If you’re a recruiter or hiring manager, your role is instrumental in ensuring that the right individuals are brought on board to contribute to the growth of your company. But what’s the best way to gauge your effectiveness? Unlike accounting, marketing or sales - sometimes you don’t have concrete cost-savings or revenue goals.
In addition to the standard metrics most recruiters keep track of, like number of submissions, first and second round interviews, offers and hires, we suggest measuring a few more KPIs.
Measuring these has helped our internal team and our clients understand where we’re spending the majority of our time and how we can improve.
Priority. Most recruiters and hiring managers intuitively know the priority of a role they’re hiring for, but documenting this in your notes or shared workspace is never a bad idea. This can look like a ranking from 1-4, or high, medium or low priority - whatever makes sense to your org.
Not only will ranking the priority of your roles help team members know where to focus their time, it can also help for future hires. For example, let’s say you have a role open up that you know is a top priority, but often takes your team longer to hire for since you’re looking for a specific skillset. Knowing this in advance can help you staff accordingly, like hire a contractor or spread out tasks among teams before you find the right person for the role.
Meetings booked. We’re big fans of Calendly and schedule a lot of our meetings with this tool. Measuring how much time our team is spending in meetings with candidates/clients and comparing this to our hiring results helps us understand how we’re spending our time. Are certain team members spending too much time in meetings? Do some team members have more time, and could take some of these meetings off others plates?
Cost/Staff hours. Many of our clients spend hours posting jobs, reviewing resumes, interviewing candidates, and negotiating offers - which means less time working on their day-to-day work. Sometimes, when you break out the staff hours spent on hiring, this amount can be staggering. When your organization is bringing on a new hire, we recommend measuring the amount of staff hours you’re spending on all the work that goes into bringing someone new on board.
One of the benefits of working with a contingent recruiting firm like RFS is that our clients don’t need to spend as much time on the daily tasks that come with hiring, and can prioritize their time in other ways.
Candidate satisfaction. This is important for all candidates that enter your pipeline, and not only the ones you ultimately hire. At RFS, we work with candidates to get their feedback on the interview process (was it too long, too short), what factors go into their evaluation of an offer (compensation, remote vs. non-remote, etc.) and general interest in the role they’re interviewing for (for example - did they like the team/hiring manager?).
Surveys are a great tool to help you identify both positive and negative feedback, and adjust accordingly.
Retention rate. This one can’t be measured until after a hire starts, but it’s important to keep track of. When measuring retention, ask: What’s the average turnover? Does it vary by department? In exit interviews, are there certain roles that give similar reasons for leaving (for example - three of your software engineers have left within the last 9 months to earn higher pay somewhere else)?
If you understand your retention rate, and keep this in mind as you’re recruiting - this metric can help you focus on candidates who will have a higher likelihood of staying at your company. For example, one of the reasons many companies love referrals is because referred candidates often stay longer and may already have a connection at the company - a win-win for everyone.
Let our team help you get where you need to be.
