8 Essential Recruitment Metrics You Should Be Using

Recruitment is critical in all business ventures, with forward-thinking organisations continually refining their recruitment practices to generate the most qualified candidates for their open positions.

Technology has opened new opportunities for HR teams and recruiters to source, vet, and hire using more streamlined, data-driven processes. By tapping into the abundance of valuable information being produced across all industries and job functions, recruiters have found it much easier to analyse the qualities they are looking for in their candidates and maximise recruitment results.

This blog explores the function of metrics in data-driven recruitment and discusses eight essential metrics you can track, measure, and analyse to boost your recruitment performance.

What are recruitment metrics?

Recruitment metrics are essential for recruitment managers, who use them to measure their organisations’ performance in talent acquisition. They are the entire set of data points that recruiters must track, manage, and optimise during the recruiting process.

The recruiting process lifecycle includes sourcing, engaging, screening, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and retaining employees. Every step in the lifecycle has a distinct set of parameters and metrics that data-driven recruiting teams use to make better recruiting decisions.

Metrics can also help the recruiting team assess whether or not they are employing the right job candidates, whether they are correctly attracting and selecting candidates, and if the company is making enough hires.

What makes a metric good for recruitment?

If recruitment metrics are simply points to measure, what makes these points valuable? We can highlight the following factors of a good metric:

• A good metric is relevant and should apply to your unique business goals and recruitment objectives
• A good metric is actionable, meaning recruiting managers can use the recruiting metrics they have to drive decisions and actions that matter for their business goals
• A good metric is comparative, as you should be able to compare a metric to other periods, demographics, or competitors to understand its progress.
• A good recruiter metric is understandable, which means you should be able to clearly explain its meaning and use, such as showing a direct correlation between the metric and company profitability.

The metrics your recruitment team selects should be a strategic priority for your company, providing as much value to your hiring efforts as possible.

Eight essential recruitment metrics

In a world where business is increasingly competitive, leveraging the most effective recruitment practices is critical to any organisation’s success. Here are eight metrics recruitment leaders can know and measure to secure the best talent for their companies.

1. Application completion rate during recruitment

Tracking the application completion rate will help you understand how well you have designed your hiring process. The candidate experience should be pleasant enough to encourage qualified candidates to complete your application and commit to working with you.

Measuring the application completion rate will help recruiters identify whether your organisation adequately encourages applicants to fill out employment applications and apply for the relevant positions. The lower this metric, the more likely you are to have an unsuccessful hiring process because there is no doubt that candidate experience is the top priority for most recruiters.

2. Time to fill

This metric considers how many days pass between the time a job is posted and the time a candidate accepts an offer. The average time to fill varies by industry, but it is typically between 35-45 days. Measuring the time to fill is simple but incredibly important to HR professionals.

If a candidate takes longer than the average time to fill to accept a job offer, it means there was something that didn’t match the applicant, the company, the job application process – or all three. A top recruitment company knows how to minimise this time, costing the business hundreds of thousands of rands in lost salary and future earnings.

3. Source of hire 

This metric can determine where you are receiving the most job applications. If you are aware of the places where the majority of job seekers submit their resumes and applications, you can easily advertise your open positions on these platforms. You can always use the same sources to attract candidates and identify where the most qualified candidates are coming from.

4. Offer acceptance rate

The offer acceptance rate measures the percentage of candidates that accept job offers. This metric is a helpful gauge for competitive recruiting strategies and compensation plans. Whether your hiring goals are specific or wide-ranging, applicants often apply only to the jobs they would be most interested in. By tracking this recruitment metric, you can optimise your offers to consistently ensure that your company hires the most desirable applicants.

5. Yield ratios in the recruitment spac

A yield ratio is used to gauge the number of applicants moving forward in the hiring process. They highlight the percentage of applicants who advance from one stage of the hiring process to the next. For example, if you get 30 hirable candidates, the yield ratio would be divided by how many of them came from the previous stage of the hiring process, i.e. the number of candidates who submitted applications.

Ultimately, yield ratios show how effective your hiring procedure was. However, you must continuously measure them over time. Your hiring process will become more effective as yield ratios decline over time.

6. Candidate experience

This metric focuses exclusively on the candidate’s perception of your entire hiring process. It spans from when a potential applicant lands on your application page to when they receive a job offer (or rejection).

The goal of any organisation and HR team is to make the candidate experience as positive as possible for future employees. Candidates frequently post their opinions on job boards like Indeed. You don’t want unfavourable reviews to spread online because they might make it harder for you to recruit top talent in the future.

You’ll need to ask for some assistance from the candidates to put this metric in place. Establish what key measurements you’re looking to establish and set up an objective survey. You can do this yourself or ask your recruitment team to take the initiative.

7. First-year attrition

A crucial hiring metric that shows hiring success is first-year attrition, also known as first-year/new hire turnover. Candidates who quit during their first year on the job are typically costly to the business as they fail to become fully productive.

You can determine attrition by employers terminating the contract early or employees resigning from the company. The former is a sign that a prospective employee is not a good fit, while the latter indicates that an employee may have had the wrong expectations about the role or was simply unhappy in their position.

Whether there is an identifiable cause is crucial to figuring out why attrition occurred and what you can do to prevent it from recurring.

8. Cost per hire during recruitment

An effective way to optimise spending is to know how much money goes into the hiring process. When hiring an employee, it’s critical to examine your costs to identify areas where you can make hiring process savings without sacrificing candidate quality or experience.

Here are some of the factors that the recruitment metric cost per hire helps discover:

• The cost of advertising a job
• The expense of processing and conducting interviews
• The cost of recruitment software and upgrades
• The fee is paid to an agency or professional recruiter
• Additional administrative costs that build up along the way

Make your recruitment metrics count

Focusing on data-driven recruiting and the metrics mentioned above will improve the quality of the candidates you hire for new job positions. Additionally, you should be aware that the recruitment process and metrics constantly evolve to reflect current employment market trends.

Outlining metrics to track is only one small part of recruitment, and it’s certainly not all there is to the process. Where do you source candidates, and how do you attract them to your company? Partnering with a top recruitment agency can open up a wider talent pool for your organisation and allow you to hire the best candidates for the role.

Greys Recruitment Agency is a white-collar temporary and permanent recruitment specialist. We source the best candidates online through cutting-edge digital channels, SEO practices, and push and retrieval technology. You can contact us to find out more about our specialist recruitment solutions.