Top 6 Hiring Metrics Every Organisation Should Track and Monitor

Recruiting is one of the most crucial aspects of a company apart from business. After all, an employee is the most vital asset of any organisation.

Now, how can you check if your hiring process is effective and is producing expected results? The answer is recruiting metrics. Effective monitoring of your recruitment process will help you collate your recruiting metrics. This data provides you with better insights on your recruitment process, allowing you to make necessary modifications and amendments to the process as and when required.

So, let us check out the top six recruiting metrics which every organisation should monitor.

1. Sources of hiring and effectiveness of recruitment channels

Before the internet and smartphone era, job postings were only limited to ads in newspapers. Today, in this highly digitised era, candidates have access to multiple avenues to search for their jobs, such as social media, job portals, referral programs and placement ads on traditional media, and many more.

With multiple avenues now available at your disposal, it is crucial to track the performance of each vertical or channel to understand which source is attracting the most job seekers towards your job openings. This recruiting metric is one of the most significant ones which a hiring company should focus on. It will provide them with insights on where to invest more and where to not.

The hiring metrics of different sourcing channels would help you:

• Identify the sources which attract the most job applicants
• Recognise the quality of the talent for the job openings from each source

For instance, you may receive many applications from different online job portals, but many of the applications may not match up to the value or quality of your job description. Therefore, in most cases, they may not convert into an actual hire. Inversely, an employee referral program may not get you heaps of applications but it will bring in quality referrals often ending up with a hire. It will increase your hiring rate and overall conversion ratio. Hence, it is essential that you track the number and quality of applicants from various sourcing channels.

2. Candidate experience

Candidate experience is an essential recruiting metric that every company should follow. Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing strategy in the world. Sample this would you ever visit a restaurant if you read negative reviews about their food? Or would you bother staying at an inn that has unfavourable reviews? No, right? The same rule applies to recruitment.

Good candidate experience helps you do generic marketing and networking activity to a wider audience. Positive candidate experience will always travel far and wide, even if the candidate in question has not been selected for the job. Therefore, make sure you provide a good candidate experience to all the job applicants because the inverse is also true. A bad experience travels faster than a positive experience.

Be it simple email replies explaining the status of their application or providing relevant feedback about their performance in the interview, proper professional communication builds your brand and reaps better recruitment benefits in the long term. So take stock of the candidate experience you are providing to gauge your recruitment efforts.

3. Cost per hire

When we talk about different talent acquisition metrics, cost per hire is one of those obvious recurring metrics that you must monitor to understand your overall expenses. No doubt, running a successful hiring campaign requires a lot of money. Therefore, by keeping track of such metrics, you will understand how efficiently your money is being spent and how effective the return on your investment is.

You may have considered all the important cost outgoings that you would monitor. However, there are still some cost overruns that you fail to monitor during the recruitment cycle. Expenses, such as the cost of technology and tools, recruiter fees, travel expense, ad placement expenses, are some of the obvious expenses that get noticed and are easy to monitor. But there are certainly other expenses that are not visible, and hence, hard to calculate — for instance, the number of hours spent by the hiring manager in doing job interviews and what is the equivalent monetary returns or the values of that time utilised. These hidden figures will give you the exact insights about the actual efficiency and effectiveness of the recruitment cycle and would allow you to make the right modifications to make recurring more cost-efficient.

4. Time to hire

This recruitment metric calculates the duration spent from the moment the job position is advertised until the time the right candidate gets hired by the company. Time to hire holds extreme importance in HR recruitment metrics, as it helps you determine the quality of engagement your job advertisements and marketing efforts are bringing to your job opening.

In simple terms, an open job position is like a leaking hole, and a lot of your resources are focused on plugging that leak with a qualified employee. An open job position means that most of your resources are diverted towards finding the right candidate for the job. Moreover, it shifts your focus from the core business objectives, further delaying your project timelines and affecting your business in the process.

Ideally, an effective hiring process is one that has shorter time-to-hire metrics. Generally, it takes around 42 days for a company to fill one open vacancy. This duration becomes much slower because the top candidates get hired within ten days of folding in the job market. Therefore, streamline your recruiting process to keep your time-to-hire at a minimum.

5. Offer acceptance rate

Yes, this metric is also important considering that most top candidates refuse the offer during this stage. All your other metrics won’t hold any water if this metric doesn’t look promising. There is nothing more demoralising than finding out that the ideal candidate for the open position, who has succeeded in all the interview rounds, rejects the job offer in the final stage. It begs us to ask the question — why?

Sometimes the reasons are beyond one’s control. However, close observation of your job acceptance rate will help you identify the loopholes and mistakes in the recruitment process. Therefore, don’t consider yourself to have won the war after finding the best candidate for the job. The war is won when the candidate formally accepts the job offer letter.

Most times, the primary reason for rejecting the offer is less than expected pay. However, there are other factors as well — for instance, a tedious recruiting process, vague job expectations, and negative experiences during the interview. Therefore, make a note of such candidate feedback and make sure changes are implemented into the recruiting process, or else you would end up getting rejected most of the time.

6. Application drop out rate

Let us suppose 100 candidates entered your hiring process, and only ten candidates finished the complete process. Then there is a major underlying problem in your recruitment process. It indicates that your recruiting process is too lengthy and tedious, and candidates prefer to drop out halfway rather than finish the entire process. This trend is troublesome because job seekers are opting to walk out midway rather than check what you have on offer at the end of the process.

Effective monitoring of your recruitment process will help you identify the pain points in the recruitment process and fix them before it is too late. It will also make your process robust and effective and will attract more candidates into your recruitment funnel. To begin with, you should design your first application form in such a way that the candidate takes no more than five minutes to fill up the form completely.

The application form should be designed such that you can acquire as much information as possible from the candidates without it being too time-consuming to fill. If you succeed at that, then most of the job is done.

Recruiting talent is a crucial aspect of any organisation. By focusing on the key recruiting metrics, an employer can create an effective hiring plan to attract and hire the best of candidates in shorter turnaround time. These metrics will also help you offer a positive overall experience to your candidates, which can enhance your brand image in the recruitment market.