Recruiting metrics like cost per hire and time to hire can be helpful, but they paint only part of the picture. Looking at recruitment through a broader lens, including diversity and new-hire productivity, is essential. A high quality-of-hire metric shows that recruiters are finding talent that fits well with your company. A low one can point to problems with your job descriptions, hiring managers, or sourcing strategy.
Cost-effectiveness
Selecting specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant metrics is essential when recruiting a candidate. This will assist you in proving the worth of your recruitment endeavors to important decision-makers. Choosing metrics that align with your overall business goals is also helpful. For example, if new hire retention is a broader workforce planning goal, you can use recruitment metrics to measure how well you meet that goal. Qualified candidates per open position is a crucial recruiting metric that measures how many qualified candidates move on to interview. It also reveals the quality of the applicants your team attracts and can show you where to focus your recruitment strategy. Recruiting is expensive, and minimizing the number of bad hires you make is essential. One way to do this is by measuring first-year attrition. A high attrition rate can lead to reduced productivity and increased costs. Using this metric can help you identify problems with your hiring process and make improvements.
Time-to-hire
Time-to-hire is a crucial metric that helps recruiters and hiring managers understand how long it takes to hire candidates for specific roles. It can help identify bottlenecks in the recruiting process and improve hiring outcomes. It is often used in conjunction with cost-per-hire and quality-of-hire metrics. The time-to-hire may vary significantly depending on the industry and the hiring process. Measuring time-to-hire by role and department helps get a more accurate picture. This will reveal how streamlined your functions are and which ones need improvement. Measuring the time-to-hire can be difficult, but it’s essential to remember that it is only one metric of the overall recruiting process. It’s also important to consider the quality of hire, which is a more comprehensive metric that evaluates the candidate’s skills and fit for the company.
Quality-of-hire
When a company sets hiring goals for a specific period, measuring how well the recruiting team meets those goals is essential. This metric allows couples to pinpoint slow or inefficient workflows and make adjustments. It can help companies determine which job postings and recruiting channels produce the best results. QoH metrics include subjective data such as manager satisfaction surveys, new hire self-ratings, and objective data like days to total productivity and months until promotion. This metric can be tricky to calculate because it requires consistent, comprehensive tracking of all aspects of the recruitment process. Another critical metric is the number of interviewees hired and promoted within a specific time frame. This indicates whether the company has built a strong talent pipeline and nurtured it appropriately. However, high turnover should raise red flags and be a source of concern for the organization. This metric can be calculated by dividing the number of employees who stay with the company by the total number of hires within that time frame.
Retention
While many recruiters consider hiring a success when an open position is filled, it’s essential to look at the quality of the hire. A bad hire can cause more problems than it solves, and the costs associated with recruiting, training, and onboarding a new employee can be significant. Measuring your recruitment efforts against KPIs can help you improve your process. These include famous HR performance metrics like cost per hire, time-to-hire, first-offer acceptance rate, and KPIs specific to recruitment. For example, if you require applicants to provide their referral source, you can use this information to identify the best channels for finding qualified candidates. Using these metrics can help you measure the effectiveness of your recruiting strategies and determine if they are helping you improve your company’s bottom line. If not, you should focus more on building your talent pipeline and identifying the sources of your most successful hires.
