In the first two posts in this series, “Why Your Reliance on Job Boards & InMails Is Sabotaging Your Recruiting” and “How to Get Your Recruiting Tools to Stop Working Against You”, we discussed the importance of having a solid recruiting process. A robust process will not only generate more long-term value but will also be easier to scale with growth.
B y now, you should understand the importance of having a recruiting process, and you’re in either one of two categories: you already have an existing process and want to improve it, or you don’t have a process and are looking to build it from the ground up.
Regardless of your current state, the following steps will look exactly the same. Let’s stop talking and start building.
You Need to Start Measuring
We’re living in the age of data. With access to more information, everyone, including recruiters, must now leverage data for actionable insight or risk being left behind.
With so much information at our fingertips, it can be overwhelming to figure out where to start. A quick search of “recruitment metrics” returns approximately 470 different options to track. Okay, maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but I challenge you to search for yourself. Tell me if you don’t get exhausted after reading the first three results.
Instead of measuring everything, keep it simple. Don’t spend more time tracking metrics than actually recruiting. However, to be a great recruiter, you need to know your metrics as well as the key drivers of your performance.
The 4 Most Important Recruitment Metrics
You have to start somewhere, and these four are the most important for all recruiters. The truth is the majority of the other metrics are either derived from or directly influenced by these KPIs. Once you have a better grasp on your overall performance, you can dive into other metrics, but you should start with these for now.
- Time to Fill: This is the total time it takes to fill a position. Interestingly, this is the only metric you are going consistently to hear about, and there’s a reason why. On average, the best candidates accept an offer within 10 days of hitting the job market (Officevibe.com). Time to fill will provide you with a benchmark of how your overall process is performing. If you notice a major increase, then it’s time to drill deeper to pinpoint the underlying issue in your process. Note: When measuring time to hire, compare it across your efforts for similar roles, as certain roles will usually require more time to fill.
- Submittal to Placement: This is the total number of candidates the hiring manager interviews. A lower number indicates that you fully understood the requirements for the role, built a strong talent pipeline or sourced only the best candidates, and effectively prepared them for the interview.
- Offer Acceptance Rate: This measures the number of offers made before a candidate accepts. This is the best gauge of your process and, most importantly, your effectiveness as an individual recruiter. Great recruiters will have a higher rate, indicating that they built an engaging and enticing candidate experience.
- Candidate Satisfaction: Did you know that talent shortages ranks as the number one challenge facing staffing firms (Bullhorn 2016)? While it’s important to keep clients happy, you also have to keep your candidates happy. With increased competition for the best candidates, it more important than ever to know how you compare at engaging candidates. If you’re not measuring your performance, how are you ever going to know which part of your process to improve?
Note: These metrics should be used to gauge the effectiveness of an individual recruiter and their process. Staffing agencies should leverage these metrics as well are more specific team metrics, such as the total number of placements, completion ratio, and client satisfaction to assess the overall performance of their recruiting team and identify top performers.
Why you should ignore other common metrics?
This is a starting point, a place where you can get comfortable merging science with recruiting. If you feel you need to dive into other metrics over time, you should absolutely go for it, but note that recruiting is evolving and once effective methods, like job postings, are slowly dying away. You should not focus your efforts on improving these ineffective processes, but rather measure your success at converting passive candidates with modern approaches while building client satisfaction.
How do you measure?
This up to you to decide. If you like spreadsheets, use them. If you have an automated technology, that’s even better. The most important thing is that you measure after each and every role to fully understand what is and isn’t working in your recruiting process.