To improve the recruiting process, it’s important to track key metrics. HR thought leader Jim Stroud outlines critical questions recruiters should ask themselves to evaluate their recruiting strategy. Thank you to our partner, Verified First, for providing this article through their HR thought leader network. This article was originally published here.
I just read an interesting article on recruiting metrics and it made me wonder all the things I should have measured in my young and impetuous sourcing/recruiting youth. As a matter of fact, if I could’ve snapped a finger and have certain metrics back in the day (and the will to leverage them), I would’ve been the most productive recruiter (or sourcer) who ever lived.
Metrics like…
- How many leads did the sourcer find?
- How many leads did the sourcer deem qualified, interested and available?
- How many leads did the recruiter accept?
- How many leads did the recruiter follow-up on?
- How many leads had a second interview?
- How many leads were hired?
- How long did it take to make first contact with a lead that was ruled qualified, interested and available?
- How long did it take to tell each contact that they were no longer being considered for the role?
- How many alternative jobs were they being considered for?
- What were the reasons why they were not hired?
- What specific companies did we hire from the most?
- What industries, outside of our own, did we hire from the most?
- Which managers hired the most in the past year?
- Which managers hired the quickest in the past year?
- Which managers hired the slowest in the past year?
- What is the typical profile of the candidates hired by each hiring manager? (To include: schools attended, professional experience and size of company)
- Which managers retain the most staff?
- Which managers lose the most staff?
- Which managers review the most resumes and offer immediate feedback?
- What skills are needed to meet the next business initiative?
- What skills are presently available to meet present and future needs?
If I had the answer to those questions, I would know…
- How much quantity the sourcer can produce
- How well the sourcer can engage passive candidates
- How much quality the sourcer can produce
- How well the recruiter can manage his desk
- How much quality the sourcer can produce
- How in-sync the recruiter and sourcer are
- How well the recruiting process is working
- How important candidate engagement is to the company
- How resourceful the recruiter and sourcer are
- What about our company needs to change to appeal to more candidates
- Which companies should we be targeting
- Which companies should we be paying more attention to
- Which managers I should give the most attention to
- Which managers I should give the most attention to
- Which managers I would connect with to pipeline talent for future reference
- Which passive candidates would be most appealing to whom
- Which managers know their needs the best
- Which managers to avoid
- Which managers to give surprise gifts to (wink)
- What skills to pipeline for
- What skills to pipeline for
From all of that data, I would also know…
- My stats as a sourcer (for example: 50 leads sourced > 12 qualified, interested and available > 10 accepted by recruiter > 1 hire)
- My stats as a recruiter (for example: 10 qualified, interested and available leads > 8 Interviews > 1 hire)
- Which of my fellow sourcers are best at finding a certain profile
- Which of my fellow recruiters are best at closing leads they have accepted
- As a manager, I know which sourcing projects to assign to whom
- As a manager, I would know how to predict when jobs would be filled
And yet, with all of this information one measure has been overlooked – retention. Shouldn’t how long a person stays with a company be the ultimate test of a recruiter? To put it another way, isn’t it better to judge a matchmaker by the number of divorces that have resulted from their handiwork vs the marriages they have influenced? Wouldn’t you think that a matchmaker with 50 marriages and 1 divorce to their credit is better than a matchmaker with 75 marriages and 33 divorces accredited to them? With this in mind, in a perfect world, I would probably add a few more metrics to my overall recruiting process
In order to rate our recruiting organization overall, I would ask:
- How many people did our recruiting org hire in the past year?
- Of the people our recruiting org hired, how many are still with the company?
In order to rate the hiring managers overall, I would ask:
- Which office locations retain their staff the longest?
- Which managers retain their staff the longest?
My guess is that these types of stats would work anywhere in the world in order to measure the effectiveness of recruiter and sourcer alike. But, I could be wrong. What do you think?
This article is courtesy of our partner, Verified First. To learn how our integration speeds up your hiring process, click here.
