Cohorts

Conduct cohort analysis to see how a specific population changes over time.

Overview

A cohort is a population of subject members (such as applicants, employees, and requisitions) that share similar attributes or experience common events at a specific time. Cohort analysis allows you to support use cases such as:

Cohorts capture a population of subject members. Subjects are entities, or separate and independent things, that have attributes that evolve over time, such as Applicants, Employees, and Requisitions.

For example, an Employee is a subject with attributes such as Direct Manager. When an employee's manager changes, that change to the subject's Direct Manager attribute is captured over time. Cohort analysis is only available for subjects because it's all about analyzing how a population changes over time. Other examples of subjects you can analyze include groups of Applicants or Requisitions.

When you define a cohort, the metric you select in the metric picker on the chart first will determine the subject that defines your cohort. So, if you want to define a cohort of Employees, choose the subject-based metric Headcount. Other subject-based metric examples include groups of applicants, such as Current Applicants, Applicants Active in Period, or New Applicants in Period, and groups of requisitions, such as Open Requisitions, Open Positions for Open Requisitions, or Requisitions Closed Filled in Period. The metric you select is only used for defining the subject of the cohort, it is not the outcome you want to analyze from the cohort. After you define the cohort, you can switch the metric to analyze outcomes such as Resignation Rate.

You cannot define cohorts for event-based or overlay metrics because they only exist in a single time frame, such as Employee Exit, Engagement, and Hire. An event represents an incident at a specific point in time that occurred to a subject. Events are instantaneous, therefore they have no lifetime to analyze.

For example, an Interview is an event that occurs at a point in time and is associated with an Employee subject (the interviewer) and an Applicant subject (the interviewee). You cannot define cohorts for a metric based on the Interview event such as Interviews in Period because there are no future outcomes to track about the interviews after they occurred. You can, however, define a cohort for the employees and applicants that experienced the interview during the same period.

Let's look at a group of employees who started in the third quarter of 2017. This population is a cohort because they experienced a common event during the same period, an Employment Start Event in Q3 2017. Cohort analysis involves tracking and deriving insights from the behavior of a particular cohort. For example, calculating how many of the employees who started in Q3 2017 are still with the organization in Q1 2020, as shown in the following chart.