Greenhouse's former Director of TA Recommends These 3 Recruiting KPI Buckets

Which recruiting KPI should you prioritize? Because there are a lot of KPIs a TA team could track. This was one of many topics on Hired’s podcast, Talk Talent to Me. Below are some excerpts of the conversation between the podcast host Rob Stevenson and his guest, the former Greenhouse Director of Talent Acquisition, Jackqui Maguire. In it, she shares the three levels of recruitment KPIs she focused on, as well as five KPIs the Greenhouse team tracked. 

From the original article…

When you’re not busy sourcing, emailing, phone screening, and debriefing upon your next great hire, there’s a pretty good chance you live inside your ATS. Well, I’m thrilled you’ve joined for recruiting advice from the Director of Talent Acquisition at Greenhouse.

Jacqui Maguire has her work cut out for her in the wake of Greenhouse’s recent fundraising. With great funding comes great headcount, and Jacqui is charged with making sure the company is prepped to handle the increased volume of interviewing and onboarding. She’s gone about this in a number of ways, not the least of which is a revamped interview training process. Jacqui walked me through the new format she ideated, what she covers, and how she goes about increasing attendance and effectiveness.

We also covered all Jacqui’s favorite KPIs, and which ones fall into each of the three buckets she separates them into: organization-level goals, talent team effectiveness, and individual recruiter performance.

Prioritize these 3 Recruiting KPI Levels

TT2M: How do you go about measuring success? How do you take what’s happening in those interviews and what you’re seeing in Greenhouse, and use that to articulate to the team how you’re performing and to iterate internally?

“I think of KPIs and metrics for performance sort of at three levels. There are three different levels that we measure, one being role-level metrics. So looking at the pipeline data for a specific role to set expectations. The next level that you can look at is individual performance on the team, which I kind of think is more of a, not every time you open a role or not to look at it in every rec that a recruiter is on, but look at recruiter and coordinator performance quarterly.”

Going further – Greenhouse also tracks these 5 specific KPIs

“And then I think what answers your question the most is the KPIs that we track. So how do we know that we were successful in accomplishing what the business needed us to accomplish? We actually track five KPIs that we report on every quarter, and recently added a sixth that we’re trying out.

1. How many qualified candidates do we have for every open role? Are we putting enough qualified candidates in the pipeline? And that’s something that the recruiters control.
2. What’s the number of days to offer? So how long from when the winning candidate applies to when they sign their offer? So are we moving candidates through the process quickly?
3. We look at candidate satisfaction. So we use the Greenhouse candidate surveys, but I think there are a number of ways to track candidate satisfaction. It’s really important to us that we are giving every candidate, regardless of whether or not they find an offer, a positive experience with us.
4. The fourth is offer acceptance rate, which I think is a very common one to track, and very important. Are we getting candidates to sign our offers?
5. And then finally, another very important but very common is hires to goal. So are we actually hiring the number of employees that the business needs us to hire?

Every quarter we track those five performance indicators and send them to the executive team and to all of our hiring managers. We study them internally amongst the recruiting team, to find ways that we can improve our process. One quarter we may see that our days-to-offer have spiked, and we’ll look and say, “Well, why?” Why did it take us so long to close our candidates? And we can kind of whittle down from there to find out what was going on, and if it’s something we can improve in the future.”

TT2M: I was curious about which recruiting KPIs are for the sake of reporting to external teams and which are the ones you turn around internally, “Okay, this is what we should… What we can individually measure ourselves on”?

“All five are both. So we report all five to leadership and all of our hiring managers, and then we look at all five internally and try and make updates to each. We track certain ones to individuals as well. What we report on is the days to offer in aggregate, the average amongst all of the candidates we hired that quarter. But each recruiter will pull, when we do their quarterly performance review, which isn’t what we call them internally; we call them our look-back outlook, but when we’re looking back on the last quarter, each recruiter will pull their own personal days to offer and see how they were doing in their performance.

Related: Read the blog featuring Shally Steckerl, Global Head of Talent for LTK, where he discusses talent sourcing analytics in the 2023 market. 

Some of them we can do at a recruiter or coordinator level, like hires to goal, offer acceptance rate, days to offer. Candidate satisfaction is an anonymous survey, so that we can only look at the aggregate, but we have quarters, like last quarter, Q2 of 2018, we had 100% positive response in our surveys. So that was something that the entire team can say they impacted, and we could all celebrate together. So it’s not all about finding the things we did wrong, but also finding the things that we did really well and celebrating it.”

See below for more from Jacqui’s appearance on Hired’s recruiting podcast, Talk Talent To Me. 

Editor’s Note: When this blog was originally published, Ms. Maguire was the Director of Talent Acquisition for Greenhouse. She’s continued to grow her career with a variety of entities since. Additionally, Greenhouse is a Hired partner and integrates their applicant tracking system with the Hired talent marketplace platform, for greater efficiency. See all of Hired’s ATS partners – we’re adding new ones all the time!