Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Metrics (KPIs)

Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Metrics (KPIs)

Do you often fail to find the right candidate for your business? Publish an ad, wait … and nothing happens. What’s wrong!?

If you’ve also encountered this problem, read this article thoroughly: you’ll discover or deepen your knowledge of the hot topic, Recruiting Analytics (it’s considered by many experts as one of the top Recruiting Trends of 2017).

Recruiters often have difficulty closing a search, which is natural in a competitive market in the perpetual struggle for the best candidates. But not all recruiters are the same. There are at least two different groups: recruiters that remain blocked and can’t understand why they never get applicants; and those who manage to overcome their momentary difficulties by changing processes or investment in ineffective campaigns and ineffective recruiting tools.

There is a difference between these two groups: the first group of recruiters has no control over their activities because they do not have control of their numbers. For any business to measure results it is crucial, and this principle is even truer when we talk about recruiting processes. To be effective a recruitment strategy should be based on planning and careful measurement of results.

Keeping track of what’s happening in a recruitment campaign allows you to have a clear idea of where you are going and allows you to correct yourself if the actions taken do not deliver the desired results.

To not measure your KPIs is like plodding on in the night, without knowing if you are going in the right direction or not.

Would you really promise your HR manager that you will be able to close a search based only on good luck?

Metrics: How to Take Control of Your Recruiting Activities

Recruitment Metrics: recruitment metrics are KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to collect, analyze, and interpret the effectiveness of a recruiting process.
Using metrics allows you to make certain data-based decisions and improve your return on investment in the recruiting process (ROI). However, recruiters are often confused about the real meaning or utility of recruiting metrics or have only theoretical knowledge.

metriche ricerca selezione di personale

For a company, it is important to know the metrics that are most relevant to their recruitment activity, as they vary from company to company. You will need to choose which of the recruiting metrics on our list is most useful and immediately usable (“actionable”) for the structure of your recruiting process.
The complete list of Recruitment KPIs
Here, we list the key recruitment KPI you can use to track your recruiting activity.

1. REACH FOR HIRE

What is it? The Reach for Hire metric includes the total number of candidates placed within the corporate CV database, or which can still be exposed to a recruiting message or campaign. These are usually combined with the social business followers and subscribers to the blog newsletter.

How to measure? Example: If your corporate CV database has 2350 contacts, the company’s LinkedIn page has 547 followers, Twitter account 11,200 followers, Facebook page 849 followers and blog 612 subscribers to the newsletter then your reach will be 2350 + 547 + 11,200 + 849 + 612 = 15,558.

metriche recruitment

How can In-recruiting help you? With a recruitment software, you will be able to centralize all your applications and CVs in one place and track the source of origin for each CV. It easily integrates with your site/business career-page, job boards, email and major social networks to aggregate all Recruiting Analytics assets and metrics in one tool.

2. COMPOSITION OF CV DATABASE AND CANDIDATES

What is it? For a company, it is vital to build and constantly maintain a proprietary database of candidates from which to draw in case of necessity.

How to measure it? It is important to have specific indicators about the number of candidates in the database, the features of the candidates, and the number of open ads. With an ATS, you can directly monitor all of these elements in real time within a synthetic dashboard or through metric points, and search for a specific time period to see the change.

kpi selezione personale

It is important to monitor the composition of your CV database periodically: a database that doesn’t evolve or is composed of non-target candidates is predictive of the fact that the overall Talent Acquisition process is not working effectively.

3. METRICS ON SINGLE JOB ADS

What is it? For each ad it is important to know: the number of views, the applications received, the interviewed candidates, the offers made to the candidates and the accepted ones, as well as the channels used by the candidates to submit their CV.
How to measure? It’s important to have the awareness of each stage of the recruiting process to understand the bottlenecks that prevent you from closing a particular search. Did the ad receive only a few views? Or is the problem in the next phase, and it received only a few applicants? Having this data can help you to correct any problems without losing any unnecessary time and resources.

4. SOURCE OF HIRE

What is it? Source of Hire recruiting metrics identify the sources of candidates (Job boards, Career site, Social Network, referrals, internal database) and allows you to understand which are the most effective. It can refer to a single job ad, or to a set of ads published in a given time span (month/ year).
The image below shows some recruiting metrics within the In-recruiting ATS.

How to measure: It is not easy to aggregate candidate application data manually (e.g. with Excel). This operation takes a long time, you cannot get real-time updates and you cannot protect the privacy of your business data. We have devoted an article to explain why Excel is not an effective tool for recruiting.
An Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) such as In-recruiting allows you to track metrics and create synthetic reports on recruitment sources. You will always know if a candidate comes from a Job board (and specifically which Job board), the company Career site, a Social Network, an employee referral or more. Each ad records the views and registrations that have come from each channel.

For recruiters using the Source of Hire metric, it’s easy to find the channels that bring candidates in line with the target search. As a result, it becomes extremely intuitive to evaluate your investments and reallocate your budget to channels with the highest ROI.

5. TIME TO FILL

What is it? This allows you to understand the time it takes to manage and close a job search, so you can properly plan how much time it will take to hire a new candidate. A High Time to Fill almost certainly indicates that the ad’s publication is not working properly or that the internal recruiting process is very slow.

time to hire

 

How to Measure: Time to Fill indicates the number of days elapsed between the ad delivery date and the actual acceptance of the job offer. Manually monitoring Time to Fill is possible for a single ad. When ads start to multiply, perhaps on multiple locations, for different business functions and managed by different recruiters, it becomes more complicated. In these cases it is recommended to use a centralized tool such as an ATS that provides Time to Fill data for individual ads but also overall, allowing you to identify bottlenecks that slow the candidate path along the recruiting funnel. With an ATS you can also have the average time to fill with all hires or divided by each business function.

WARNING: It is important to strive to progressively reduce Time to Hire, but it is important not to forget that greatly reducing this value may impact on the overall quality of the entire recruitment process and on the job candidates.

6. COST TO HIRE
What is it? The cost to Hire estimates the average cost needed to attract and hire new employees. This element is a fundamental metric for assessing the effectiveness of the recruiting process.

cost to hire

How to measure it? It is usually calculated by dividing the total recruiting costs by the total number of new hires. Recruiting costs to include both external costs, such as the cost of search and selection companies, or the cost of ad serving, as well as internal ones, such as the cost of the staff involved in the selection.
Here is the formula for calculating the Cost of Hire:

Cost for Hire (£) = [Total External Costs + Total Internal Costs] / Total Hires.

Recruitment metrics are too often underestimated by recruiters. Instead, it is important to remember that:

“With better and more accurate metrics for recruitment, you can make your strategy more targeted and effective. “

How can In-recruiting help you track your Recruiting Metrics:

In-recruiting is one of the most complete and flexible recruitment software / ATS on the market. The Recruiting Analytics features have been recently updated and have become even more powerful.
If you’re interested in automatically tracking your recruitment metrics and want to test a next-generation Applicant Tracking System (ATS), we suggest that you can try In-recruiting for 14 days, for free.