Top Recruiting Metrics to Track In 2020 To Improve Hiring

Recruiting metrics can be an invaluable tool to a human resources or recruiting manager, providing insight into the recruitment process, and helping to identify opportunities to improve that might otherwise be overlooked.

In addition to process improvement, recruiting metrics provide HR with a clear, concrete language to communicate the value of recruiting efforts. With the help of benchmarking and review of recruiting metrics, a company can improve the overall ROI of recruiting and effectiveness of their hiring programs to find highly qualified candidates.

The Top Recruiting Metrics to Track in 2020 to Improve Hiring Include:

1. Pass-Through Rate

The pass-through rate measures the number of candidates who are active at each stage of the hiring process – from initial application, to screening, to interview, offer and hire. Pass-through is the difference between candidates at one stage of the process to the next.

Benchmarking and tracking how many candidates pass from one stage to the next can help to identify potential bottlenecks. For example, if the screening-to-interview rate is high, too many candidates may be moving forward and wasting resources. This may be an opportunity to tighten screening criteria to approve fewer, more-qualified candidates.

2. Source Channel

To gain a comprehensive view of recruiting, it is important to know where candidates are coming from. Source channels could include job boards, social media, referrals, internal candidates, career fairs, website interactions and more. Understanding how candidates find you is important to calculate the ROI of different source channels, which can inform current and future candidate search strategies and marketing budgets.

Related Reading: 4 Recruiting Strategies Proven to Enhance Your Talent Pool

3. Candidate Quality

The quantity of candidates for a particular position is one thing, but a more important metric is the quality of the candidates you have reached. If you have a high volume but low quality, not only are you not reaching the correct audience, you are wasting resources reviewing inappropriate candidates. Candidate quality can be derived from hiring manager reviews, time to productivity, and longevity or retention.

4. Offer Acceptance Rate

There are few events that waste recruiting resources as much as a rejected offer: a candidate has moved through all phases of the process, and all key stakeholders have agreed, only to fail at the finish line. There may be a number of reasons that a candidate doesn’t accept an offer, maybe:

- They received a better offer
- They didn’t feel that the culture is a good fit
- The position wasn’t what they thought it was
- The recruiting process wasn’t a good experience

Regardless of the reasoning, tracking offer acceptance rates and understanding how frequently, and why, an offer is unsuccessful is critical to improving the chances of having a candidate accept a position.

5. Time-to-Hire

Research has shown¹ that the best candidates are off the market in just 10 days, so companies with an efficient, streamlined recruiting processes have an advantage over slow movers.

For an organization to evaluate how long it takes them to hire an employee they should measure time-to-hire. Time-to-hire measures the period between connecting with a candidate and hiring. It’s a valuable metric to benchmark and to measure over time because it provides an overview of the efficiency of a recruiting process. An increase in time-to-hire indicates a problem with the process that should be addressed.

Related Reading: Why Time To Hire Is A Recruiting Metric That Matters

6. Cost-to-Hire

Cost-to-hire is the measure of the average amount it costs for each employee that is brought in to the company, and includes both external costs (job board fees, etc.) and internal costs (recruiter time, ATS support, etc.)

Cost-to-hire may vary from one position to the next, with executive positions and hard-to-find skills more expensive than other jobs. However, tracking your company’s overall cost-to-hire is a key measure of recruiting success. An increase in recruiting cost or an amount that is above average for your industry or location means that there may be some challenges in the recruiting process that can be optimized.

Keeping track of recruiting metrics takes time, but can add value to the recruiting process as a whole. Benchmarking and monitoring performance takes a seemingly-subjective process, selecting and hiring new employees, and breaks it down in easy to understand data. Armed with this data, a recruiter can identify opportunities to decrease the cost of hiring, streamline processes, improve the candidate experience, channel resources for improved ROI, and improve the overall quality of candidates – and employees – at a company.

Related Reading: Uncovering Cost to Hire: How a Bad Hire Impacts Your Bottom Line

If you are interested in streamlining, improving, or changing your recruiting process, consider enlisting the help of an agency, like Sparks Group.

Sparks Group is a nationally-recognized staffing agency with the expertise, skill and knowledge to help improve your recruiting and hiring processes, as well as business outcomes. Leverage the expert staffers at Sparks Group to access top-quality talent, streamline processes and improve recruiting ROI.