Twenty-five recruitment metrics to level-up HR management

Recruitment metrics or hiring metrics are a predetermined group of measurements put in place to understand, manage, and enhance the process of recruiting candidates for an organization. Human Resource professionals collect HR recruitment metrics data, analyze it, and use the insights to align the hiring process with the organization’s goals.

A clear understanding of these metrics can help HR professionals make the required changes to ensure that their organization remains competitive in the area of talent management. This article will help you develop that understanding.

Setting recruiting metrics benchmarks lets HR professionals have a clear idea of what they need to do to improve their hiring process. More often than not, HR departments carry out extensive programs and implement complex HR strategies. However, they forget to measure the success of those strategies. The latter can leave them wondering what they did wrong in case of failures.

Without the available data, they have nothing to base decisions on. Talent acquisition metrics and talent acquisition KPIs are essential to keep a tab on the success or failure of any policy/ strategy implementation.

It is vital to have the relevant recruitment metrics set to analyze what is going well and what is not. Let us take this a step further and garner a clear understanding of 25 vital recruitment metrics.

Time to fill refers to the number of calendar days it takes to find and hire a new candidate. This metric helps measure the speed of your process and its quality.

The period is usually measured from when the job opening was made known to HR to the date they begin the recruitment process. The start time for this metric may differ from organization to organization; it could be from the time of the job vacancy’s online posting.

When using this hiring metric:

• You should ensure that the start date and end date remain the same throughout the process. This aspect makes it much easier to track the HR department’s efficiency.
• Once you have the base data, you will have sufficient information to know how long you can expect it to take to fill positions. This data allows businesses to plan their productivity and output goals. If you find that it takes too long to fill some vacancies, it is time to change the process.
• You could enhance the process by having more straightforward job descriptions and increasing awareness of the opening. You may consider using job portals or increasing your brand’s social media impression.

It is vital to remember that a long-drawn-out recruitment process takes a toll on candidate engagement. Therefore, even if your process takes time, you must keep in touch with your candidates.

This talent acquisition metric may sound similar to the previous one. However, it is measured from the date a candidate applies for a job to the date he/she is hired.

This recruitment standard benchmark is more candidate-centered and focuses on their experience of the recruitment process. It determines how easy it was and how engaged they felt at each step.

The data gathered from these two metrics are integral to enable recruiters to enhance their recruitment strategies and address any hindrances to the process.

This candidate experience metric refers to how much time it takes to complete each of the following steps in your recruiting process:

• Application
• Screening
• Interview
• Testing
• Background Verification
• Offer
• Negotiation and Acceptance

Understanding how much time it takes for a candidate to complete each step gives you a clear indicator of the efficiency of the process. Suppose candidates take too much time filling out applications. In that case, you must understand that the process may be too complex and needs to be simplified.

This parameter refers to the percentage of candidates that have gone through the recruitment process and accepted your offer letter.

If you have a low acceptance rate, you know that you have to change your offers. You can do it by offering better compensation or benefits or improving your brand image.

This recruitment metric measures the efficiency of job portals, boards, social media, fairs, recruitment agencies, etc. Understanding which sources gives you the best results helps you decide where to invest more time and effort.

First-Year Attrition Rate is a perfect HR recruitment metric to understand your work culture and the new hires’ experience.

If you find that many new hires are leaving within the first year of joining your organization, you need to take a long, hard look at what you may be doing wrong. The best thing to do here is to establish a brilliantly structured exit process that helps you gain honest feedback from employees.

This hiring metric involves collecting surveys from hiring managers. It helps understand how satisfied the managers are with the new hires in meeting requirements and hiring goals. It is advisable to use a mix of surveys to develop a better understanding.

Quality of hire metric, a vital recruitment metric, helps HR understand the value a new hire brings to the table. You can make these calculations based on productivity indicators, employee engagement surveys and results from management satisfaction surveys.

When you ensure that your recruitment process aligns with business goals; using the metrics becomes much more manageable.

This metric refers to collecting information from candidates about how they feel in their new roles. One-on-one interviews and surveys are the best way to collect this information.

It is ideal to collect data after the first four weeks of the candidate’s joining, then at regular intervals like once in every three or six months.

This metric revolves around the likeliness of your candidate recommending an acquaintance for a position in your company. You can determine this score by asking various questions to your hires about how likely they are to suggest a friend for a job in your company.

This metric refers to the number of applicants that apply for an opening. It helps you understand:

• How popular a role is
• Your brand’s standing
• The effectiveness of your recruitment efforts

This parameter refers to how many applicants get to the interview phase of the recruitment process. Understanding this metric gives you a clear understanding the efficiency of your recruitment funnel and the quality of applicants.

The standard recruiting benchmark for this metric is three interviewees per job opening.

The selection ratio indicates how good the recruitment process is at filtering out poor candidates and hiring top talent.

As a general rule, the lower the selection ratio, the better. It signifies that your hiring focuses on quality. On the other hand, if the rate is so low that you cannot fill positions in time, you must reevaluate the type of applicants you are attracting.

The cost per hire metric refers to all the expenses involved in hiring a candidate to fill an opening. Keeping an eye on costs per hire is essential for budget planning and reallocation of resources.

It refers to the cost of using a specific channel. This metric includes the advertising, posting, and everything involved in getting applicants through a particular channel.

Running this metric on all your media helps you understand how influential that channel is and whether you should continue to invest in that channel or focus on other media.

This metric refers to the quality of candidates you get from a particular channel.

Combining the sourcing channel effectiveness with the sourcing channel costs helps you identify the best sourcing option. Matching this parameter with the hiring manager satisfaction ratio gives you a clear picture of the source’s success.

Candidate experience metrics deal with how the candidates feel during the hiring procedure, from seeing the job post to accepting the offer letter.

It is best to collect feedback at every stage of the recruitment process to get a clear understanding. Additionally, you can implement the feedback received right away to help streamline the process.

It refers to the number of applicants that apply and then do not follow through on the application process. This fact could be because of a highly complicated application or because candidates realize they are not suitable for the role.

Understanding exactly when and why the applicants dropped off is integral to improving the drop-off rate. You could use a pop-up survey when an applicant exits midway through their application.

This metric complements the drop-off rate. It gives you a precise idea of what percentage of applicants are completing the application.

This metric helps you understand several angles of your organization’s hiring process. Open Position percentages being on the high side could be indicative of one of the following:

Conversely, your company may be growing at a rapid rate and thus have a high percentage of open positions.

A recruitment funnel is everything that goes into getting candidates for a role in your company. It spans from employer image to job posts, advertising, selecting sourcing channels, and every other aspect of recruitment.

The recruitment funnel metric involves measuring the effectiveness of the entire recruitment process by focusing on each step’s success or failure rate.

This metric measures how much time it takes for a new hire to produce optimum output from when they started production. It is a great measure to understand the quality of hire, screening and interview effectiveness, and your onboarding and training success.

This metric uses a combination of surveys and actual productivity numbers to understand how productive a candidate is. It would be best if you considered running this measurement a few times within the first six months of a candidate joining your organization.

The following formula can help measure the time to optimum productivity:

This metric lets you know how many referrals come in from your existing employees.

If your referral rate is high, it means that your referral program is going well. It signals that your company is a desirable place to work, or at least that your existing employees think so.

Turnover or attrition rates help you understand how effective your employee retention and engagement programs are. They also help you know if you have recruited suitable candidates to fill vacancies.

As mentioned earlier, well-structured exit- interviews are vital to understanding what is behind your turnover rate.

This recruitment metric allows you to understand the costs involved in hiring, onboarding, training and additional expenses necessary to get a new hire to optimum productivity levels.

It is important to understand which metrics are most relevant to your particular hiring strategy. It is advisable to use a combination of different metrics to garner a clear understanding of what you are doing right and what areas have the scope for improvement.

Using AI and machine learning algorithm-powered HR software makes running and measuring these metrics more efficient and accurate. There is a vast amount of data involved. Hence, you must leverage the latest tech to help enhance this process.

This use of technology allows your HR personnel to take the data and improve recruitment metrics rather than take all their time calculating recruitment metrics.