7 Recruitment Metrics That No Company Should Ignore

Leverage Your Hiring Statistics to Boost Your Hiring Success

Is your hiring strategy and process successful? How do you know? When was the last time you took the temperature of your recruitment success?

In a data-led world, it is surprising how many hiring companies don’t measure the success of their recruitment processes, despite access to an avalanche of recruitment metrics.

With a war for talent raging following the Great Resignation, and the skills shortage developing into a talent recession and threatening rapidly evolving sectors like tech and creative industries, isn’t it essential to know how your hiring measures up? Only with a deep insight can you shape your recruitment practices to ensure you recruit the people who will drive your business toward its strategic goals.

Recruitment Metrics Are Key to Hiring Successfully

Recruitment metrics are important to measure the effectiveness of recruitment and hiring processes. They provide insights into how your company’s recruitment process is functioning and what needs to be improved.

Gathering comprehensive data is the first step to improving hiring success. This data then needs to be analyzed, and the results used to promote meaningful discussion about your hiring practices. It may lead to the uncovering of some harsh realities. However, as with any aspect of managing a business, this is essential. Without understanding where your strategy is falling short, you will never improve it.

What 7 Recruitment Metrics Should You Be Measuring?

A company’s recruitment metrics can be derived from various sources. Some companies may use information from their own database, while others may use external sources like job boards and social media sites.

While the range of recruitment metrics that a company uses will vary, and depend upon many factors, there are some that are crucial to measure. Here is what we consider to be the top 10:

1.     Time to Fill

One of the most common metrics is time-to-fill (TTF). This measures how long it takes to fill a position, from the time a job vacancy is created to the time a new employee fills that vacancy.

It’s crucial to measure how long it takes you to fill a position against the average in your sector. The longer it takes, the more stress there will be on your existing staff. This could be detrimental to your retention numbers. Also, a long TTF could indicate a flawed hiring process. This will damage your ability to hire the best talent, who are unlikely to wait around for an offer to be made.

2.     First-Year Quit Rate

How many of your new hires quit within the first year? This turnover number indicates that the job description didn’t accurately describe the role, its duties, and responsibilities. All good hires stem from great job descriptions.

3.     First-Year Fire Rate

You should also measure how many new recruits you let go during the first year. This managed attrition is an indicator of how well your hiring process evaluates candidates. A high managed attrition rate indicates that you are hiring bad fits, or candidates who are not suitably qualified or experienced. It could indicate that your interviewing process needs to be re-imagined.

4.     Selection Ratio

This is a simple measurement to make: the number of candidates hired vs the total number of candidates.

With a high number of candidates, this number will move toward zero. But a high number of candidates could indicate that your job description is not doing part of its job ─ to deter poor candidates from applying.

A high number of candidates also increases the cost of hiring, because of the amount of time needed to review, the number of interviews you will conduct, and the general administration work needed to manage each candidate. Plus, of course, the hiring manager and other people involved in the interviewing process will be taken from their other work.

The ideal is fewer candidates of higher quality.

5.     Cost Per Hire

When calculating the cost of hiring a candidate, there are many expenses and charges to consider. These include external costs (such as advertising the position, candidate expenses, and agency fees) and internal costs (such as time spent by HR and hiring managers reviewing resumes and interviewing candidates, onboarding costs, and lost productivity).

Internal costs can be greatly reduced by decreasing the number of applicants while simultaneously increasing the quality of applicants.

6.     Offer Acceptance Rate

A simple ratio calculated by comparing how many candidates accept a job offer to the number of candidates to whom you make an offer. If this rate is low, it could indicate that your salary and benefits package fall short of your competition.

To improve this ratio (which, of course, impacts costs) it is crucial to have insight into the current market and understand evolving candidate expectations.

7.     Time to Optimum Productivity

This is a measurement of how long it takes for your new hires to become fully productive, from their first day in the role to the day where they are making maximum contribution. This has been estimated at around 28 weeks.

The faster a new hire can attain optimum productivity, the more beneficial it is to your company. The key to this is to source the highest-quality candidates available in the talent pool.

Using Recruitment Metrics to Optimize Your Hiring Process

The process of hiring new employees is always challenging. By continually monitoring key recruitment metrics, you gain insight into the effectiveness of your hiring process. Analyzing your recruitment numbers can help you identify where you need to improve and what strategies are most effective for your company.

There is one final recruitment metric that should not be overlooked: the source of your new hires, and how successful new hires from each source are. This will help you to track which recruitment channels are performing best for you. Knowing this, you can optimize your recruitment processes by increasing focus on those sources that perform best for you.

Recruiting channels may include social media, your website, jobs boards, employee referral schemes, and staffing agencies.

When we work with our clients, we make certain that we fully understand their requirements ─ for the role, the candidate, and from a strategic business focus. We bring our specific sector experience to the table, and our intimate knowledge of our talent pool, as well as our expertise in sourcing both active and passive candidates. The result is:

  • Fewer candidates but of higher quality
  • A reduction intime to fill
  • Improving the selection ratio and offer acceptance rate
  • Cutting the time for new hires to reach optimal productivity
  • Improving employee retention numbers

To learn more about how we partner with our clients to obtain the best talent and future-proof their high-performing teams with our creative staffing solutions, contact TECHEAD today.

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