How Recruitment Analytics & Metrics can Influence Your Hiring Decisions

Wherever there is a process, there are answers. This goes for recruitment just as well as any endeavor that a company undertakes. Establishing a process that leverages the proper channels, outlines the proper steps, and follows the recipe for successful recruitment comes with answers. Employers can easily pinpoint issues and justify problems. What often remains unanswered is the decision-making aspect of it all. While recruitment begins with an open position, it does not end once a hire is made. Data that can be analyzed post-placement is still a valuable tool that can affect most hiring decisions on a campaign/company level.

It’s important to identify post-hire data and recruitment metrics in order to maintain process optimization momentum.

1- Identifying which data should be collected

The point isn’t to gather a massive amount of data just to let it sit in the corner. Some data might be useful to the organization, while other types might not. As such, employers need to begin by identifying which data sets they want to collect and how they will be used.

As part of this identification, the most important metrics and data are the ones that contribute to the recruitment process and provide the recruitment team with clear results.

2- Training Recruiters to Gather Data

Every company approaches the internal debate in a different way. For this particular matter, it’s best to be as transparent as possible with your recruiters and HR department. You can hold a meeting with the entire team and explain the importance of these performance metrics, and how they would contribute to their day-to-day work.

Here, employers can demonstrate to their employees how their jobs would become simpler, easier, and more software-assisted. With the right tool to help them monitor different metrics and gather performance data, you can begin training the management team in its use. Many ATS solutions and recruiting software provide a range of features that track recruitment metrics and provide helpful insights for future improvements.

3- The funnel: Application to hire Ratio

There’s quite a bit of pressure behind the recruitment process, especially when a placement is one of high priority. In order to progressively improve the process on every level, recruiters should make data-driven improvements along the way. In order to effect visible change, it’s important to gather as much data as possible beforehand. Keep in mind that more data improves the statistical significance of the metrics you’re measuring. Try to gather six months to a year of recruitment data so you can effectively track your progress.

An important metric to consider early on would be the application-to-hire ratio of each channel in your arsenal. This data point helps recruiters determine how many applications are needed to make each hire. As you implement change to your process with this ratio in mind, you can progressively determine how you can more manage your hiring campaigns more effectively. A good tip to make the most of this activity is to measure the application to hire ratio for each channel individually. This ensures a clear view of just how effective they really are.

4- Candidates & Onboarding

Every step of the candidate’s journey deserves your attention. The onboarding stage is just as important if not more. Instruct your recruiters to conduct post-interview surveys. Interview candidates after their interviews and get their impressions on the recruitment experience, the application process, the interview, and how they perceive your brand.

5- Important metrics to track

Time to Fill

This is an important metric to track. It helps you measure the number of days it takes from the job opening being published to when an offer is accepted. Tracking this measure can give you a sense of how effective your recruitment team is.

Time to Hire

Time to Hire helps you track how long it takes for your recruitment team to begin the sourcing process and report an offer acceptance.

First-year Attrition

First-year attrition is a metric that helps track your hiring success and its long term effects on your team. Candidates who leave in their first year of work fail to become fully productive and usually cost a lot of money.

Cost per Hire

A relatively popular metric, one that is extremely important. Cost per Hire tracks the average amount of money you spend on each a hire. This metric is also useful when you are creating or tracking your recruiting budget.

Source of Hire

Source of Hire allows you to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of each recruiting channel in your arsenal. This particular metric tracks the percentage of hires entering your pipeline from the different recruiting channels.

Quality of Hire

This is arguably the most difficult recruitment metric to track, as the definition of “quality” can be difficult to pin down depending on the role, the industry, and the company itself. It tracks the value a new hire adds to your organization. Specifically, how much a new hire contributes to your long term success. A good tip to improve your quality of hire would be through reviewing their past industries. Role experience and proven results are all well and good, but industry knowledge is extremely valuable, and a candidate whose affiliation remains consistent with the same industry is more likely to provide calculated insights and effective strategies.  This makes it important to collect data on where your candidate worked before being hired by your company. It’s also a source of extremely valuable information on how to better target future recruiting efforts.

Offer acceptance rates

Understanding the success rate of your offer to acceptance ratio not only showcases the effectiveness of your recruitment team but also the quality of the match between the candidate and the company. The higher your offer to acceptance ratio, the better your recruiting process.

Tracking these metrics and taking actionable steps to improve the recruiting process based on data-driven decisions can catapult a company’s hiring campaigns. This would inevitably lead it down previously undiscovered paths to talent acquisition.

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