Top Recruiting Metrics That Every Manager Should Have On Their Dashboard
You’ve just entered the back half of the year, and whether it’s 2019 or 2030, it’s still time for a mid-year review of your recruiting metrics and how your team has fared since the beginning of the year.
Previously, our team created a list of the top hiring metrics that every manager should have on their dashboard. You can see that information here. While we review these metrics constantly, we take extra time to review them at the end of June to ensure we are providing the highest level of service to our clients possible. We look for trends that could mean changes in the market, we look for best practices some recruiters are using and implement them company-wide, and we look for gaps in our training that have to be fixed in order to reach our goals for the year.
This is not only a recruiting exercise. This is something that can and should be done in every sales environment across every product or service category. A giant ship can’t turn on a dime, so let’s make sure the ship is headed in the right direction now before it’s too late.
Your metrics may be different than ours, but the key is to begin developing a diagnostic platform that will give you a barometer on your business. In 2006, we began seeing trends in the business that were unexpected. By 2007, those changes were so evident that we knew something catastrophic was happening. If not for the development of a scorecard that gave us clear indications of a changing economy and informed decisions that directed is to respond accordingly, our firm could have suffered the fate that hundreds or even thousands of others did during the 2008 recession.
What’s On Your ScoreCard?
I have a great friend that lives and dies by a daily scorecard. He has been able to establish criteria whereby he only works to achieve his “points” each day on his scorecard. After he has reached his goal for the day, he decides whether or not to shut it down and go enjoy the day or dig deep and achieve greatness! Most days, he blows away his points, but at a minimum, he hits his points for a day before he even considers checking out for other activities. The cool thing about this is he has the ability to judge his performance on a daily basis. As long as he hits his daily points, there is no need to make major adjustments in his business.
Recruiting and most other sales can be simplified into steps that could have a daily scorecard, but if you are like me, that doesn’t work. The micro metrics are important… daily calls, phone time, inbound, outbound, etc. but it’s the macro metrics that provide a true understanding on how your business, industry and the economy are working… and that’s what I want to know.
How do you measure your business? What can we do different that would enhance our work or the work product we provide to our customers? Let us know below. We have also provided a list of the 6 most important metrics that every recruiting manager should have on their dashboard below.
6 Hiring Metrics Every manager Should Have on Their Dashboard
Effective hiring is critical for a smooth running company. The way to know if what you are currently doing is working is by tracking metrics.
Stay on top of these 6 critical measurements. They give you important insight into what is successful and what needs improvement.
Candidate Quality Ratio
This metric is also called the ratio of qualified applicants to total applicants. Tracking this ratio lets you monitor how many candidates that you spend time on in the recruiting process are actually a good fit.
It refers to those chosen for an interview. According to experts, the goal is to get a minimum of three-quarters of your candidates selected for an interview. If your rate is less, it means the ones chosen for you to review aren’t measuring up to the needs and desires of you or your hiring team. For hiring managers, this means you have now become the “quality metric” for your hiring practice.
Try to empower your recruiting team to be the “quality metric” of all candidates submitted. If the candidates that you are seeing do not measure up to your expectations, spend some time recalibrating with your team. Set expectations, but more importantly, establish a standard for your minimum criteria. The better this metric gets, the more efficient your time is spent as a hiring manager in the hiring process.
Time to Fill
The industry-accepted calculation for this metric is: Time to Fill = Total Number of Days Job Is Available and Unfilled. At Cerca Talent, because our focus is to find the right candidate as soon as possible, we measure this in two different ways.
1. Candidate Sourcing Time
It makes a major difference in a company’s efficiency when the time to fill a job, from starting a job requisition to hiring a qualified candidate, is short. The standard, according to Recruiter.com, is 10 to 14 days for presenting a qualified slate of 3 candidates. The experts recommend tracking how long it takes to present a slate of three qualified candidates and how many slates are assembled.
For difficult roles in Clinical Research or Clinical Diagnostics, the areas that Cerca Talent specializes, you might find that the 10 to 14 day window is consistently too short of a timeframe. This is especially true in some highly technical environments. Continue to track this metric to see how your organization manages different areas of your business.
2. Candidate Processing Time
The processing time refers to how long it takes from introduction of the candidate who is ultimately hired to the time when they ultimately accept the position. Many people will say that processing time is the time it takes from approval for hiring a candidate to the actual time she starts working in the new position, but this time has many variables associated with it and does not provide a usable statistic that can be managed.
According to ERE Media, a variety of circumstances add to this time period. For example, if the new hire needs to relocate, it can add weeks to the process. Make this a simple metric that can allow for gains in efficiency and effectiveness in the actual interviewing process. Measure this retrospectively with each hired candidate and work to improve your interviewing process. This makes for a better candidate experience and can even improve the quality of hire, when done correctly.
Quality of Hire
According to research done by the Aberdeen Group, the most critical hiring metric is Quality of Hire. While this measure can be difficult, find a systematic way to do this at your company based on the desires for new employees. Your Quality of Hire (QoH) metric could be based on the first two years of performance reviews, or for commercial teams, it could be a calculation based on their performance to goal. For a long term QoH metric, one could look at the number of promotions a new employees receives over a one, two or three year time period.
According to the Recruitment Metrics and Performance Benchmark Report done by Staffing.org, there are definite benefits from frequent measuring the quality of those hired. The more often it is done, the happier managers are with the quality.
Cost of Hire
As the inforgraphic here shows, a bad hire is expensive. According to a Harris poll, over 40% of people responding said it was more than $25,000, and a full 25% said it was more than $50,000. Cost of hire is an important metric! Within leadership roles or commercial teams, this number can skyrocket due to lost revenue or mismanagement of revenue generating personnel.
This metric includes:
Advertising agency fees
Employee referral bonuses
Employee relocation costs
Third party recruiter fees
Travel expenses for applicants and staff
Sign-on bonuses
Recruiter salary and benefits
Lost revenue for open territories
Lost revenue from mismanaged employees or customers
Tracking these six metrics helps any organization, large or small. It tells you right away how effective your talent acquisition efforts are. When you know the numbers, you can pinpoint where change needs to happen, speeding up improvements to the hiring process.
If you are looking for a little assistance in analyzing these numbers as they apply to your recruiting efforts, or if you are working to expand and enhance your search efforts today after measuring performance against these metrics, call the diagnostics recruiter team here at Cerca Talent+, or email me directly – srivers@cercatalent.com. Having been leaders and hiring managers ourselves, we are the professional search firm that knows the diagnostics industry and can help you improve your talent branding in all theses metrics…and more.