The Top Recruitment Metrics You Should Be Tracking

It’s been said that data rules the world–and even human-centric fields such as HR are being disrupted.

While HR will always be the province of flesh-and-blood human beings, there’s been a thrust for the past few years towards a data-driven practice. A key part of this is using specific metrics to objectively evaluate how well you’re doing. Take this further, and you get detailed graphs and algorithms that spit out surprising insights.

People can get a little too enthusiastic about metrics, though—you can list down at least ten for recruitment alone. Trying to keep track of all these will lead to too many data points and muddled thinking, and you can become obsessed with tracking instead of committing to action.

To avoid getting overwhelmed, focus on these top recruitment metrics first:

Source of Hire

Where do candidates come from?

The options here are limitless: social media, the company website, referrals. To a certain extent, getting a great candidate depends on putting the job post out there and having it reach as many potentially interested as possible—giving you more options.

Try to measure how many people come from each source. You can then channel your resources more into the higher-yield channels, while focusing less on those that don’t attract as much.

Consider, too, the quality of candidates—a few well-qualified candidates is better than a hundred mediocre ones.

Offer Acceptance Rate

How often do people accept your job offer?

The answer to this is a percentage: number of acceptances divided by number of candidates given a job offer. Scoring low means that most of your candidates didn’t take you up on your job offer.

That’s a red flag—if they’d gone through your complete round of interviews, why wouldn’t they want to join your company? Maybe the pay is too low, or the benefits aren’t good enough.

What’s challenging about this is that candidates are rarely honest when you ask them why they turned it down. It might also imply a bad candidate experience—maybe they were genuinely looking forward to being part of your company, but the interview made them change their minds.

Time to Fill an Opening

How long does it take to hire a candidate?

Time isn’t the only variable, but in general, the more quickly you fill up a position, the better. When a job opening is left vacant, the involved team has to shoulder the extra work, which adds to their baggage and lessens productivity.

On average, though, it’s probably going to take more than a month to find someone new.

Time to fill is related to offer acceptance rate. No matter how efficient you are with gathering and interviewing candidate, progress will remain stalled if nobody accepts your offer.

Job still untaken after two months? That’s a call for you to reexamine your recruitment process and wonder if you’re simply not looking in the right places, if your standards are too high, or if your employer branding can use some work.

Turnover Rate

How many of your new hires quit even before a year?

A major concern in HR is trimming down the costs. HR can take up as much as 30% of a company’s expenses—and turnover adds to that cost.

It’s inconvenient when employees quit early, even before their probation ends. You have to go through the entire hiring process all over again—not to mention deal with the negative returns from another round of training.

The level of a recruiter’s success isn’t gauged by the offer acceptance rate alone. You’d have to look beyond that to the long-term result: will the new hire actually stay in the company? Moreover, if turnover does occur, is it because the employee quit on his own, or he got fired?

Quality of Hire

How good is the new employee that you hired?

Hand-in-hand with turnover rate is quality of hire—and you should never compromise quality. The ideal situation is hiring someone quickly, and getting that person to do well. However, if you focus on hiring quickly alone, you run the risk of getting someone who won’t perform well.

Quality of hire is mainly based on performance rating, which is judged against a set of KPIs specific to the position. This is usually measured after a year.

The best success you can have as a hiring manager is to find someone who can transform the company for the better. In line with this, there’s something called the Success Ratio, which compares the number of high-performing hires with the total number of new hires.

Bonus: Cost of Hire

What resources do you invest in hiring an employee?

This metric comes into play when you’re doing your budgeting. It’s usually an eye-opener—chances are, your estimate will be quite off the mark!

While you’re probably going to focus on monetary cost when filling out your spreadsheet, you also have to consider the other kinds of costs, such as the time you invested into interviewing.

Check out this graphic from Beamery for a breakdown of the costs you will inevitably encounter when hiring:

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