Recruitment metrics are key to evaluating the health and effectiveness of your recruiting process. However, to appropriately track your staffing metrics, you need to know the proper mix of recruiter productivity metrics to tell you what’s working and what’s not. 

Having the right recruitment metrics allows you to determine where your recruiters should spend their time. It can also show you how to better allocate your budget.

Chameleon BI has identified eight crucial recruitment metrics you should track:

  1. Time to Fill: Tracking time to fill is essential because it directly impacts your ability to onboard the most lucrative talent. It’s important to determine your recruitment turnaround time benchmark. Calculating your recruiters’ time to fill metrics will empower you to lead a more efficient team. 
  2. Time within Recruiting Process Steps: These recruiter productivity metrics describe the time a candidate spends in each step. You should be able to see this rate in your ATS – that is if you’re tracking each step. Examples of process steps include phone screens, submissions to the hiring manager, interviews, and placements. Ultimately, it gives you the “big picture” of your recruitment turnaround time benchmark. When you analyze the time spent in each process, you’ll find some bottlenecks. Identifying these bottlenecks is critical for prioritizing where your teams can better spend their time. 
  3. Quality of Hire: This is the percentage of candidates submitted by recruiters who are accepted for employment plus the percentage of these that do not leave, divided by two. The resulting metric indicates the effectiveness of the recruiting team in identifying quality, local talent. It represents the distinction between more candidates and the best candidates. If recruiting teams submit low-quality talent, hiring managers waste valuable time and resources filtering through them.
  4. Interview to Hire Ratio: This recruitment metric calculates the percentage of candidates submitted by the recruiting function that is ultimately hired. How many hires should a recruiter make per month? This number will quite likely be different across departments. However, an average interview-to-hire ratio is 4:8:1; a good ratio is 3:1. Interview-to-hire ratios are excellent measures of how well recruiting is sourcing and screening candidates. Make sure your organization has a strong interview-to-hire ratio to ensure overall hiring efficiency.
  5. Offer Acceptance Rate: This is one of the more straightforward recruiter productivity metrics. Essentially, it’s a comparison between the number of candidates given a job offer and the number that accepts. If your organization has an industry-low Offer Acceptance Rate, your offers are likely, not competitive enough, or too slow. If it comes to light that certain demographics are not accepting otherwise lucrative offers, there may be a systemic problem with your talent pipeline that makes these groups uncomfortable with your workplace. It’s important to take a deep look into this metric!
  6. Application Drop-Off Rate: The application drop-off rate is the percentage of applicants who start but do not complete the application process. Improving this metric not only creates a better candidate experience but also gives your organization better access to top talent. The traditional job application takes over 30 minutes to complete, is not optimized for mobile, and requires extraneous information many job seekers are uncomfortable giving out. The best candidates know they are the best, and will not put up with a bloated application, especially in today’s candidate-driven market. 
  7. Candidate Net Promoter Score: This metric is commonly used to gauge consumer satisfaction, but it can also gauge the satisfaction of candidates. It’s a key metric that your company can use to measure how candidates view your hiring process, your employer brand, and what they might tell others about their impression of your company. In other words, it’s how talent rates their experience applying and interviewing for a position.
  8. Cost to Fill: Cost to fill is a metric that measures the average cost to fill a position, from candidate attraction to onboarding. In large organizations, the cost to acquire has a measurable impact on the bottom line. In smaller organizations, it can make or break the yearly budget. You should view cost to fill in the context of the previous seven metrics.