Talent Acquisition Metrics – old school vs new school.

Do our old school talent metrics support and measure the right things within our talent acquisition functions, or is it time for a refresh?

Time to hire, cost per hire, hiring manager satisfaction. These metrics have been around for as long as coffee has been tasty (umm…always!)

There has been much written about and discussed in any recruitment blog you see about recruitment metrics and how recruitment is measured within a commercial context. The tough thing about measuring recruitment is measuring ROI (return on investment) doesn’t always align to our candidate first mentality we claim to have. Let me explain and run through a few old the classics and look at them reimagined!

Time to hire – what does this really measure? It measures how quickly we can get someone in a seat, and yes that has positive impact in terms of minimising business impact and operational down time. But think about it – if your time to fill is day 30 days is this good or bad relative to what? What does this tell us about the process itself? What if 12 of those 30 days is made up of waiting for contracts or screening? Is that efficient or inefficient?

Now measuring time to fill is all well and good for the business, but what does this mean for the candidate experience and the recruiter? Well, it can mean that they won’t experience a lengthy, drawn out recruitment experience (well except for those that still insist on having a 7 stage interview process – yes this really does still exist!) and it can mean speed in converting candidates in a hot market. But what if this metric starts to negatively impact the candidate? If a recruiter is rushing to hit a metric, what will they need to compromise in their process to fill the role fast?

What if we changed the focus to time in process which measures velocity and efficiency within process rather than looking at the whole end to end process as a continuum? What will that tell the business? How about if we measured our efficiency in taking candidates through each stage of the process?

We all know the recruitment process by and large can be thought of as a funnel. You start at the top with all the candidates that come via different channels, internal/external, job board, referral, directly sourced etc. the. You progress through the funnel refining the candidates through screening, then interviewing before offer and hire.

Conversion ratios are my all time favourite measure for recruitment (and sourcing!) and measuring conversion ratios through the funnel is a great way of measuring speed and efficiency together. Let’s break this down:

Say we want to measure the effectiveness through the screening and interview stages of the funnel you would look at how many candidates you had to screen, and how many got selected for an interview. For example 30 candidates screened and 10 interviewed – 30/10 x 100 = 33.33 so your interview conversion is 33%. Now you can set metrics to support what you ideally want that ratio to be.

This is also the time to consider the tools and technology currently supporting the process and if they are supporting or hindering the function. If you can, this could be where you review and explore things like AI or other tools to support screening. Commercially it is all about minimising wastage, and maximising efficiency and productivity.

Similarly if you want to measure efficiency in the number of applications you receive to the number you actual screen. Say if you received 200 applications but only screened 50 then your ratio would be 50/200 x 100 = 25%. Again, you can then look at how to optimise this conversion ratio through channel use and advertising efficiencies.

By analysing the funnel you get a better idea about where the slack or wastage is and help to steer and guide based on that data.

Old metric = time to fill. New metric = recruitment velocity and optimised conversion ratios.

Cost per hire is one of the more commercially driven metrics that tend to make logical sense. Some recruitment models are set up as a charge back to the business based on trended hiring demand which liquidates all recruitment related costs at a fixed cost. Some are an overhead and absorbed by the business, meaning they don’t recoup their cost, rather minimising recruitment costs overall to reduce total cost to the business.

Recruitment costs mean everything from human capital costs to operating costs such as IT, advertising. As a sourcing leader I would pay particular attention to channel effectiveness and channel ROI. Are the channels we are using, effective, optimal and efficient. Based on the number of applications received to the number that are hired per channel can tell a TA function, if where they are recruiting is working.

Evaluate things like LinkedIn recruiter allocations and the return on investment here. How many candidates are you reaching out to, what is your engagement %, are you making hires? If it isn’t working, look to invest that spend elsewhere that will. Same as job boards. Not every role needs to be, or quite frankly should be on a job board. Look at your data. How many candidates are you receiving, how many are your screening, interviewing etc. look at the data and see what makes sense. If you have to screen loads of noise and are only getting a few candidates that qualify for an interview, then this is costing you the cost of the channel itself, but also your time. Change it! Use the conversion ratio model as mentioned above and do some channel analysis – you will quickly learn what channels have the highest ROI.

Old metric = cost per hire. New metric = cost per source.

Successful NPS is a newer metric which measures how a candidate feels about your recruitment process and if they are likely to act as a promoter or a detractor within the market based on that experience. Now I love this metric – it’s candidate aligned, and measures what the candidate’s experience was based on how they felt, but why do we just ask the candidates that are successful? I mean they got the job, obviously they felt ok if they said yes. Now this doesn’t always mean the process was great and it’s important to ask for that feedback and measure it, but…. what if there was a more insightful metric that still measures candidate experience.

What about unsuccessful candidate NPS? Woah… you mean we will ask candidates that didn’t get the job about their recruitment experience? Absolutely! Let’s ask the candidates that didn’t get the job how we made them feel throughout the process. Did we contact them within a reasonable timeframe? How was the interview process? and here’s the big one…did we provide them with constructive, timely feedback? If we say we are here for the candidates, then let’s ask all of them how we did?

Now we all know about employee advocacy, but was about prospect talent advocacy? Isn’t that just as powerful, if not more so than those people that already work for you? What would those unsuccessful candidates say about you in the market based on their experience? Taking this further, how does the recruitment experience then impact their customer perception of your brand? We all know that recruitment experience = customer experience, so why don’t we measure it that way?

Old metric = successful NPS – new metric = overall NPS (successful and unsuccessful)

Now this is just the start, there are many many other metrics that can be used for recruitment, next I want to cover how to metricise your sourcing function as measuring output and ROI for a proactive function is tough and it’s harder to produce meaningful insights to the business with something that is a more longer team play than short term reward.

Leave your comments below – if you had the ability to design your own metrics, what would they be and which ones do you hate?

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J. Xx