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5 Recruitment Metrics to Help You Start a Data-Driven Recruitment Process



If you want better hiring results, you have to make some changes in your recruiting process. Because of the increased focus on data, today’s talent acquisition leaders are expected to be able to easily locate and discuss the current state of recruiting performance. This means they not only need strategies and tools for capturing and analyzing data, they also need to understand the depths of what the recruiting metrics mean.

Recruiting metrics are measurements used to track hiring success and optimize the process of hiring candidates for an organization. While there are many metrics out there, most of them require complex data analysis. The ones mentioned below are easy to calculate and give enough information to start a data-driven recruitment process.

1. Time to Fill

This refers to the time it takes to find and hire a new candidate, often measured by the number of days between publishing a job opening and hiring the candidate. Time to fill is influenced by supply and demand ratios for specific jobs. It’s a great metric for business planning and offers a realistic view for the manager to assess the time it will take to attract a replacement for a departed employee.

2. Source of Hire

Tracking the sources which attract new hires to your organization is one of the most popular recruiting metrics. This metric also helps to keep track of the effectiveness of different recruiting channels. A few examples are job boards, the company’s career page, social media, and sourcing agencies.

3. First-Year Attrition

First-year attrition is a key recruiting metric and also indicates hiring success. Candidates who leave in their first year of work fail to become fully productive and usually cost a lot of money. This metric can also be turned around as ‘candidate retention rate’. First-year attrition can be managed and unmanaged.

Managed attrition means that the contract is terminated by the employer. Unmanaged attrition means that they leave on their own accord. The former is often an indicator of bad first-year performance or bad fit with the team. The second is often an indicator of unrealistic expectations which cause the candidate to quit. This could be due to a mismatch between the job description and the actual job, or the job and/or company has been oversold by the recruiter.

4. Selection Ratio

The selection ratio refers to the number of hired candidates compared to the total number of candidates. This ratio is also called the Submittals to Hire Ratio. The selection ratio provides information such as the value of different assessment tools and can be used to estimate the utility of a given selection and recruitment system.

5. Cost Per Hire

The cost per hire recruitment metric is the total cost invested in hiring divided by the number of hires.

Cost per hire consists of multiple cost structures which can be divided by internal and external cost. Internal costs include time spent by recruiter, time spent by manager, new hire onboarding time, lost productivity etc. The external costs include advertising cost, agency fees, candidate expenses, new hire training costs etc. By quantifying all of them you can calculate the total recruitment cost.

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