Toolbox: metrics for recruiters

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there lived a recruiter, let’s call her Jane. She was constantly looking candidates but with poor success. She created job adverts, posted them on agreed channels, conducted interviews – but nothing changed, there were still so many vacancies to fill. She tried to convince herself that she is doing the best that she can. Each time when she was posting a job advert she prayed for candidates. She prayed for second time when she presented candidates to hiring managers. Each evening when she went home she felt desperate. But then on one day she learned that you can’t expect different results when doing the same things over and over again. So she made some changes in recruitment decisions. She also started to use metrics and benchmark activities with others.  And she became one of the greatest recruiters in her world.

In case you would also like to be one of the best recruiters in your region then here are the metrics that I would recommend to use.

Firstly; keep track on the number of your vacancies. I’d recommend having weekly, monthly and yearly overview. Even when you are one of those small companies who don’t need to recruit people on everyday bases, you still need to know where you are standing. But you should also know how other employers are doing: how many vacancies they have and how fast they are capable to fill them. Remember: in most of the cases recruitment is the result of employee turnover. Which means: if you have too many vacancies you should assess different HR procedures not only your recruitment activities.

Quality of recruitment channel is other metric that one should have. You may have a very attractive job advert or innovative recruitment solution, but when publishing it in wrong channel, you may end up with zero applicants. This would mean: wasted time and money for you. So, how do you know is the channel right or wrong? There are several ways to do that by collecting an assessing different data starting from applicants per channel finishing with quality hire per channel.

Recruitment is always associated with different recruitment costs, including creating a job advert, publishing it, etc. But we often forget that there are also several other costs that are related to recruitment such as salaries of recruiters and hiring managers, costs of different recruitment materials, lost working hours due to the fact that the positon is vacant and so on. You should measure the efficiency and effectiveness of the recruitment channels and activities and then based on that information make the investment decisions.

You can also assess your employer brand. One way to do that is to measure the efficiency of your (recruitment) marketing. For instance, you can screen the traffic on your career page, count the likes, shares or retweets on your social media page or analyze the results of your employee referral program.

And finally, assess the quality of your recruitment process. There are several metrics that you can use here, such as quality of candidates and employee turnover among new hires. For instance, what is the attrition rate of new hires, how many employees leave within 1st year of service, etc. But do not forget to ask also for feedback both from hiring managers as well as from candidates and new hires. How would they rate the full recruitment process, starting from the quality of job advert finishing with the speed and quality of the full process?

Be like Jane, and don’t forget: you can’t expect different results when doing the same things over and over again