habit. She listens to what candidates and employees actually say, in exit conversations and even on Glassdoor, because a pattern in feedback surfaces things a dashboard never will. 🤯
My Learnings
Nothing Joi does is complicated.
Ask why the last person left, then ask again a different way. Listen for the offhand phrase that says more than the resume does. Talk about money early. Follow up with the people who didn't get the job.
What makes this work is that she treats hiring like a relationship that starts before the first interview and doesn't end at the offer letter. If your own numbers on time to hire, acceptance rate, or retention have plateaued, I'd bet the gap isn't in your sourcing. It's in everything around it.
Listen to our conversation: