7 Recruiting Metrics You Should Really Care About

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Recruiting the right people to your organization is a process that takes time and effort to perfect, and recruiting metrics can be a huge help with this.

In this article, you’ll learn about seven of the most important recruiting metrics, as well as strategies for collecting and analyzing these metrics.

Key Takeaways

• Three of the most important recruiting metrics to measure are time to hire, sourcing channel, and cost of hire.

• You can collect and analyze recruiting metrics automatically on a data dashboard or manually with a spreadsheet.

• Set up regular times to review and analyze your recruiting metrics data.

What Are Recruiting Metrics?

Recruiting metrics (also called hiring or staffing metrics) are data points or measurements that organizations use to track and optimize the hiring process.

Hiring people can be expensive and time-consuming, so companies benefit from collecting as much data as they can and then using it to make the hiring process more efficient and effective.

7 Recruiting Metrics You Should Care About

1. Time to Hire

   From the time you advertise your vacancy, how much time passes before the successful candidate starts? Not just before they accept your offer, but until they are actually on board?

   Companies with strong talent management processes have faster hiring times than those without.

   Of course, the exception is any market that is short of suitably talented candidates; if you have strict hiring standards, it may take longer to find the appropriate person.

   Compare the time to hire across different roles and aim to lower the average as time goes on.

2. Sourcing Channel

   It’s important to track where your candidates came from.

   If you’re smart about your recruiting, you will have multiple channels from which to source your potential candidates.

   These could include advertisements on job boards and LinkedIn, direct contact with passive candidates, and a pool of potential employees connected to your careers pages either on Facebook or LinkedIn.

   Every job vacancy needs to know:

   • How many applicants came from each source

   • How many qualified applications were garnered from each source

   • Where the shortlisted applicants were sourced

   • Where the successful candidate first heard about the position

   These metrics need to be kept in a database that can be cross-referenced over periods of time. Keeping tabs on this metric will save you money in the long run as it will highlight the effectiveness of your various channels.

   If one channel is proving to be ineffective, you have the justification to shut it down. Similarly, if one channel seems to be producing a higher-than-expected ratio of qualified candidates, you can focus more resources in that direction.

3. Cost of Hire

   It’s a no-brainer that the cost of every hire should be measured, but have you considered all costs involved in a hire?

   For example, recruiter fees, whether internal or external, are straightforward. But what about the time it took the manager to interview?

   You should consider these factors when calculating the cost of hiring new employees:

   • Advertisements placed (if they are billed directly to you)

   • Setting up and maintaining social media accounts like Facebook and LinkedIn

   • Time your hiring managers spend interviewing potential employees

   • Recruiter fees

   • Any accounting and administrative costs involved in setting up a new employee (eg contracts, pay accounts, health benefits, etc.)

4. Retention

   Now that you’re seeing the true extent of the costs involved in hiring a new employee, it’s important to look at your retention rates.

   Low staff retention rates can drain thousands of dollars from your budget every year. These costs don’t just come from direct expenses associated with hiring a new person but also from the loss of productivity around the resignation, rehiring, and retraining processes.

   Remember the cost of losing an employee can be as high as three to four times their salary.

   When it comes to measuring retention rates, find the turnover rate of a specific role, and compare that to the turnover rate across specific departments. Then, try checking the turnover rate by pay grade. You’re looking to see how many resignations vs. terminations each department/role/pay grade has had.

   A proper analysis of retention rates should be performed every 3-6 months and graded across a period of time to show trends.

5. Open Vacancies Vs. Positions Filled

   Larger organizations will need to keep track of the number of vacancies the organization has versus the number of vacancies that have been filled recently.

   This metric could be measured either per month or per quarter, and the result should go alongside the time-to-fill ratio.

   A company managing its talent acquisition will have a low amount of open vacancies when compared to positions filled.

6. Offer to Acceptance Ratio

   It’s great to be in a position to make an offer to a rockstar candidate. Unfortunately, if they then turn it down for something else, you are back to square one.

   When this happens, it costs you time and money, as well as morale, which is why measuring how often people accept your job offers is so important.

   Keeping track of how many formal offers you had to extend before you ultimately filled the role and then comparing these to other positions can help inform your future job offer strategies.

   This measure also complements your cost of hire metrics very well.

7. Gender Mix

   Many studies have shown the benefits of a mixed-gender team, from greater innovation to greater profits.

   To ensure you’re taking full advantage of these benefits, consider placing a metric within your dashboard that measures the percentage balance of men and women on your team. This should cover all front-line, middle management, and senior positions.

   It’s good to step back from time to time and assess the gender mix within teams and within the organization as a whole to make sure you aren’t wildly off-balance in any area.

How to Collect Recruiting Metrics

There are a couple of different methods for collecting, storing, and sharing recruiting metrics, and the one you choose will depend on your organization’s size, needs, and resources.

1. An automated data dashboard. If you are working within a large organization, a customized software application that gathers data from as many sources as possible and automatically populates a dashboard with figures and timelines can be valuable.

   Having a dashboard like this allows managers to compare their team’s data to averages from the rest of the company so they are aware of their own strengths and weaknesses in the recruitment process.

2. A shared spreadsheet. If customized software is not a possibility in your budget right now or if your organization isn’t big enough to warrant a whole data dashboard, a simple Excel spreadsheet will do.

   Ask your hiring managers to update the spreadsheet each time a hire is made, and then set up a quarterly meeting to look over the spreadsheet and analyze the data.

   This may sound like a lot of effort, but when done right, measuring and analyzing these metrics will save you time and money.

Author

Caitlin Mazur

Caitlin Mazur is a freelance writer at Zippia where she has written 140+ articles that have reached over 1 mil viewers as of June 2023. Caitlin is passionate about helping Zippia’s readers land the jobs of their dreams by offering content that discusses job-seeking advice based on experience and extensive research.