6 Indicators you Should Measure in Recruitment

By Susana Mozo ( Global SaaS Client Manager)

Our company meets goals, bumps up sales and projects multiply. This is fantastic news! Obviously this isn’t just a matter of getting on with work; to develop their business, companies need to recruit the best talent. So it’s time to hire. But have we thought about what we want from a recruitment process?

1. A new workforce.
2. To get the best professionals in the labour market.
3. To get the best talent as well as reliable recruitment information to bring in outstanding hires that allow us to pull off our mission successfully and to be able to set up continuous improvement processes based on objective data that’s easy to analyse and track.

If this were a multiple test question in a questionnaire in a “Recruitment 101” course, we’d be pretty sure that the right option would be “C”. However, everything will depend on the state of maturity in our organization, on the analysis that we can do on the data stored, and also on the feedback from the information gathered about the on-going processes.

If we are at the initial stage, our prime goal will simply be to reach option “B”: to get the best professionals in the labour market. But let’s not kid ourselves. It is not an easy goal and harder still, if we don’t have enough information. Using intuition and experience, we can infer certain conclusions on how to obtain information, such as: portals from where I get more candidates or profiles that best fit our corporate structure and culture. Needless to say, these intuitions belong to the people making the inferences and vanish when these leave the company.

If we are a part of a mature organization and have the resources needed, we can, and must, go a little further. For this, it’s essential to have a technology tool available that helps us to store and analyse data to get the right information. What indicators should this measure?

1. It must really understand how we source candidates

• What is the rate for new candidates by process type?
• What is the rate for existing candidates who fit in my database by process type?
• Origin of the source for obtaining candidates.
• Where do the candidates who fit our offers come from?

2. We need to find out where we get the most qualified candidates from, which ones pass the preliminary filters, which ones reach the end of the process, and of course, which ones are finally hired. We don’t need to receive hundreds of CVs, just the ones that fit the requirements for the vacancy.
3. Average duration in candidate selection processes: where do our recruitment processes get stuck? In what phases do we take the longest? Do we lack recruiters and need the help of external recruitment companies for the preliminary phase? Are our managers so busy that we need to fine-tune screening so that the process does not go on for months? Maybe we need to include extra evidence that will allow us to better assess the candidates, before involving other departments inside our company. To obtain this information, we need to be able to track our candidate selection processes. If we can’t, this won’t be doable.

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2. Success rate: as in, how many offers do we send and how many are accepted? If the acceptance rate is low, maybe we aren’t doing this well and we should review the target audience of our processes, as well as the compensation we offer. If the rate of aborted processes is high, perhaps we aren’t really screening properly or we aren’t pitching the vacancy properly.
3. Process cost: how much does it cost us to select a candidate and how are these costs split, for example: job boards, external recruitment companies, internal recruiters, and time spent by our management, etc.
4. Time spent in the job: a clear way to know if we have really been successful with recruiting a candidate is to find out the length of time the employee remains in the job. Logically, this KPI’s value will depend on the job type and the investment that we make in both the recruitment process and in the training required for upskilling the employee to perform new functions. Selecting the wrong candidate can be very costly, not just due to the consequences of the candidate’s poor or negative performance, but also to triggering at the organizational level, many hidden costs in recruitment, training and missed opportunities.

All these KPIs are very interesting, but to get them we need information and that’s only possible to access, if we have structured data correctly. For this, the best solution is to have a technology tool for recruitment to help us to do the process and record our recruitment activities. However, for this to be successful it will be necessary to feed it and that in itself is an investment. The more thorough we are at recording such data, the more information we will get, and the greater the control we will have over our internal processes, because as Sir Francis Bacon once said, “information is power” and in the personnel recruitment field, this is a well-established fact.