Recruiting Metrics that Measure Greater Company Health

December 16, 2015 at 12:36 PM by Rob Stevenson

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Indulge me in my assumption that you've spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trawling the blogosphere for advice on recruiting metrics. Which ones are the most important, how to calculate them, and how to present them in such a way that illustrates your team's performance to the higher-ups. Let's face it, you're not getting any budget for team hires or sexy powerful recruiting tools unless you can bring some data to the table telling the story of your conquests. And while recruiting metrics are a great way to execute some internal PR and demonstrate your worth, I will implore you to think bigger about the utility of recruiting metrics. The information you're crunching as part of your hiring process can be a telling barometer of health at your company, and if you endeavor to make higher reaching impacts on your organization, you need to firmly place a finger on their pulse.

 

Referral Rate

Referrals tend to be a company's greatest individual source of hire. Often, recruiters will measure referrals in terms of hires made, and frame it in comparison with outbound and inbound recruiting efforts. The problem here is that looking only at hires made from referred candidates is severely limited in scope-- it really only tells you how clearly your employees understand the rigors of open roles (and can therefore recommend appopriate candidates), and how streamlined your interview process is.

Instead of looking at the bottom of the referral funnel, turn your attention to the top.

Even if the candidates don't get hired, or maybe you don't even deem them worthy of a phone screen, bulk number of total referred candidates is an implicit measurement of employee engagement, morale, and whether you have built a truly incentivizing referral program. If employees are referring candidates, they view your open roles as true opportunities, recognize their office as a place they'd recommend other people come in to work, and are inspired by your referral program.

 

Offer Acceptance Rate

This one is particularly more telling for the organization than for the talent team, as once a candidate has progressed to the offer stage, the hiring manager and their team should be doing the heavy lifting. If a candidate makes it all the way through your assessment process and backs out at the 1 yard line, it may be a signal of a fly in the ointment. Either your compensation packages are lacking, you're moving too slowly, or the hiring manager isn't positioning your company as a compelling place to work. Comparing the offer acceptance rate across all your hiring managers is a good way to isolate the bug, but if these numbers are weak across the board then there's a common denominator keeping people from signing up. Odds are, this is something unrelated to the sourcing, scheduling, interviewing, and candidate experience provided and performed by your team.

 

Interview to Offer Rate

The role of sourcers and recruiters, boiled and reduced all the way down, is to build quaility interviewing pipeline for hiring managers and team members . If the talent team is tossing a great number of candidates over the fence to specific teams, candidates who then progress no further through the funnel resulting in a supremely low interview to offer rate, that's a signal of misalignment between teams in your organization. Again, compare this rate across deparments to determine which teams have done a good job identifying and articulating their needs. This can signify an issue with internal teams not having clear goals about their own growth, a lack of their overt buy-in in the hiring process, or just a lack of communication between these teams. Either way, articulating this problem can help you identify greater organizational ills.

 

Erring on the side of under-reporting, let's agree this list is hardly exhaustive. What recruiting metrics do you use to help you assess organizational needs? 

  employee referral program

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