Measuring Key Performance Indicators for Your Recruiting Team
August 15, 2013
Are you monitoring the success and impact of your recruiting efforts? If not, you’re missing out on important metrics that can transform your company into a lean, mean talent-acquisition machine.
Sourcing, recruiting, and hiring the best possible candidates can be a long and complex process. Implementing the right strategies can help to streamline it, but in order to do that you need to know specifically which parts are running optimally and which aren’t. That’s why learning exactly what you should be monitoring plays such an integral role in transforming an otherwise average recruiting team into a productive powerhouse.
Listen in to this week’s Labcast to hear OpenView’s own Talent Specialist Katy Smigowski share her valuable insight on effective recruiting metrics and how to better track, understand, and optimize the key performance indicators of your recruiting team’s success.
Key Takeaways
- Monitor daily activities. Measure success by focusing on the combination of tactical activities and what those activities end results are. [1:32]
- Simplify your day. Break down your day-to-day activities and know what to track.[2:04]
- Are you being successful? How to track the information and know when your team is doing a good job. [4:22]
- The big picture. How to interpret and fully understand the metrics. [7:30]
- Stay tuned for a new report. Katy explains the talent factory’s latest report consisting of the best practices when it comes to recruiting software enginers. [10:12]
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Transcript
Kevin Cain: And today I’m here with my colleague Katy Smigowski, who’s one of our Talent Specialists here at OpenView Labs to talk about how to measure the success of your talent factory. This conversation actually comes on the heels of the publication of our new ebook, Get More Talent, which describes in great detail how you can build your own in-house talent factory. Hey Katy, thanks so much for joining me today on Labcast. How’s it going?
Katy: It’s going well. Thanks for having me.
Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned in my introduction, OpenView just recently put out a new e-book on how to build a talent factory that we’re going to be discussing today, and what I wanted to start off with is sort of a brief explanation on what a talent factory actually is. Can you describe that for us?
Katy: Yeah, sure, absolutely. So basically what a talent factory is, is an internal talent team, a recruiting team, that’s dedicated to using best practices and processes in order to find, recruit, and hire the best talent for companies or your own company.
Kevin: Great. So what we’re going to be focusing on in our conversation today is how you actually measure those talent factories, right? So my first question to you is really, how can recruiters and their companies measure the success of their talent factories, you know? What are the factors that they should be looking at in evaluating them?
Katy: Yeah, great question. So measuring the success of a talent factory is incredibly important to keep track of just because you have several different moving pieces, different Talent Specialists working together, so really what you’re going to be focused on when you’re measuring that success is a combination of tactical activities and what those activities end results are.
Kevin: Great. So why don’t we break that down a little bit? What are some of the sort of tactical activities and what are the results we should be looking for?
Katy: Sure. So the activities can be broken down into several different areas, if you will. So there can be daily activity, which is basically-, a talent team, or a talent factory is consistent of different Talent Specialists. So each individual Talent Specialist can keep track of their own daily activity. So obviously what someone’s doing on a day-to-day basis and things like that would include applications that you’re getting in, candidates that you’re sourcing either from LinkedIn or other resources, candidate phone interviews that you’re performing, candidates sent to hiring managers, and candidates interviewing in person. So those are really all the day-to-day things that you should keep track of, so that’s more of a very tactical level, and then on top of that you can also keep track of the team activities. So everyone working together as a team. Things like that would be the total number of open requisitions or job openings that you’re recruiting on, as well as how many of those have closed. Also why searches have closed, so not always are searches closed because someone’s been hired. It could be several different reasons. Those are all good things to measure and keep track of. And then lastly is really the individual job requisition activity. So you really want to make sure that you’re keeping track of everything there. Things like how are candidates coming into process, details like sourced candidates, so candidates that a Talent Specialist has found versus candidates that have applied or have come inbound, as well as number of candidate interviews that have been going on per requisition. So as you can see, that’s a lot of activity, and it’s all really important to keep track of and make sure you’re measuring what’s going on there.
Kevin: So that raises a couple of questions for me. One is, how do you go about actually tracking all this stuff, and then what does it all mean? Are there benchmarks you should be comparing yourself to? How do you put it into context to evaluate whether or not you’re doing a good job?
Katy: Yeah. Well all of those things are things that we focus on. So your first question was-
Kevin: Around how do you actually track it?
Katy: How do we actually track it, OK great. So the daily activity is really going to be tracked per recruiter. That’s something that you can speak about daily if you have a daily meeting. We use SCRUM which is also talked about in our e-book. You can also track this if you have an applicant tracking system is the best way to track all of this activity, and a lot of times these applicant tracking systems will pull reports for you or show it in a graphical form and you can really see the results that you’re working on. And like you said, benchmark. So what those
all really funnel into are these results that you’re getting and these ratios that are going to be important for your team to look at as a talent factory, a talent team, as well as the company that you’re working for, of course, because they’re seeing you hiring people, they’re not the experts, we are. So we want to show them what we’re doing. The results of all this work that we’re doing, all this time that we’re putting in. Things like that can be of course an obvious one, number of candidates hired. So how many candidates have you hired? And that can be per quarter, per year, I would recommend per quarter, and then yearly, kind of total, rather than monthly just because these can take a while sometimes. Time to hire, so like I just said, how long does it take to hire a specific job opening? And that’s really going to vary too. So there can be easy, or more easy to find candidates, for typical jobs, as well as candidates that are difficult to find for a specific job. So you can track that as well as cost to hire is something that you can keep track. That may involve a manager doing something like that,
understanding how much the applicant tracking system is costing versus how much time you’re spending, so that’s a ratio you could look at too. The source of a hire, so like I mentioned before, where are these candidates coming from? The reason that’s a good thing to track is because if a lot of them are coming from LinkedIn, or a meetup group, or a referral, you can focus a little bit more on your success there and use that
avenue a bit more. The retention rate, that’s more of a long- term thing, so how long are people staying that you’re hiring? So are you hiring the right people, basically. You can also look at subjective results, and what I mean by that is manager or candidate satisfaction, and that’s of course going to b subjective because it’s not all just hard facts or numbers. It’s going to be like a survey or something put out to the candidate or the hiring manager, and again that’s all valuable feedback to take back to continue to improve your processes.
Kevin: So that’s all great information. I guess what really is important though, is what do you do with it all? So you know, I think lots of people are into tracking metrics and there’s certainly value in that, but the real value comes in interpreting those metrics and doing something with them. Can you talk a little bit about how either OpenView has used these metrics to improve how we recruit, or how one of our portfolio companies has done so?
Katy: Sure. So you can use the metrics for bunch of different reasons, and I think one of the best reasons or one of the best ways to look
at all of this information, all of these metrics, is to really focus on maybe if things are not going as smoothly as possible with particular hires, with particular job openings you’re working with, and really focusing in. Say for instance, the time to hire is relatively long compared to something else. You can see that, instead of if you’re not tracking it, you may have some idea that maybe it’s taking a little bit longer than normal but if you are seeing these results, I mean it’s facts. You can see, wow, this took a bit longer. Or maybe it took a little bit shorter. What did I do better there, and what didn’t go well in something that took longer? So you can really focus in on those results and try to improve and figure out what happened so I can continue to be effective and efficient with my recruiting and hiring individuals. So one of the examples I have for that is that with OpenView’s talent factory, our talent team, you realize one quarter that our number of hires were a bit lower than we anticipated and rather than just accepting that, oh, it was a slow quarter, or maybe we didn’t do as good of a job. We investigated that and used our metrics and realized that some of our searches have closed, so our numbers are down, but they weren’t actually closed because people had hired into them, they were closed because their budget fell through for a particular department or hiring manager. Or, the search became a different priority. So it no longer was a priority, we’re working on something else. That may not seem like such a big deal, but if you think about it, if our Talent Specialist is spending hours and hours of time on something that’s not going to happen, that’s a huge waste of time, it’s a huge waste of money. So by really zoning in on that and figuring out what that impediment was, moving forward we made sure that things were a priority before working on them. Made sure that the budget was finalized so we weren’t going to come across that again. There’s always going to be instances where that happens, but just to really focus in on that and realize that we’re trying to work on things that are a priority and really maximize our time and our efforts. It can really help a lot when it comes to recruiting and hiring individuals.
Kevin: Great. Well I know this is a really valuable resource that you guys have put together, this talent e-book and I know that there’s another one that your team also worked on, a report. Would you mind telling us a little bit about that?
Katy: Yeah, I would love to tell you about that. So of course we were working with these technology companies, kind of the backbone to any technology company is their engineering development talent. I’ve been recruiting, as well as other members of my team, on positions such as those and we’ve been finding using our metrics and seeing that it can take a bit longer to find these people. It’s harder to find these people. We’re talking about software engineers in terms of each position than others. So what the report is basically about is best practices when it comes to finding and speaking with and recruiting basically these software engineers because there can be a little bit of a different [xx]. They’re not all always sourced from the same place liked LinkedIn. They’re not always applying. So it really focuses in on results that we received from surveys about what engineers find is most important when it comes to their job search and their companies. So it’s being able to use that valuable information from them in order to recruit them better and find them and hire them.
Kevin: Great. Well I know both of those resources are available on the OpenView Lab site. Anyone can go and download them there. Thanks again so much for joining me today Katy. I really appreciate your sharing some information about this new content. Look forward to talking to you again soon.
Katy: Sure, it was my pleasure. Thank you.