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
