There are an endless amount of metrics recruiters can use to determine whether they are recruiting effectively or not, such as referrals per call or email conversion rate.
But for those that don’t have the time to measure every little thing, here are the top 5 metrics to measure the success of your recruiting process:
1. Time to hire – Slow hiring processes cost you time and money. From the time you post a job order, how much time passes before the candidate starts? Compare the time across different roles and different clients, and aim to lower the average by identifying challenges and making recommendations to the hiring manager on how to improve their time-to-fill. The top 10 percent of talent tends to be off the market in 10 days!
2. Sourcing of hire – These days, there are more channels than ever to recruit from – job boards, referrals, recruitment networks, social media, LinkedIn, direct contact with passive candidates, etc. Where are your successful candidates coming from? You can use anything from an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), to Google Analytics, to an old-fashioned spreadsheet. With each job order, track not only how many applicants came from each source, but how many Qualified applications came from each source, as well as where the short-listed applicants and successful candidate were sourced. Tracking this metric will help highlight the effectiveness of each of these channels, so you can determine where and how to allocate your resources most effectively.
3. Cost per hire – In addition to fees, measure other costs, like how much time it took to interview, advertisements placed, cost of social media accounts, etc.
4. Retention / Quality of Hire – Hiring people is costly and time-consuming. While you always want to aim for the shortest time-to-hire as possible, you don’t want to sacrifice quality for a quick hire. Average employees add no significant value, whereas top-producing talent tend to be retained for a longer period of time – analyze this to identify which positions are the most difficult to keep filled, as well as why employees are leaving.
5. Candidate Experience – in addition to producing under-performing hires, a weak hiring process can cost a firm a great deal in lost productivity if the hiring process is unnecessarily slow, which can result in position vacant for a longer period of time. a weak candidate experience can create major damage to the business because candidates may relay their experience to their network. You could create a survey that measures candidates’ experience, collect feedback, and make improvements based on that.
Recruiting metrics need to be strategic and quantified with a focus on the big picture. They also need to be actionable – how will you use the data to actually increase the business impacts of recruiting?
What metrics do you use to confirm whether you are employing effectively or not?
