When you are in the recruiting trenches all day every day, it is easy to develop a sort of myopia. You begin to focus on the thing that is right in front of you (such as a candidate you are really trying to hire), and you may lose the sense of the bigger hiring picture.

For this reason, it is important to have a pre-determined set of metrics to help you maintain a good sense of how effective your recruiting strategies really are. The difficulty with this, of course, is that there are many, many metrics you can capture. Which ones are really important?

Here are a few that should be on every recruiter’s short list of vital items to measure:

1) Source of Hire

It just makes sense to spend your recruiting budget on sources that yield the best results. From a c-suite perspective, you will want to measure, not only the source from which you get the most candidates, but the source that yields the best candidates.

Looking at it from a strictly cost-based viewpoint, a source that gives you candidates that end up substantially contributing to your organization’s bottom line is a source you want to cultivate.

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2) Quality of Hire

Closely tied to source of hire, quality of hire provides the other half of the sourcing puzzle. Eremedia points out: “The strategic metric that needs to be tracked is the average percentage of improvement in the performance of new hires when compared to the baseline performance of the average replaced worker in the same job family … Recruiting must have an action plan for identifying the candidate selection factors that currently and in the future will result in additional better-performing and longer-tenured new hires.”

3) Time to Hire

The old adage is that you should be slow to hire and quick to fire. While it is true that you should practice deliberation in your hiring process, being too slow to actually hire top candidates means that you will miss out on true talent. Dr. John Sullivan, a thought leader in talent management, observes: “My research indicates that the top 10 percent of candidates are often gone from the marketplace within 10 days. I also estimate the recruiting loss from missing a single game-changer, purple squirrel, or innovator recruit to be over $1 million each.”

The lesson? When you are competing for top talent, speed things up or miss out entirely.

4) Cost per hire

Cost per hire is a metric your c-suite definitely wants you to measure. Some of the essential components of an accurate cost of hire measurement include:

  • Ad spend
  • Agency fees, if applicable
  • Recruiter time
  • Candidate expenses
  • Hiring manager time
  • Lost productivity costs
  • Onboarding expenses

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5) Candidate Experience

Measurement of the candidate experience is essential to your future recruiting success. This metric is captured by surveys, exit interviews, and the like. The more you know about your candidate experience, the better you can design future hiring processes. Surveys and candidate feedback provide actionable intel, identifying bottlenecks and weaknesses that you can correct.

The Takeaway

Of course, these are not the only metrics you should analyze to improve your recruiting strategies, but they are a great place to start. Utilizing the best recruiting software available will help you capture and analyze important hiring metrics. Thrive TRM provides a strong suite of analytic tools to help you make your hiring all that it can be. Schedule a demo of Thrive TRM today!