As you all know, recruiting metrics are used to evaluate your recruiting process, how you are performing, and to show a return on investment (ROI).
Not only are these metrics vital to data-driven Human Capital Management (HCM) strategies but also help you gauge the quality of your hires, among other important measures of success.
The recruiting process lifecycle includes sourcing, engaging, screening, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and retaining employees, and each of these steps requires tracking to fully understand the depth of your recruiting process.
Reasons why it’s essential to track recruiting metrics:
- Recruiting costs are a significant human capital management expense.
- Aligning the top recruitment metrics with strategic business outcomes can highlight ROI, reveal cost inefficiencies and drive proactive workforce planning.
- Recruitment metrics are vital for assessing how your recruiting process stacks up to current hiring trends and competitors.
- Metrics are useful tools for evaluating your recruitment process.
- Feedback gleaned from candidates and hiring managers can pinpoint the types of changes you need to make to be successful.
However, gathering and reporting recruitment metrics is just the beginning. You need a strategic approach to align results with business goals.
- Assess Current Need: Look at current openings and areas with traditionally high turnover to assess current hiring needs and analyze how it stacks up to hiring trends.
- Forecast Future Need: Look ahead and anticipate possible hiring needs. For example, are new locations, product lines, or projects being rolled out? Are some of the roles you might need to fill usually competitive? Or do you have historical data to show how long those roles might take to fill?
- Determine Talent Mix Required to Fill Talent Gaps: Define the skills and experience that could fill talent gaps. Actively source and engage candidates with those skills and experience to improve your overall talent mix.
- Define Pool of Internal Candidates: Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your employees helps you identify gaps in your current mix of talent.
- Take Current Talent Inventory: Keep a talent inventory and include a list of the in-demand candidates, talent gaps, and specific skillsets management desires. Pay attention to the positions with the longest time-to-fill metrics. Track data on the job openings with the worst results in key recruitment metrics so you know where to make changes. Specifically, look at the interview-to-hire ratio, selection ratios, and applicant-per-opening metrics.
- Assess the Availability of External Candidates: Recruiting candidates before they’re actively seeking employment is a proactive strategy that can pay long-term dividends. Engage with in-demand candidates ahead of an actual need for their skillset and continue to assess their availability with strategic touchpoints.
- Measure and Assess Promotion Rates: When a new position opens, how often are internal employees promoted? Career growth is a key measure of employee engagement and can often cut down on training and turnover costs.
- Measure and Analyze Turnover Rate: A high turnover rate raises your recruiting costs. Keeping turnover down with employee engagement and retention programs can reduce recruitment costs. Additionally, effective recruiting can affect turnover by finding the right candidate for the position.
- Focus on Increasing Candidate Engagement: Help excite applicants to work for you. Make it easy for them to engage with you by keeping communication clear and concise. Also, sharing and sticking to a hiring timeline can go a long way.
- Continually Refine Sourcing Strategies and Tactics: Use channel source cost and recruitment effectiveness metrics to focus your efforts and spend your money more effectively. This recruitment data is a great tool to communicate your sourcing strategies with staffing agency partners.
