To the uninitiated, the recruiting world looks like a supermarket: When you need something, you simply go to the right part of the store and select from your pre-packaged options.
But for those in the know, recruiting behaves more like the stock-market: it’s fast-paced and varied. You are never sure whether the skills you need will be available at the price you want. Like a stock market trader, the successful recruiter needs a balance of experience and data to land great talent.
Too often, recruitment success is gauged by time-to-fill quotas or cost-of-hire numbers. All these numbers do is tell you how quickly you hired someone at the lowest possible price. These metrics just won’t cut it in a place like Silicon Valley, where skills and expertise (quality) trumps fast and cheap.
William Tincup, one of the leading thinkers in HR, expressed the “recruitment paradox” well with this tweet:
Do we recruit who we want to retain? If not, let’s fix that.
— William Tincup (@williamtincup) July 8, 2014
Often we focus on what can be measured. Instead, we need to focus on what should be measured: whether we are efficiently finding the skills and expertise at the right time and for the best price.
Here are five indispensable metrics that will help you determine whether you are finding top quality hires who will move your business forward — In short, whether you are actually recruiting people you want to retain. I will also outline the red flags you should be acting on to refine your recruitment process.
Remember: For all these metrics there is a spectrum in terms of success. The more critical, complex or hard-to-fill the role is, the tighter the target should be:
Must-have recruitment metric #1: Qualified applicants-per-requisition
Why you need it: The qualified applicants-per-requisition metric indicates whether your sourcing practices are delivering what you want: people who can do the job effectively.
How to get it: To calculate this metric, follow these steps:
- Start at the end of the period you want to analyse
- Count all of the qualified applicants you have for the requisitions that are still open or were closed during the period
- Count the number of requisitions that are still open or were closed during the period
- Finally, divide the number of applicants by the number of requisitions to calculate your metric
You can further refine your numbers by looking independently at the requisitions that are closed and the requisitions that are still open. You can look for flags that indicate whether specific roles or geographies are seeing more or fewer qualified applicants per requisition.
Red flags to act on: If you see that your qualified applicants-per-requisition metric is declining over time, then you need to tweak your sourcing activities. For example, you may need to post job openings in new locations or revamp your referral program.
First published on Talent Culture by Ian Cook