Understanding Your Recruiter Ratios

It amazes me how few recruiters truly understand their recruiting ratios. Early in my recruiting career I would hear things like “we need to get your deal count up so come in a half hour earlier and stay a half hour later. That gives you an extra hour a day to work harder.” For me, “working harder” didn’t get to the root of my recruiting issues. I was fortunate to have a strong manager/mentor who taught me to understand my recruiting ratios which allowed me to pinpoint the areas that I needed to improve. Additionally, this painted a picture that was quite uplifting because it showed how many areas I was actually quite proficient in. This kept me from being overwhelmed and inspired me to tweak the areas of deficiency. Below is a quick example of a tracker:

This paints a more accurate and usually a more positive picture of your recruiting results. This example illustrates that your matching is quite good. It also shows that the client thinks your candidates are worthy of interviewing. It shows that you have done a good job of matching the candidate wish list to the job (hence the great offer to start result). It also shows that an area of weakness is the Client IV:Offer category. This could be a result of many factors, for example, maybe the IV prep needs to improve or coaching your candidates for the IV needs to improve, etc. But most importantly it shows that 3 out of 4 measurable categories are quite good. This will allow you to spend more time improving the area that you really need to improve in (rather than spamming another 50 candidates on a mass email). You will be less overwhelmed and less stressed out when it comes time to improving your deal count. Give it a try.

Comment by John Hazlewood on November 29, 2011 at 11:09am: Hi Scott,

'Cand Sub' - presumably means 'no of candidates' who applied for a role?

Sub 2 Client -- means 'no if candidates' submitted to client for the role?

Client IV - means 'no of interviews' i.e. in example above 6?

Is that right?

Comment by Scott Burgess on November 29, 2011 at 11:16am: Cand sub = cands submitted to the AM (using split model)

Sub 2 Client = Yes

Client IV = yes

Comment by John Hazlewood on November 29, 2011 at 12:13pm: Hi scott,

I'm in the U.K. We have 'hiring managers' - candidates apply to a role i.e. candidates received then we have candidates submitted to client - usually 3 hopefully at the moment. Then of course we have 'interviews' - Apply those things disregarding 'split model' which I presume you mean a 'split' between two recruiters lets use for simplicity

Candidates received - CR
Candidates submitted to client - CS
Interviews - interviews

Can you use my abbreviations and then apply the model above. Is the ratios done every week when you say 'week ending'?

Comment by Scott Burgess on November 29, 2011 at 12:28pm

Comment by John Hazlewood on November 29, 2011 at 12:57pm: Hi Scott,

Thanks.

Comment by Will Branning on November 29, 2011 at 6:55pm: I will work on tracking resumes to interviews - currently I'm tracking resumes submitted to clients on a weekly basis (overall and for individual jobs) and sendouts (interviews). Also, I'm not really tracking ratios so this will be a New Years resolution! Good article - thanks!