Prioritise These 4 Recruitment Metrics
Thursday, April 21, 2016
If you were to measure every single metric to establish whether your recruitment activities were effective or not, you would end up spending the majority of your time measuring statistics instead of actually filling jobs!
While measuring your recruitment strategies is clearly important, there are only a few you should really be spending most of your time on. If you keep tabs on these specific metrics, you will stay informed as to how your recruitment company is performing on the talent management front. Whether large or small, these metrics can play a vital role to improving your recruitment tactics.
1. Where are the candidates sourced from?
It is vital to keep track of where the bulk of your candidates are coming from. If you're intelligent about your recruitment, you will have a wide variety of channels from which to find your candidates - placing a job description on relevant boards; another one on LinkedIn; some direct contact with passive applicants; and a pool of potential candidates connected to your careers page on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
You need to keep a track of how many applicants and qualified candidates came from each source. Also, keep a track of where the candidate first became aware of your job description. Once you have this data, it can be cross-referenced over different periods of time and you will save money in the long term. If you seem to be finding a high number of applicants from one channel, you can focus the majority of your resources on that network.
2. Time taken to Hire
When you have advertised your vacancy, how much times does it take before the candidate starts their first day of work? Organisations with strong talent management processes have quicker hiring times than those who neglect this key metric.
Of course, some clients have particularly strict hiring standards and it may take longer for back checks to be carried out. However, it may be more advisable to focus your efforts on winning client who need immediate staff within their company. As a rule of thumb, you should compare the time to hire across various job roles and aim to decrease the average as time goes on.
3. The cost of filling a position
This one is a no brainer but have you measured every cost involved with a hire? It is simple to track recruiter fees, whether internal of external. But what about the average time frame it takes the manager to carry out interviews?
It is important to take these factors into consideration when working out the cost of hiring new staff. Furthermore, look at how much money you are spending maintaining social media accounts and any accounting or administrative costs associated with setting up pay accounts and contracts.
4. Job Retention
Once you have analysed the extent of the costs involved with taking on a new candidate, it's vital to assess your retention rates. If you have low employee retention rates, thousands of pounds can be drained from your overall budget. Not only do the direct expenses linked with hiring a new employee play a factor but there's also a loss of productivity around the resignation. Carrying out a thorough analysis of this metric should be undertaken every 4-6 months. From here, you will be able to assess turnover rate for specific roles.
How to put these recruitment metrics into place…
If you own a large organisation, the clear way forward is to use a customised software that gathers data from a multiple range of resources and automatically displays the stats on an open dashboard with relevant timelines. However, if customised software is not a possibility, a simple and easy to track excel spreadsheet will suffice. Measure these metrics every three months or so. Updating the spreadsheet at regular intervals will save you time and help you see which recruitment areas to improve upon.
Hari Singh, Recruitment Consultant
