Nowadays the labor market is full of highly-skilled and talented job-seekers, but connecting with the best candidates remains a great challenge for most businesses. The hiring process doesn’t end when the job offer is accepted; recruiters need to ensure that new hires fit into the company’s internal culture and remain motivated, satisfied, and engaged at all times. And this is the main reason why companies need recruiting KPI.
Talent Acquisition metrics: which ones to choose as a recruiting KPI
Efficiently hiring the right people within budget and timeframe is a key function of the HR department. But how would you judge if the hiring process in your company is efficient enough? Many businesses still rely on intuition and gut feeling, believing that peer-to-peer interaction has greater significance than any metric. But by measuring hiring activities over time, you can define an effective recruitment strategy based on a detailed picture of what works and what doesn’t work for your business.
The best recruiters I know leverage their natural talents in EQ and people skills in addition to the analytical skills. The industry as a whole is going through a lot of change, and we’re going to see more and more exciting advancements as more of us embrace truly data-driven recruiting.
—Jennifer Kim, ex-Head of Employee Experience & Development at Lever
With so many talent acquisition metrics to choose from, you can easily lose your way of trying to select the right one. You can read more about talent acquisition or HR KPI metrics and strategy in the article Important Talent Acquisition Metrics You Should be Tracking on Employa’s blog.
You might want to focus on a few crucial metrics, rather than measuring absolutely everything mentioned in the list; if you spend all your time measuring, you won’t have any time to hire! So, which metrics will be the most useful to track long-term recruiting performance? It depends on various factors such as company size, hiring frequency, business growth, future plans, etc. Here are the top 6 metrics for success in recruitment according to experts from world-famous companies, but remember, every metric should link to your recruitment goals.
- Sourcing channel effectiveness or SCE is a metric that measures which sources produce quality hires and helps to calculate conversions per channel. You can easily identify the effectiveness of different channels by comparing the number of applications with the number of impressions of positions and use this information to adjust future job postings.
- Offer acceptance rate shows what percentage of offers made to applicants are accepted. There is no rule of thumb on the ideal rate as it depends on many factors, so you need to establish a number that makes the most sense for your business.
- Quality of hire definition measures how the employee matches the work he’s doing and meets management expectations. Asking managers how satisfied they are with new employees is a nice way to identify if your recruitment process is delivering the relevant level of hiring.
- Applicant satisfaction measures how satisfied new employees are with the hiring experience. Surveying new hires will help you identify ways to streamline the hiring process. To avoid negative candidate experiences, you can use software to engage applicants in dialogue and keep them in the loop, so they are always aware of how their CV is being processed. For example, Employa has a Candidate Portal, where candidates can see their progress and increase their chances of being hired by answering additional questions.
- Employee Net Promoter Score is a quick way to measure employee engagement, the health of the organization, and is a great alternative to traditional lengthy employment surveys.
Recruiting goals: examples
In order to choose the right metrics for your business, you need to proceed from recruiting goals. One of the most commonly used practices in goal-setting is the SMART method. Briefly speaking, each goal should be:
- Specific — what exactly do you want to accomplish?
- Measurable — how will you understand that the goal is achieved?
- Assignable — who will be responsible for the result?
- Realistic — which results can be realistically achieved?
- Time-related — what’s the deadline?
Here are a few hands-on examples of recruitment SMART-goals:
- Increase the number of applications via job boards by 25% in the next month
- Create 3 inbound leads that are hiring for our recruitment consultants, over the next 6 months, as it will save time on outbound efforts
- Boost our eNPS score by 5 points over the next 6 months, because we want to increase the number of referrals and save money on agencies
- Improve offer acceptance rate by 10% in the next year, as this will allow us to increase revenues and decrease cost of hire
Abovementioned metrics are common and reliable ways of monitoring your recruitment KPIs, but now Artificial Intelligence allows recruiters to see very specific predictions and optimize the hiring process on the go. AI tools can identify more about humans than ever before; not only our soft and hard skills, but even whether we’re lying or not. For example, AI-based software X0pa can predict employee loyalty, and Seekout has a talent insights module to keep you in the loop on the latest updates in hiring.
Things change rapidly here, so recruiting stays close to the business teams. Together, we continue to calibrate our hiring direction.
—Xiaoyuan Wang, Director and Senior Staff Engineer at Alibaba
How to setup recruiting metrics: template
Once you have adopted a strategic direction and set recruitment KPIs, you can select a set of metrics to track hiring performance. Make sure you have included metrics that reflect each stage and state of the hiring process: sourcing, speed and cost, candidate experience, hiring quality, and, of course, employee metrics.
At Employa, we have strong experience in setting and analyzing recruiting metrics. As a result of our long-term efforts, we have prepared a Perfect Recruiting Metrics Template; just fill the cells with the values and immediately see the calculated metrics for your business. Contact us to get our Perfect Recruiting Metrics Template for free.
Staffing metrics dashboard
According to ManpowerGroup, around 67% of large companies are facing difficulties when trying to find candidates with the required skills, and 45% of companies can’t find employees with the right skills for particular roles inside their organizations.
For companies looking to hire new employees today, a data-driven approach is crucial. Data analysis tools for recruiting enable you to see data patterns, adjust your hiring strategy, and hire the most qualified candidates that perfectly match job requirements. You can create recruiting dashboards using a standalone tool, such as Datapine, or a one-stop-shop such as Employa.
So, which staffing KPIs should be included in the dashboard to track long-term performance correctly? At Employa, we suggest these top 10 metrics:
- Quality of hire
- Source of hire
- Cost per hire
- Time to fill
- Applicants per opening
- Recruiting conversion rate
- First-year attrition
- Candidate job satisfaction
- Hiring manager satisfaction
- Recruitment funnel effectiveness
If you are new to setting up sourcing metrics, it’s important to understand what you can learn from a recruiting dashboard. We suggest considering the following points and adjusting this list from time to time according to your overall strategy and changed business needs:
- How long does it take to hire employees?
- Is this applicant a good match for the job?
- How much do you spend on the hiring process?
- How many applications are you getting on your job postings?
- Where are the candidates looking for in the job postings?
- How’s the performance of new employees?
- Does the job description represent job details clearly and correctly?
No matter what metrics you choose, measuring your recruitment performance and setting clear recruiting KPIs will help you focus on what really works and get rid of bottlenecks in the hiring process—and, definitely, it will help to demonstrate your important and value-adding role in the company.