Measuring recruitment success is key to a healthy organization and strategy. But how do you actually measure your team’s effectiveness?
Measuring the success of recruiting efforts involves a lot more than just knowing what positions are filled. If you want to really understand how your recruitment strategy is going, it’s crucial to track the right metrics.
Effective metrics account for both the high-level view and low-level view of how your strategies are playing out. So, where do you start?
Today, we will discuss our top six recruitment metrics that your organization should measure to truly understand what’s working and what needs adjustment.
At a snapshot:
- 1. Source of hires
- 2. Position satisfaction
- 3. Qualified candidates per opening
- 4. Days to offer
- 5. Offer acceptance rate
- 6. Retention Rate
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1. Source of hires#
Most organizations have diverse campaigns with job postings on multiple sites or mediums, including social media, referrals, online job boards, and more. Some may be more effective than others, so it’s crucial to measure which are sourcing high quality hires and which are gathering dust.
By tracking these metrics, you can funnel resources into the highest-performing sources that are returning the best ROI and avoid wasting time or funds on the low-performers.
There are several ways to track these metrics. The easiest way is through built-in tracking using your ATS, which comes with a built-in tracking capability for these numbers.
It’s crucial to weed out job seekers and candidates who will alter the number, such as:
- Those who visited your sites multiple times before applying
- Those who saw a listing several places before using a particular portal.
A more hands-on way is through surveys during the application process. This makes your job easier by asking the candidate to explain the primary source that brought them to your door. The main downside to this method is that you are dependent on user subjective responses, so numbers may not reflect reality.
Growth and improvement requires hard decisions. There is nothing wrong with shutting down ineffective strategies.
2. Position satisfaction#
Hiring manager satisfaction is a crucial metric for recruitment success. According to the Global Recruiting trends report, more than 43% of organizations use this metric in recruiting strategies. This metric is most useful when combined with other numbers you’ve gathered, such as acceptance rate or days-to-hire.
You can measure this less-objective metric using surveys like above, but you’ll want to keep these surveys short and direct. Keep in mind that responses may vary depending on a wide variety of subjective factors.
Even so, these numbers are powerful when combined with other qualitative metrics. They can also offer important insights into ways of improving your recruiting strategy based on direct feedback from candidates.
3. Qualified candidates per opening#
This metric refers to the number of applicants who proceed to the second stage of recruiting per specific job opening. As you look through resumes and applications, it’s crucial to measure how many respond when a position or interview is open.
This information tells you how many qualified, interested candidates you are actually reaching. This empowers your team to alter strategies with actionable goals and course-correct during the entire process, such as limiting unnecessary interviews.
You can then apply these metrics to your source of hire to filter out which outlet brings the best candidates. Metrics on qualified candidates makes it possible to set better goals for the future and improve the overall interview process, both for your team as well as candidates.
4. Days to offer#
Recruitment can be a big time waster if you don’t approach it strategically. Days-to-offer is a helpful metric for measuring productivity. This refers to the number of days from an application to an accepted/rejected offer.
This metric differs from time-to-hire, which can only show you how much time passes after a certain position is open. With days-to-hire, you focus on the effectiveness of the recruitment pipeline. You can even create more specific filters for this data such as time-to-contact, time-to-interview, and more.
You can even use these numbers to encourage eager candidates or dissuade uncommitted ones.
By measuring these numbers, you can identify potential bottlenecks in your recruiting strategy and improve them with things like automated responses. Without this data, it’s hard to tell what’s preventing progress or where your team is falling behind.
5. Acceptance rate#
This metric encapsulates many crucial factors such as quality of applicants, satisfaction, and effectiveness of your EVP. For example, if you fill a position but it took 15 candidates to fill it, you might be missing something.
This metric is measured with the following formula:
A poor acceptance rate can indicate that your recruitment strategy isn’t alluring to a candidate, and you may need to rethink the position, candidate experience, or its compensation/benefits.
A nice way to get more data on this metric is to ask candidates who reject an offer to fill out a survey, perhaps with a small incentive. This can help target why your process may not be working and what expectations can be expanded to help bridge the gap.
6. Retention Rate#
It is also important to measure if your employees are sticking around, since the cost to rehire can reach somewhere from 30 to 400 percent of that role’s salary (TLNT). Retention rates are a snapshot way of measuring if the people you’re hiring are a good fit for the company.
Naturally, the reasons an employee may leave a position are myriad in nature, but insights and patterns can only emerge if you track the data. The basic formula for tracking this data is:
If you want to gather more information on why employees are leaving, surveys are another good option. Ask employees to fill out short (or detailed) explanations of their departure, and use this data to rethink how you sell your company’s story.
Wrapping up#
To summarize the points we’ve made here, a recruitment strategy should be measured with the following metrics:
- Source of hires
- Position satisfaction
- Qualified candidates per opening
- Days to offer
- Offer acceptance rate
- Retention Rate
These six metrics empower both a fine-tuned and high-level snapshot of your recruitment process. Once you combine these metrics, your team will be empowered to alter ineffective processes, increase productivity, and retain happier employees.
If you are interested in learning more about what Educative can do for your recruitment and technical interview process, please contact Educative for Business. Our best-in-class interview prep courses can also equip potential hires for interviewing success.
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