Talent Acquisition has always been referred to as a sales driven function in the Human Resource domain and I tend to agree with such a broad conjecture. In an economy being driven more on Intellectual capital and an apparent shift from the traditional machinist roles pretty evident, acquiring and nurturing talent has become critical.

That is exactly the point, where the still nascent field of Talent Acquisition Metrics is gaining importance as organisations become more focused on tracking the performance of the talent acquisition team and its recruiters. The metrics are still evolving and rapid strides in social and collaborative platforms have added their own share to this bouquet.

Talent Acquisition metrics generally encompass three different types of metrics which have different user community focus, applicability and strategic intent. These three categories are:

>> Workforce Planning and Acquisition Strategy
>> Applicant sourcing and candidate management
>> Applicant tracking and final joining

In the First category, the metrics are more focused on measures around employee addition, attrition, budgeting and planned new additions for the plan period.

Some classical metrics used for this quarterly, biannually or yearly exercise are FTE Vs Headcount Reports, Attrition report, Net additions report, manpower budget allocation, employee bulge reports, diversity reports etc.

The second category of reports are used more often by multinational organisations which have very stable talent acquisition processes, and have a well defined way of managing the applicant database containing applications from interested applicants across geographies and across different age profiles.

Some of the most often used reports are source mix report, applicant profile report, profile aging reports, conversion ratios, source cost reports, channel cost reports, vendor cost reports, vendor performance reports.

These reports are also used for managing the channels used for talent acquisition by monitoring their budgets, performance and usage. In most of the organisations, the second category goes hand in hand with the third category of metrics.

The Third Category of metrics has been referred in the classical sense as Talent Acquisition Metrics.
They are primarily concerned with applicant tracking, interview statuses, offer and on boarding processes. Some of the reports used are funnel reports, turn around time reports, technical selection ratio reports, final selection ratio reports, salary deviations reports, offer v/s aborts reports, employee joining reports, hiring cycle time report etc.

These reports together represent a whole battery of reports which a talent acquisition team would use at different stages of talent acquisition and staffing. Depending upon the maturity of processes in an organisation, they are either selectively used or are integrated as one stream of reports.