The 7 Recruiting Metrics You Should Be Tracking
October 30, 2013
Want to improve your recruiting process? Then it’s time to start harnessing the data your team naturally generates during each and every candidate search.
Your goal is to bring the best available talent on board to help grow your company. That means taking steps ensure your recruiting and hiring efforts reflect the standard of excellence you’re seeking.
Today, smart business processes are fueled by data. It objectively analyzes your performance, revealing trends or activities that can point you in the right direction. By the same logic, you can track certain metrics to continually improve your recruiting process.
What Recruiting Metrics Should You Be Tracking?
A system of documentation and recruiting metrics allows you to evaluate the tactical work each member of your recruiting team is completing. It also helps identify opportunities for improving inefficiencies and removing impediments. Leveraging recruiting metrics will allow you to take a results-based, data-driven approach to decision making, which will lead to a more productive and effective talent team.
But first, you need to define the metrics you’ll be tracking. Here is a list to start with, but keep in mind your data should always reflect your company’s larger business goals and strategy.
Below are seven useful recruiting metrics and data points:
1) Time-to-hire: To gain valuable insight into the workload and productivity of each recruiter you can track this metric three ways:
- Time from search kickoff to accepted offer.
- Number of hours spent on each requisition.
- The breakdown of time-to-hire (i.e. the intervals of time from when a candidate was sourced, to when they were screened, to when they were interviewed, etc.). Note: This will also allow you to discover any inefficiencies in your overall process such as a delay in the interview process, etc.
2) Source of hire: If you keep track of where your top candidates originate (LinkedIn, referrals, collage fairs, etc.) you will be able to measure the effectiveness of recruiting sources over time. As a result, you can then make further investments in those sources that provide the highest ROI.
3) Retention rate: Following the retention rate of new hires can help you improve recruitment and employee retention policies.
4) Quality/productivity of hire: Admittedly, this metric is typically tough to measure and based on subjective feedback. Nevertheless, tracking it will allow you to stay updated on new employees’ successes.
5) Cost per hire: Just as a sales team measures new customer acquisition costs, you can weigh the financial investment your company must make to attract and recruit new hires.
6) Hiring manager satisfaction: Here’s another subjective metric. An internal survey completed by stakeholders will tell you what worked, what didn’t, and what you can improve upon during the next search.
7) Applicant satisfaction: Create a standardized survey for new hires so you can collect feedback that will assist in improving the overall candidate experience in the future.
Now Put that Data To Use
Once you’ve been built up and organized an appropriate amount of data, it’s time to dive in and see where you can make some improvements. Your metrics, of course, will play a crucial role.
Here’s an example from OpenView:
During a recent quarterly review, we realized that our number of hires was quite a bit lower than we had anticipated. Using metrics to investigate the problem, we discovered more of our searches had closed than we had thought. But they hadn’t closed because positions had been filled; They’d closed because either the budget had fallen through or the search was no longer deemed a priority.
In order to avoid that situation in the future, and improve both our productivity and efficiency, we determined we needed to make absolutely sure a role was a priority before dedicating time and resources to it. And that improvement in our process was all thanks to the data we had collected.
When you hit bottlenecks or notice your productivity slipping, check the data, identify where you’re running into roadblocks, and make adjustments to your process accordingly.
Keep Track Of the Recruiting Process
In addition to team-wide goals reflected in the metrics above, each individual Talent Specialist should also keep track of his or her own activity. These can focus more closely on the day-to-day things on a more tactical level.
By keeping tabs on how and what your team does every day, you can measure important ratios such as:
- # of candidates sourced : # of candidates interviewed
- # of candidates interviewed : # of offers presented
- # of offers presented : # of hires
Tracking these ratios will help your Talent Specialists make improvements to their own recruitment strategies and approach.
As Talent Specialists go about filling out a position, make sure they are actively keeping track of:
- Applications coming in
- Candidates sourced (via LinkedIn, referrals, etc.)
- Phone screens
- Candidates sent to hiring managers
- In-person interviews
- Offers extended
- Offers accepted/hires
You can have your team members track this data however works best for your company, but some options include applicant tracking software, reviewing numbers in a daily meeting, or adopting and tracking the process via SCRUM (which is what we do here at OpenView).
The important thing is that you begin collecting the data as soon as you can so that you can begin using it to work smarter and improve your hiring process to truly develop a talent factory.
Take the Next Step: Download the Free eBook
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- Assemble and manage a successful, high-output talent team
- Execute the six phases of an effective recruiting process
- Leverage the best recruiting tools and technology in the industry
- Establish the key metrics you need to measure to regularly improve your talent factory