There’s no question that recruitment metrics are important. By tracking key recruitment metrics, you can gain valuable insights into your recruitment process and make data-driven decisions about improving it. In this blog, Broadbean discusses the ten best recruitment metrics you need to track, explaining why each is important and providing tips on measuring them.

What Are Recruitment Metrics?

Recruitment metrics or ‘HR metrics’ are performance indicators that help recruiters and employers to track, manage and optimise the effectiveness of their recruitment and hiring process. By tracking important recruiting metrics, you can gain valuable insights into where your recruitment processes are succeeding and pinpoint areas for improvement. Recruiting metrics are integral to any successful data-driven hiring and recruitment process.

Why Track Recruitment Metrics?

In the face of time and budget constraints, recruiters and direct employers are under pressure to make the correct hiring decisions. Ultimately, every hire must add value to a business and drive ROI. This is where key recruitment metrics are pivotal in determining how successful hiring decisions have been based on the lifetime value of a hire during their tenure. Armed with the data, recruiters and HR teams can refine their processes accordingly.

Here are several more standout reasons why recruitment metrics are important:

They highlight where best to allocate time and budget.
They help to identify strengths and weaknesses in the recruitment process.
They help to benchmark recruitment performance against competitors.
They help to track progress and measure the impact of changes to the recruitment process.

10 Recruitment Metrics To Track

Time to Fill
Time to Hire
Diversity of Candidates
Quality of Hire
Source of Hire
Applicants per Opening
Attrition Rate
Offer Acceptance Rate
Cost per Hire
Candidate Experience

1. Time To Fill

Time to fill measures the time it takes to fill a vacant position. This metric is often measured according to the number of days elapsed from when the job requisition is approved and the candidate’s acceptance of the job offer. Time to fill is a useful KPI for business planning and is one of the best recruiting metrics for measuring the effectiveness of your recruitment process, given that it illustrates the length of time it takes to fill a role with quality hires.

2. Time To Hire

Time to hire or ‘time to accept’ is a measurement of how quickly a candidate moves through the recruitment process from the point of application or approach to accepting the job offer. This metric is an excellent indicator of how your recruitment team and systems perform, highlighting any bottlenecks in the process. Typically, a shorter time to hire helps to secure the best talent and delivers a better candidate experience.

3. Diversity Of Candidates

Diversity of candidates measures the percentage of applicants from underrepresented groups. Diversity recruitment from a broad talent pool has been shown to improve organizational performance, increase innovation and boost profits. So aim to measure the diversity of hires across all levels, from frontline staff to senior management, to ensure you’re building mixed teams representing a broad spectrum of demographics.

4. Quality Of Hire

Quality of hire is a measure of a new hire’s first-year performance. This is an important metric because a lackluster first year indicates a poor hire that could cost the organization directly and indirectly. Quality of hire data is also useful for determining the success ratio, which is the number of high-performing candidates hired divided by the total number of candidates hired. A low success ratio is a clear sign that your processes need addressing.

5. Source Of Hire

Source of hire measures the percentage of new hires sourced from various recruitment channels. For example, these can include everything from job boards and recruiters to social media and referrals. This recruitment metric tells you which channels work effectively and deserve more budget and resources. It also highlights which are less efficient and require less emphasis or dropping from your mix.

6. Applicants Per Opening

Applicants per opening measures the number of applications received for each open position. This KPI can either demonstrate the level of demand for a specific role or that a description is too broad. The insights from this metric enable recruiters and HR teams to narrow job descriptions, which can save a great deal of time and budget – particularly at the screening stage.

7. Attrition Rate

Attrition rate measures the percentage of new hires who leave the company within a certain period. A useful variation on this metric is first-year attrition, which monitors first-year leavers and is a helpful indicator of hiring success. Replacing talent is costly, both in recruitment and onboarding costs and resources, at any stage. This KPI can help you to better understand whether postings and job descriptions accurately portray job roles.

8. Offer Acceptance Rate

Offer acceptance rate measures the percentage of job offers that candidates accept. This metric illustrates how attractive and competitive your job offers are to prospective candidates. Conversely, a low offer acceptance rate indicates your offers are not competitive enough. Potential solutions to a low score are to list the remuneration package in job postings or to discuss the candidate’s salary expectations at the interview stage.

9. Cost Per Hire

Cost per hire measures the total cost of recruiting a new employee divided by the number of new hires. Gaining a clear insight into the cost of hiring new recruits can be crucial for determining recruitment budgets. The cost per hire requires all internal and external costs to be tallied, including advertising, admin, background checks, recruiters, marketing, candidate expenses, training and development, and any other associated costs.

10. Candidate Experience

Candidate experience measures job seekers’ perception of a company’s recruitment and onboarding processes. This is generally collated using a candidate experience survey based on a Net Promoter Score that identifies how accurately the job seeker’s experience correlates with their expectations. For example, a low candidate experience score could indicate inaccurate job descriptions or misleading communication.

Evolve Your Recruitment Strategy

By tracking these ten recruitment metrics examples, you can gain valuable insights into your recruitment processes and make necessary improvements to increase their efficiency and effectiveness. Broadbean offers an extensive product suite of solutions that help agency recruiters and direct employers to collate, aggregate and manage all the most important HR benchmarking metrics. Get the data and insights you need to optimize your recruitment strategy with the world’s number one talent attraction platform from Broadbean.

For more information about our data-driven recruitment solutions and to access the HR metrics that matter, please get in touch with the Broadbean team. Contact us today at 949-706-8560 or email [email protected].