In many organizations, the success of recruiting effort is measured by how quickly HR can post a job opening and fill it. Discussions between management and HR about how that success is measured and improvements made are laced with anecdotes, hunches, and ambiguity. The quality of hire is based on gut, not substantive background, and given cursory attention…until after the new employee quits or is terminated. Recruiting costs are viewed as expenses, not investment in human assets. It works on a shoestring budget, if one exists at all. The decision to select one source over another (should we use Careerbuilder or Indeed or a staffing firm?) is often decided by the lowest cost. As a result, management is frustrated because HR doesn’t provide them with meaningful data; HR and recruiters are frustrated because they don’t have access to the numbers and resources that management needs. It’s a stalemate between lack of investment in a reliable recruiting process and ineptitude.
Where should you start your journey toward smarter recruiting? It’s simple – companies must begin to use predictive analytics and recruiting metrics. Whether a company chooses to collect and analyze data manually or with an applicant tracking system makes no difference. What is important is that without real-time reporting on the following recruiting metrics, recruiting efforts will remain inefficient and grow more costly – two options no business can afford. To be effective at filling open positions, you must collect meaningful data, scour it for relevancy, and monitor it continuously.
Here are 6 recruiting metrics that should form the foundation of every recruiting initiative. Pay attention to the common theme that runs through each one – quality and cost per source.
Views – in order to attract more qualified candidates, they must see your job offer. So tracking how many applicants see your ad is important. It is also important to track how many started an application, completed your application (or submitted a resume), and how many were scheduled for interviews. But Views is just the starting part and is the least meaningful when it comes to improving quality of hire. Of course, tracking views and applicant abandonment is almost impossible without ATS software or sophisticated web tracking and SEO (which will likely cost more to build than a subscription to ATS).
After Views, you can move onto collecting more meaningful and useful data.
Applicants – how many applicants completed an application per source and how much did you invest in that source.
Interviews – how many interviews did you set up per source and what was the quality of the candidate. You might also determine how much it cost to acquire a candidate that you deemed qualified to schedule an interview.
Hires – how many candidates did you hire per source and like the other categories, what did it cost per candidate per source?
Quality of hire – this measure is of course the most valuable metric there can be. What more can you ask than hiring a candidate who meets or exceeds expectations. But you might not know the quality for weeks, months, or even years. Nonetheless quality of hire per source is the ultimate recruiting measure of success. But while waiting to figure this out, hires, interviews, and even applicants per source will have to do.
Retention – last but not least is retention per source. Hiring a qualified candidate but turning them over quickly is frustrating and costly. There are many factors that contribute to turnover so it’s important to rule out how much the source contributes. (For example, do candidates hired from a staffing company stay longer or leave faster than those from a job board or employee referral?)
Imagine trying to collect all this information and analyze it in real-time manually? It’s impractical, resource-intensive, and costly. Get the recruiting metrics and reports you need when you need them with applicant tracking software. For more information or a free demo, contact us by phone, chat or complete the form below today.
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