As a recruiter, it’s important to have some understanding of how we’re performing. Now our performance doesn’t just fall down to “have we filled the role or not.”
It’s much more complex than that, and this article is going to tell you the 21 recruiting metrics every recruiter should follow in 2023:
- Time to fill
- Source of hire
- Performance
- External and internal offer declines
- The number of candidates
- Inbound referral
- Conversion rates
- Cost of hire
- Retention rates
- Equality
- Interview to Hire Ratio
- Offer Acceptance Rate
- Candidate Net Promoter Score
- First-year attrition
- Candidate Experience
- Application Time
- Applications Received Per Opening
- Interview to Offer Ratio
- Passive Candidate Conversion Rate
- Candidate Job Satisfaction
- Hiring Manager Satisfaction
What Can You Learn From Recruiting Metrics?
Recruiting metrics can give you answers to some of the critical questions like:
- The time it takes to hire employees.
- How efficient is your recruitment funnel?
- How well do new employees perform on a job?
- How do candidates find your job openings, via which channels?
- How much is your cost of hire?
- How many candidates apply for your job openings?
- What are the retention rates?
- And many more.
You can use the insight you get from recruiting metrics to better your whole recruitment process and candidate experience, resulting in a more significant ROI and profit.
1. Time-to fill
If you don’t know the average time it takes you to fill a role, how do you suppose you will plan which recruiter has what workload?
If you know that it takes a certain amount of time to fill one role, you know not to give 7 of those roles to one recruiter as there is little chance they will fill the positions.
Time-to-fill is a metric that varies from sector to sector to position. It’s something that’s learned in time and is very good for predicting the outcome of individual hires.
2. Source of hire
The Source of hire is a metric every recruiter should be focusing on.
When you notice many good, successful candidates coming from the same source, you must put much more effort into that space to find more great candidates. If you need to do a paid promotion on your job ads, it’s beneficial to do so in the spaces where you’re most likely to get excellent talent.
Have a look at your recent hires, examine the data and determine which sources are the best performers.
Examples of different sources:
- Social media.
- Job boards.
- Referral programs.
Things are changing quickly, and people find new ways to look for jobs. You must stay ahead of this and understand to find and secure the best candidates.
Tracking where these applicants come from include the following:
- How many candidates were brought in from each source?
- How were many applicants from each source completely qualified for the available position?
- Which source did the best candidates come from?
- Where did qualifying candidates find out about open spots?
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 justification for shutting 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.
Always check your source of hire metrics to make sure you’re not spending too much money on something that’s not giving you enough value and not enough money on something that’s giving you very little value.
3. How well the particular recruiter is performing
One metric everyone seems to profess they have but is quite tricky to measure how well the particular recruiter performs.
Now, some might say this is a tough one because you gauge how the recruiter is doing by looking at their other metrics. When looking at recruiter performance, one should not compare the recruiters against each other, like a number game.
Instead, you should look to take each recruiter as an individual and create a list of improvements and achievements for them.
You should review this list of improvements and achievements regularly, and as long as they have achieved their goals, you can assume they are performing well. Remember, you hired the recruiter for a reason. If at any point you don’t feel they’re up to the standard you need them to be, it’s your job as an employer to help them get there.
4. External and internal offer declines
When people reject your offer, don’t just ignore those metrics. These are important.
Often these are what tells you whether your efforts at recruiting are good or not. Externally you should see whether offer declines is because of trends that are going on in the industry.
However, you should look at offer declines internally as well.
Perhaps one particular department in the company sees a lot more declines than others. Perhaps there has been a change in structure or strategy that needs to be addressed.
Why people said no is just as important as finding out why people said yes if you want to improve your overall recruiting process.
5. The number of candidates
When looking at recruitment metrics, the number of candidates you’re talking to/interviewing is an important metric to consider. It’s not just a case of too few candidates but too many as well.
Suppose a recruiter is only interviewing a few candidates for a role that should warrant a lot more applications. In that case, there might be a problem in how the recruiter is either approaching the candidates or looking for the candidates.
Alternatively, suppose a recruiter is interviewing many candidates for a senior role that shouldn’t have that many people who are suitable for the role. In that case, it might be that they’re not sure about the process of interviewing and securing suitable candidates.
Spending time on too few or too many candidates is a waste of time and only means the recruiter has to spend longer doing the same job.
6. Inbound referral
You should try to ensure you have a system in place or a plan for inbound referrals. For executive roles that come up often, it’s essential to have a full talent pipeline of great talent at your disposal.
One way to ensure you get talent referrals that people often overlook is to talk to the candidates that weren’t right. Yes, it’s important to see if the successful candidates know anyone else for other roles you’re hoping to fill, but you should also talk to the non-suitable candidates.
You should try and get at least two different names from each person you speak to, suitable or not.
7. Conversion rates
How often conversations move from LinkedIn to E-mail? LinkedIn is an excellent tool for outbound recruitment.
You might find that 500 people are looking at your job advert but only 75 are applying for a role. This means you have a conversion rate of 15%, which obviously seems low.
So what is the ideal conversion rate?
You should aim for a conversion rate of 50%. This means half the people you talk to regarding the role should be getting in touch with via e-mail to speak further about the position, or you should be contacting them
The idea is not to get as many people as possible to read the application but to get them to apply. This means if 50 people read your application and 35 people apply, you have a conversion rate of 70%.
Although fewer people applied than the previous one, having a higher conversion rate means your job advert targets the right people, and everyone who is reading the application believes they have the right skills to do the job.
At the same time, if you’re writing effective job adverts and there aren’t enough people viewing or converting, it might be the case that you have an issue with visibility.
8. Cost of hire
People consider the cost of hire as a measured metric, but they often overlook some of the other costs concerned with hiring. First of all, there are recruiter fees whether you’re using internal or external recruiters.
Other metrics that should be considered under the umbrella term of cost to hire are:
- The amount of time it took the manager to interview the candidate.
- Whether you had to pay to place your job advert on the board,
- The time and cost it took to set up and manage the social media accounts you use to hire, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
- The cost of administrative tasks such as writing and creating contracts, health, and other benefits.
Consider the following to ensure you aren’t spending too much in the wrong places:
- Want ads for newspapers, radio and other publications?
- Social media accounts? Setting up and maintaining them as well as paid ads through the sites?
- Interviewing processes?
- Recruiter fees?
- Administrative, contracts, health benefits, accounting and more?
If you’re spending a great deal of money on these, think about ways to cut down on costs. Could you combine interviewing processes or stop posting want ads in the newspaper because they’re not generating the right candidates? Really consider what you’re spending on the overall hiring process and cut costs where possible.
9. Retention rates
Once you’ve understood the true value of what it costs to hire a candidate, you should now look with more scrutiny at your retention rates.
If you have poor retention rates metrics, then you are undergoing the cost of hire repeatedly. If you’re unable to retain the employees you hire, you will find that you lose an unnecessary budget because you have to repeat an already expensive process.
The best way to look at retention rates is to consider the turnover rate for their specific role. Cooper this to the turnover rate in the department and then also see by pay grade. Find the departments, pay bracket, and roles with the highest turnover rate and then come up with solutions to stop this from happening.
Read More: Why ATS is a must-have tool for recruiters?
10. Equality
Have you ensured you have a mix of people of different genders, different racial backgrounds, and 100% inclusive of people with disabilities?
One metric to check is that you are ensuring you have mixed teams. It has been proven in various studies that companies who have a mixed team rather than just one sort of demographic perform better and have more significant innovation, leading to higher profits.
You should measure the different genders and demographics across different levels. You should look at your front line, middle management, and senior positions and see that you have a nice mix of everyone in all three levels. It’s
If you’re a small company, then keeping track of your metrics should be fine to be done on a spreadsheet. However, for larger organizations, you might need to seek out software that will help you keep track of the metrics you want to measure.
Measuring metrics is a great way to ensure you save your company and yourself both time and money.
11. Interview to Hire Ratio
The interview to hire ratio is a metric that shows you the percentage of candidates who have been hired. It’s a great measure of how efficiently recruiters source and screen candidates. The better interview to hire ratio, the bigger the hiring efficiency.
You can calculate it by calculating the average number of interviews a recruiter needs to do in order to land a candidate. In practice, this looks like this:
The hiring manager interviews 5 candidates and only one of them gets hired. The interview-to-hire ratio here is 5:1.
A good interview-to-hire ratio is 3:1, but keep in mind that this varies across the industries. The average ratio is 4:8:1.
12. Offer Acceptance Rate
Offer acceptance rate or OAR is a recruiting metric that gives you insight into your ability to understand candidates and their preferences and priorities.
If OAR is high, then it means that your job descriptions and messaging are clear and aren’t misleading. The offers are tailored to meet both candidate’s and client’s needs and expectations.
However, if OAR is low, then you should take time to analyze your communication strategies and candidate experience. Once you understand where the problem is, you should be able to attract the right candidates for the right job openings and increase the offer acceptance rate.
Things you can do to get over this are:
- Make sure that you offer informative and coherent messages to candidates.
- Provide candidates with factually correct information about the company. This includes a job description, benefits, environment, and culture.
- Use the right interview and screening as well as recruiting techniques to get to know the candidate better and thus make the rightful judgment of whether they are the right fit for the company.
13. Candidate Net Promoter Score
Candidate Net Promoter Score is measured in candidate surveys.
NPS is a metric used to gauge customer satisfaction, but it can be used to estimate the satisfaction of applicants.
To measure it, you should ask candidates questions like:
“How likely are you to recommend this job to a friend or colleague on a scale of 0-10?”
Then subtract the percentage of candidates who answered from 7 to 10 from the percentage that answered between 1 and 6.
The score you get can range from -100 to +100. Scores above 0 are considered to be good, while scores above 50 are considered to be excellent.
14. First-year attrition
First-year attrition can either be:
- Managed – the employer terminates the contract.
- Unmanaged – the employee leaves the company.
This can indicate that the job description and expectations weren’t clear enough or that the recruiter didn’t understand the company’s needs and culture thoroughly when choosing the ideal candidate.
15. Candidate Experience
It is one of the most impacting and influencing metrics in the entire recruitment workspace. Single negative feedback or experience may turn the odds against the company.
The best way to ensure a positive candidate experience is by getting an ATS aboard. An ATS assures candidate engagement through the entire recruitment process by sending notifications at every stage. This eventually increases candidate satisfaction and refrains them from seeking other opportunities.
The reports generated by an ATS help the recruiters to analyze and track their daily operations. Through this performance analysis, the recruiters get to know the key performing areas. This