Let’s say it loud, recruiting is a difficult task!  

Being a recruiter it's terribly frustrating not to get the expected outcome even after putting significant efforts, time, and money into developing a good recruitment strategy. Because if a recruitment process unable to bring the right talent, the whole organization suffers.  

What is the actual reason behind the failed recruitment strategies? How to figure out what makes a good hiring strategy and what needs to be focused on to hire the right candidates.  

The answer to all these questions is - Know your key recruitment metrics to design a successful recruitment strategy.  

In order to measure the effectiveness of your recruitment process, you must decide the key recruitment metrics. The recruitment metrics help you have accurate data and measurable hiring goals to avoid the risk of wasting time, money, and efforts. 

However, you would have no time left for executing your recruitment strategies if you keep track of every recruitment metric. Here in this post, you can check the most important recruitment metrics. 

So let’s understand them one by one

Recruitment goals:

Establishing recruitment goals and objectives are essential for developing successful hiring strategies. Yet most of the recruiters do not decide their recruitment goals and objectives before they start hiring and most of them fall flat.  

Deciding your hiring objectives should be a base for every recruitment strategy. To decide your hiring goals just get the answers to the questions like what is the purpose of recruiting? What do you want to achieve by hiring? What results would you like to get?  

A clear goal not only helps you develop a robust hiring strategy but also channelizes your efforts and helps you measure success or failure as well as return on investment.  

Quality of hire: 

Measuring the quality of hire helps you understand the value a candidate brings to your organization. Specifically, how much a new employee contributes through his/her performance during the tenure. It is the most difficult recruitment metric to measure because it requires a long-term commitment to decide the efficiency of a new hire.  

The way quality of hire is important to measure the caliber of a new hire the same way it is responsible for deciding the success or failure of the overall recruiting function.  

Ramp-up time, job performance, culture fit, employee engagement are the common metrics to measure the quality of hire.  

(Job Performance  + Ramp-up Time + Employee Engagement + Cultural Fit) / N 

N = number of indicators  

Time-to-hire:  

Time-to-hire is as important as the quality of hire. Time-to-hire means the number of days from the moment a candidate enters the pipeline to the moment the candidate accepts the job offer.  

Time-to-hire is important to identify the loopholes in your hiring process and targets areas of improvement. It will help you find out answers to questions such as:  

How much time required to hire a job-fit candidate? 

How much time required to hire for the same job role? 

How long does it take to move a candidate from one stage to another?  

When it comes to measuring time-to-hire the common metrics are measure time-per-stage & different roles and/or departments.  

Time-to-hire = Day candidate accepted the offer - Day candidate entered the pipeline  

Measuring time-to-hire is a great step to stay on top of your hiring process. This metric provides you inputs into the great and not-so-great parts of our recruitment process. 

Cost-per-hire:  

How much it takes to make a candidate go through your recruitment funnel? It takes the total costs spent on recruiting for an open role which includes:  

External cost - Advertising cost, Agency fees, Candidate expenses, Training cost, etc.  

Internal cost - Time spent by recruiter & manager (avg. wages * hrs spent), New hire onboarding time, lost productivity, etc.  

(Total internal recruiting costs + external recruiting costs) / (total # of hires in a given time frame) 

Cost-per-hire recruiting metrics help companies measure how much it cost them to hire a new employee. It can vary depending on the size of the organization, the level of the position, and the capability of a recruitment team.  

Being a recruiter you must be facing constant pressure to reduce cost per hire. The right way to control your recruiting cost is to create your detailed budget while keeping your average cost required to hire a new employee in mind.  

Attrition rate: 

Not every employee you hire stays with your organization for a long period. If your employee turnover cost increasing and you are constantly hiring new employees then you need to work on reducing your attrition rate and find out the root cause.  

Sometimes, the reason behind the increased employee churn rate aka attrition rate is the unclear job description, poor onboarding, and hiring poor culture fit. Taking corrective measures likes refining your recruiting, training, and onboarding process will definitely going to help you reduce the attrition rate.  

Attrition rate = number of employees who leave within a year / total number of employees 

Hiring manager’s expectation:    

Your understanding with your hiring manager can make or break the recruitment process. A number of issues arise between recruiters and hiring managers whenever they try to close a position.   

The most common problems you need to focus on to fulfill the hiring manager’s expectations are lack of communication and debriefing throughout the recruitment process.   

To make your hiring process effective and successful you should always make sure that you and your hiring manager are on the same page. Your every action should be aligned with the hiring manager’s recruitment needs.   

Candidate experience:   

In the list of key recruitment metrics, we must include candidate experience. The experience candidates get during any stage of the recruitment process makes a positive or negative impact on them. Most of us will agree that one negative experience will be enough to make candidates change their mind even at the last minute.    

How can we ensure a positive experience throughout your recruitment process?   

This can be measured by doing a candidate experience survey with the help of a net promoter score to identify key components of the experience that can be improved.   

Job Satisfaction:   

Job satisfaction is an unquantifiable recruitment metric. It is nothing but the level of fulfillment your employees feel at their job. Most employers are trying to measure this feeling nowadays, by tracking whether they have fulfilled the expectations of their employees set during the hiring process.   

To measure job satisfaction you can ask your employees questions related to tangible rewards, supervisory support, appreciation, workplace, job role, etc.   

A high job satisfaction indicates living up to employees' expectations whereas low job satisfaction could mean not providing a realistic job preview.   

Offer acceptance rate:   

The offer acceptance rate gives you clarity about how likely a candidate is to accept a job offer. Many HR professionals do not consider this a priority metric. However, it provides insights on when and where to improve the recruitment process.   

The employment acceptance rate can be affected by various external as well as internal factors. To increase the offer acceptance rate you can focus on important factors such as compensation packages, employer branding, and recruitment time.   

Calculate the offer acceptance rate with a simple method. Divide the number of accepted job offers by the number of job offers given.  

  These metrics are always great recruitment assessment tools. However, it can deviate you if you dig deep and try to consider all the metrics for successful hiring. Because there are various KPIs you could invent and consider every metric will make the recruitment process more complex and time-consuming. So to be productive and hire according to your recruitment needs and objectives consider the above important recruitment metrics.   

Author Bio:    

Pankaj is a digital marketing professional at iMocha a talent assessment tool. He produces highly informative and actionable content for topics ranging from recruitment, social media hiring to candidate assessment. Pankaj believes in continuously learning & being updated with the latest trends in content marketing.