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KPIs for Effective Recruiting

In recruitment, there’s more to success than simply knowing your team is capable of filling every vacancy with new hires and, to get higher profile clients, you’ll have to prove it.  

Quality of candidates, suitability of clients, and other key metrics are all important factors to consider when creating an effective recruiting system and leveraging your success to engage new clients. This is where key performance indicators (KPI) an important role.

KPIs are effective ways to organize and assess company and individual recruiter performance, progress toward objectives, and probability of reaching strategic goals. Too often, however, organizations aimlessly adopt industry recognized KPIs and wonder why their indicators don’t reflect business performance or produce any constructive changes.

Knowing which key recruitment metrics to evaluate is just as important as evaluating metrics and benchmarks in the first place. Utilizing the top benchmark recruiting services, IT staffing benchmarks, and KPIs are vital to charting the success of any accomplished recruiting agency.  

Below are KPIs for effective recruiting that every firm should be tracking and leveraging when attempting to contract new clients.

Time to Hire

Time to hire is one of the easiest and most effective KPIs to measure. In short, time to hire is the time between when a candidate enters an application tracking system (ATS), to when they accept an offer. Because ATS tools make it easy to sort and rank job applications, it’s crucial that recruiting agencies take advantage of the easy-to-chart figures to assess their efficiency in hiring.

Time to hire is important for revealing potential problems in the hiring process of your recruitment firm or the hiring process of your clients. If it’s taking more than a few weeks or months to advance an offer, then it might be wise to consider how long it takes to screen and interview applicants. It may be an indication of delays in interviewing or hiring decisions made by managers. If it takes additional weeks or months for candidates to accept offers, clients may be presenting non-competitive offers or may not be communicating well in  offer negotiation.

While productivity and revenue are obvious concerns with a slow time to hire rate, it can also affect your firm’s brand and quality of hires, which also impacts your reputation with clients. In the time spent on screening or scheduling interviews, competitors could be taking advantage of the delay by extending offers to your high-quality candidate. This is why it is essential to monitor time to hire overall and in real time: to ensure that you don’t lose out on great talent that can easily be hired due to a process that drags on.

Quality of Hire

It’s not enough that recruiters provide clients with a sufficient amount of potential hires. In order to bolster company brand and return rates, quality of hires need to be maintained at a high level. How to evaluate quality of hires is more elusive than time to hire, but there are a few ways to evaluate this metric that can also be presented to win new clients.  

Reviewing performance and retention data is an efficient way to measure how well a candidate fits a client’s needs. If hiring managers and recruiters cull together candidates who have a history of leaving after a few months, then it might be possible that they’re screening for the wrong qualities.

Identifying where your recruiters are finding the best candidates can help agencies understand which candidates share the best traits and which screening methods help produce optimal results.

Once you’ve collected your quality of hire metrics through the performance figures of new hires and client satisfaction ratings, this KPI can be a goldmine for winning new business, especially for filling roles that you have a high rate of success with.

Offer Acceptance Rate

This is an easy and effective measurement of your talent acquisition strategies. An Offer Acceptance Rate (OAR) is the percentage of extended offers that are accepted.

OARs are solid metrics that indicate a team’s overall hiring effectiveness. Strong OARs reveal a robust pipeline of candidates, thorough interview processes, thoughtful candidate selections, and a competent understanding of what kind of candidates a specific hiring team is looking for.

Maintaining an authentic OAR system, however, is crucial in adequately evaluating acquisition strategies. The temptation to avoid documenting certain offers until pre-closing patterns are identified is appealing, but it turns the hiring process into a formality with little to learn from. Such practices can lead to an inflated OAR that reaches 100% but, as a result, trivializes potentially useful data and leaves you vulnerable to a plummeting OAR in the future.

Utilizing outside resources, such as a benchmark executive search or a benchmark temp agency, can help ensure clarity and consistency in the acquisition of stable KPIs.

Candidate Satisfaction

If a happy candidate makes a happy client, and a happy client makes a happy recruiter, then looking at candidate satisfaction is a good place to assess overall user experience.

Evaluating candidate satisfaction is integral to the long-term goal of expanding an agency’s candidate and client base. Knowing what is and isn’t working for candidates will ensure that your agency is competitive with other recruiters, up to date with the best job-search softwares, and continuing to meet the changing needs of your candidates.

Measurement of this metric, although sometimes tricky, comes in a few forms. Utilizing data from surveys is a solid method to measure candidate satisfaction on a large scale. A good strategy is creating your own surveys and comparing this feedback with the abundant survey data available to the public, demonstrating your performance compared to industry averages.

Reaching out to candidates effectively is important for gathering good data. Personalizing communications, as opposed to bulk messaging, should always be used.

To boost this metric, recruiters can present opportunities in a way that shows candidates how the role is right for them and how the role is a compromise from their ideal job. This honesty and openness will go a long way with building trust with candidates and driving high satisfaction. Another best practice for driving high satisfaction is being prompt in responding to candidate emails, requests, or concerns.

Positive candidate experiences translate to positive client experiences, which ultimately lead to long-term recruiting success, which can be leveraged with new clients and candidates alike.  

By tracking KPIs of individuals and for your firm overall,  you can optimize your firm’s recruitment process, leverage your success to win new clients and better match recruiters to the needs of these clients.

Loxo is an all-in-one recruitment platform that combines your ATS and CRM, making it easy to track both candidate and client metrics.

With automated sourcing powered by AI, you’ll be connected with the best candidates in your client’s industry and have the time to ensure your connection with them is strong and genuine. Additionally, Loxo’s reporting features make it easy to present key recruiting KPIs to new clients and instantly update current clients with status reports, driving greater client satisfaction.

To see how Loxo’s features support better candidate and client relationships and make it easy to leverage these metrics, you can schedule a demo here.

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