10 Recruiting Metrics to Track in Your HR Team

If you’re part of the HR world, chances are that recruitment and snagging top talent are right at the top of your to-do list. But in today’s super competitive job market, you’ve got to be on your A-game to nab that top-tier talent before they slip through your fingers. We’ve all felt the frustration of putting in the effort to interview and extend an offer to a perfect candidate, only to see them accept another job offer. So, the big question is: How do you stay one step ahead?

When you keep an eye on the right recruiting metrics, it’s like having a secret weapon to make smart choices, fine-tune your processes, and lure in the right person for the job. So, in this article, let’s dive into ten must-know recruiting metrics that’ll keep your HR team at the top of its game.

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1. Time-to-Fill

Time-to-fill is basically about how fast you can get someone into a job that’s up for grabs. Now, you might be wondering why does it matter so much? 

Well, here’s the thing: when a job spot lingers empty for too long, it can seriously dent your company’s productivity as well as pile extra tasks on your current team members. 

And it’s not just about putting the strain on your workforce; it can hit your bottom line by making you miss out on great opportunities and dragging down productivity.

To calculate time-to-fill, track the number of days between when a job requisition is opened and when the selected candidate accepts the offer. Reducing time-to-fill should be a priority for your HR team, as it can help you secure top talent before your competitors do.

Consider a fictional company with a smart strategy: they use a Dialpad multiple numbers phone system. Their recruiters can contact multiple potential candidates simultaneously while on the go, streamlining outreach, scheduling interviews, gathering real-time feedback, and accelerating hiring decisions.

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2. Cost-Per-Hire

This cost covers a wide range of things—from the money spent on job advertising to paying your recruiters’ salaries, handling interview-related expenses, and any other costs that come with the whole hiring process.

To calculate cost-per-hire, divide the total recruitment costs by the number of hires in a specific period. By monitoring this metric, HR teams can identify cost-saving opportunities and make adjustments to their recruitment strategies accordingly.

Consider an agency using email marketing for recruiting. The issue is that their emails often land in spam folders or don’t get delivered at all. This is more than just a nuisance; it seriously impacts their cost-per-hire metric.

With emails not making it through, the recruitment process drags on. They have to keep job postings open longer, leading to higher costs. Some candidates even drop out or accept offers elsewhere due to email frustrations. So, they end up spending extra to attract and engage these candidates, only to lose them because of email hiccups.

It’s a classic example of how innocent email marketing fails can inflate the cost-per-hire metric and cause recruitment headaches.

3. Source of Hire

Knowing where your new hires are coming from is like having a treasure map to allocate your resources smartly. Source of hire is all about figuring out which channels and methods are the real rock stars when it comes to bringing in candidates. Think of it like a scoreboard with job boards, employee referrals, social media, and direct applications as the key players.

By tracking the source of hire, you can identify which channels deliver the highest-quality candidates and allocate more resources to them. This data-driven approach can optimize your recruitment budget and improve the overall quality of your hires.

Image sourced from Jobvite 

4. Quality of Hire

To figure out if your hires are top-quality, HR teams can look at performance reviews, what managers have to say, and how long people stick around (retention rates). This way, you’re not just filling chairs; you’re bringing in people who really make a positive impact on the organization. Also, you may want to consider how committed the applicant is to their career. For example, if you are hiring an new member of the HR department, you may want to consider the evidence that the potential employee has done career planning in HRM.

Now, if you’re thinking about stepping up your quality of hire game, you might want to check out tools like an applicant tracking system (ATS) or conversational AI. But hold on a second; what is conversational AI, and how does it shake up the recruitment quality?

Imagine a tech company on a mission to find amazing software developers. They introduced a conversational AI chatbot on their careers page, and the results are remarkable.

This chatbot doesn’t just sit around; it actively engages with candidates, handles employee screening, seamlessly schedules interviews, and collects real-time feedback. All this leads to a whopping boost in the quality of people they hire for those super-important roles. 

In addition to embracing conversational AI, forward-thinking HR teams are also exploring advanced digital pre-employment techniques. These methods leverage cutting-edge technology to assess candidate skills, competencies, and cultural fit more accurately.

5. Offer Acceptance Rate

Offer acceptance rate is a straightforward yet valuable metric that tracks the percentage of job offers that candidates accept. A low acceptance rate can indicate issues with your job offers, such as uncompetitive compensation, poor company culture, or a slow recruitment process.

6. Candidate Experience

The candidate experience is often overlooked but crucial for the long term. It’s about how job seekers view your hiring process, from the initial contact to the job offer or rejection.

By gathering feedback from candidates and keeping tabs on how happy they are, you can figure out where things are going well and where they might need a bit of a tune-up.

To amp up that candidate experience, think about bringing in some tools like friendly chatbots, onboarding software, or even the trusty inbound call center. And you might be thinking, “What is an inbound call center all about in the world of recruitment?” Let’s look at the example of Amazon, the global e-commerce and tech giant. 

Amazon takes candidate care seriously. They’ve incorporated an inbound call center into their recruitment strategy. This dedicated hotline offers job applicants assistance, keeps them informed about their applications and interviews, and connects them with a helpful customer service team for any inquiries.

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Source: Glassdoor

7. Diversity Metrics

A recent DEI report shows that 78% of American workers believe working for an employer that values diversity and inclusion is important, while 93% of workers consider DEI personally important to them.

When you keep an eye on diversity metrics, like if you’re attracting diverse candidates, how many people from underrepresented backgrounds you’re bringing in, and whether there’s a good balance of genders among new hires, you’re basically making sure your workplace is fair and welcoming.

This isn’t just about checking off a box or crunching numbers—it’s like a sneak peek into how well you’re doing at building a workplace where everyone truly feels valued and part of the team.

8. Interview-to-Offer Ratio

Let’s talk about the interview-to-offer ratio—it’s a way to measure how many interviews happen before a job offer. If you’re having a ton of interviews before making an offer, it might signal issues in your process, like too many rounds or lack of alignment among interviewers.

A never-ending interview process can be frustrating for everyone involved. Your team spends unnecessary time stuck in interviews, it takes longer to fill positions, and you even risk candidates getting fed up and looking at positions elsewhere.

Imagine a company in the insurance legacy systems business that hit a snag while trying to hire cybersecurity experts. They were taking ages to fill those crucial roles, causing project delays and budget overruns.

Before the makeover, their interview-to-offer ratio was through the roof, sometimes involving a mind-boggling seven or eight interviews before they’d make a job offer. Needless to say, candidates weren’t exactly doing a happy dance.

They can improve this by standardizing interviews to maintain consistency across stages, implementing early skill assessments at the outset, switching from one-on-one to panel interviews, and providing training to ensure interviewers share a unified understanding of candidate criteria.

Free-to-use image sourced from Unsplash

9. Time-to-Hire for Key Roles

Every hire is important, but certain roles in your organization are just more crucial and time-sensitive than the rest. It’s like having those MVP positions that can really make or break things. When you’re keeping tabs on how long it takes to fill these key roles, you’re basically making sure you’ve got the right people in the right places when you need them most.

HR teams can set some time-to-hire goals specifically for these positions. It’s like saying, “Hey, let’s make sure we get these awesome people on board as quickly as possible.” This way, your recruiters can put their focus and resources where they matter most.

10. Employee Referral Rate

Employee referrals often result in high-quality hires. Tracking the employee referral rate helps you understand the effectiveness of your referral program. It measures the percentage of new hires who were referred by current employees.

By encouraging and rewarding employee referrals, you can tap into your existing workforce’s network to bring in top talent who are likely to fit well within your company culture.

To get a handle on this metric, you might want to think about using some recruitment tech tools. These tools not only make the whole referral thing a whole lot simpler but also keep an eye on how your referral program is doing. They’ll help you keep track of stuff like how many candidates are being referred and how many of them actually land the job.

Image sourced from Gitnux

Optimizing Recruitment with HR Metrics

Keep these ten recruiting metrics in your toolkit, and your HR team can start making decisions that really count, using data-driven recruiting as your compass. It’s like having a GPS to fine-tune your recruitment game and pull in the crème de la crème of talent.

The recruiting world never stands still; it’s always changing. So, remember to keep an eye on your metrics and tweak your strategies as needed to stay ahead in the job market race. When you put these metrics front and center, your HR team becomes a driving force for your organization’s success, ensuring you’re always bringing in and holding onto the top talents in the industry.