Why is a data-driven approach to recruitment essential for your process?

Recruitment analysis allows to optimize the recruiting process, improve the candidate experience, and, ultimately, to attract more candidates.

Today, in the competitive market, is the ‘’recruiter intuition’’ not enough to be effective. Only by analyzing the right statistics, you can find the areas to optimize the cost and effectiveness of your recruitment process.

There are many KPIs you could apply on your recruitment but analyzing all of them would leave no time for recruitment itself  

Today we are presenting 5 metrics that will help you to measure how effective your recruitment is.

1. Time-to-hire/ Time -to-fill

Time to hire is the number of days between the candidate applying or is approached, to the moment the candidate accepts the job. This metric is all about tracking the speed with which candidates move within your hiring process, allowing you to analyze a recruiting team’s performance. Considering most talented people are off the market in 10 days, it also means a shorter process gives you a better chance at attracting and hiring your perfect candidate.

Identifying exactly where your hiring team is spending too much time or energy will allow you to take action and optimize the process.

Alternatively, you can take a look at The -time -to -fill which includes the preparation and  is the number of days between  approving/ posting a job and the candidate accepting the job job offer.

It’s a metric that offers a realistic view for the manager to assess the time it will take to attract and hire a replacement for a departing employee.

       2. Cost-per-hire

This metric lets you know what the average amount of money you are spending to make a new hire is. 

It is the total cost invested in hiring divided by the number of hires. To calculate the cost per hire you need to sum all internal and external recruiting costs like:

• Advertising costs
• Recruiter salaries
• Agency fee
• Equipment, tools and software
• Onboarding cost 
• Time spent on recruitment by all participants

      3. Sourcing channel effectiveness

This metric helps to keep track of the effectiveness of different recruiting channels like job boards, the company’s career page, social media, agencies, or referrals. By tracking this data you can see what is the most effective source. Once you know which sources provide the greatest number of candidates, you can start looking at which sources produce the best quality candidates over time. This, can of course, vary depending on the job.

Having a clear understanding of which channel works and which doesn’t, ensures the best ROI on time and investment spent on recruiting

For example, if you see that most of your successful hires are not coming from LinkedIn but your internal job board, then that’s the channel that you want to be focusing on.

       4. Quality of hire 

Quality of hire, often measured by someone’s performance rating, gives an indicator of first-year performance of a candidate. This KPI measure measures the value new hires bring to a company and its related to the first-year performance of a candidate

Candidates who receive high-performance ratings are indicative of hiring success while low first-year performance ratings are indicative of bad hires. 

 Hiring quality employees means less turnover, more productivity, better culture, and greater overall success for the company.

Quality of hire is the input for the Success Ratio. The success ratio divides the number of hires who perform well by the total number of candidates hired. A high success ratio means that most of the hired candidates perform well, however a low ratio means that you should take a look at your selection process!

      5. Candidate Experience

Even if this KPI is a separate topic and includes its own KPIs and strategies it shouldn’t be overlooked among the recruitment metrics.

This is the journey that job seekers perceive in your recruitment and onboarding process and it is the first step in  building a relation with your future employee. 

It is often measured using a candidate experience survey. This survey uses Net Promoter Score and helps to identify areas that can be improved.

Keep in mind that you can measure candidate experience in different stages of the recruitment process and include rejected candidates to get a more accurate picture of the state of your candidate experience.