If you want better hiring results, you have to make some changes in your recruiting process. One of the best changes to make is in regard to recruiting metrics. You need to gather and maintain the right kind of data, such as where your candidates are coming from, how they apply for your jobs, and skill sets an employee has. Wise use of recruiting metrics enables you to compare data from your recruiting process against corporate goals for the kind of insight you need to maintain and improve your recruiting practices.
Use the Right Metrics
HR professionals know the value of recruiting metrics even if they don’t have any talent analytics plans in place. Josh Bersin in Deloitte’s 2013 report, Talent Analytics: From Small Data to Big Data, says that 75 percent of HR leaders say analytics are important to business success but just over half of them don’t use them. Many rated their workforce analytics as poor. Bersin reports that less than 25 percent of companies are analyzing all the data they gather in their recruiting and HR processes.
Looking at the right recruiting metrics is more important than using a large quantity of recruiting metrics. Recruiting Metrics that aren’t tied to specific business goals won’t be as effective at helping to improve business success. While metrics gathering is important, you have to be sure to move beyond gathering and analyze metrics so you can take action when improvements are needed. Focusing on a smaller number of recruiting metrics that are meaningful to your recruiting success will be a lot easier than reporting on every aspect of recruiting and not being able to do anything else.
Important Recruiting Metrics
Important recruiting metrics to pay attention to when you need to improve your hiring results include sourcing, quality of hire, and satisfaction rating.
Sourcing metrics keep track of where the best candidates are coming from such as LinkedIn, on-campus recruiting, employee referrals, social media, or job boards. When you measure how many successful hires you get from each candidate source, you’ll see clearly where to focus your recruiting efforts and resources and which ones to drop. When you want to know the percentage of quality hires from sources, divide the number of hires per source by the number of total hires.
Quality of hire is a metric that looks at new hires, how long they stay, what impact they have in their positions, what their competencies are, and what sources they are coming from and why. Quality of hire metrics look at post-hire data and help you gauge how satisfied people are with the hires being made. It’s not an easy metric to apply but is worth the effort. GE CEO Jack Welch recommends measuring quality of hire and doesn’t accept excuses for not tracking it.
Satisfaction rating is an important one because it really highlights when things need improvement. It’s easy to overlook satisfaction in recruiting and close the books when the hire is made. But taking metrics to the next level with candidate surveys, new hire questionnaires, and input from supervisor, managers, and current employees will give you true insight into the quality of your recruiting process.
Recruiting Metrics are More Than Reporting
While recruiting metrics are certainly good to report to management and use to improve the reporting process, employers today need to use metrics for more than reporting. They have to use them as part of an actionable improvement process to get the most value from them. Quarterly review of recruiting metrics with improvement goals ensures metrics are not only gathered but used to support improvement. When you need your recruiting process to support employee engagement and retention, strategic goals, and a continuous improvement process, you need to choose better recruiting metrics and focus on the ones that are most important to your hiring success.
