The Importance of Measuing KPIs in the Recruiting Industry

Key Performance Indicators can become very important in your recruiting process. KPI’s are the metrics that come from your placement data and reveal insights about your recruiting efforts. On the surface they may just look like a bunch of numbers, however they can show specific metrics determining success or lack thereof.

By comparing these numbers to typical recruitment benchmarks, you can also make sure that you are doing the best job possible! When you’re looking at these numbers within your organization, you can analyze them, report them and be able to gauge how to move forward with your recruiting efforts.

As you continue your recruiting, keep some of these following KPIs handy to help you achieve success:

Time to Hire

This can be a tricky one to tackle right off the bat as a recruiter. It can be really tough to get this one to be at a consistent level. At its core, it matters how many qualified candidates you have sitting in your database or funnel needing a job.

This KPI is the result of the shortlist of candidates you have, the interviews it takes to proceed and then the hiring of the employee. So knowing how long your average recruiting campaign takes can be really beneficial when strategizing your efforts moving forward. This stage also helps you manage the influx of job orders and candidates, and can help you prevent bottlenecks when it comes to certain stages of the recruiting funnel!

In its same nature, this can also have a direct effect on the rate at which you fill candidates in a position with a company.

Qualified Candidates Per Opening

For any job order, best practices are to come up with a shortlist of candidates that meet the standards for a position. The more candidates that apply however, the better the odds are that you are going to find a perfect candidate for that given job order.

The trick is to find a balance between the quality and quantity of it all. You have to make sure that you are not casting too large of a net and wasting time with candidates who are over or under qualified. Using a qualified candidate per opening ratio is a good place to start. With this ratio, you can make sure that you are reaching and getting as close to the same benchmark for job orders each time. Sure, some might go over and some might be under - but this will give you a better understanding of the balance between the quantity and quality.

Typically, the qualified part of this comes into play if they make it further in your interview process than just the screening or the first round. By understanding this metric, you can be sure that your time is well spent and you’re getting candidates through your pipeline.

Source Quality

Pipeline tracking and candidate quality can be difficult at times, especially when you’re run short of candidates or job orders. The best thing to do is to check the channels where your candidates are coming from. Whether they are coming from referrals, certain job boards on the internet or email leads - you’ll want to check the overall average of a few things.

  • Completion Rate: This is the overall average of candidates that have completed stages in the interview process, or even simple tasks such as a pre-screening questionnaire. Knowing this will help you decide whether a candidate source is worth looking into.
  • Hire Rate: Looking into the hire rate from a specific source is going to tell you if viable candidates are coming from there often.
  • Interviews/Placements & Average Interviewed

    This ties into other KPI metrics such as the amount of candidates and qualified candidates you have in the first place. Because if you cast a larger net, most times you are probably going to get more people moving to interview stages.

    However, it can be really telling how many applicants get interviews in the first place. Keeping certain qualifications necessary and setting a standard number of applicants for a position could be a rule to follow to keep your numbers consistent.

    This metric will specifically make sure that you are also staying consistent when it comes to your quality and quantity of candidates in your interview processes.

    Offer Acceptance Rate

    When a candidate reaches the final stages of an interview process, typically the one perfect fit candidate is offered a job. Whether not they accept is another story. As recruiters and candidates proceed through this process, the candidate is also learning about the company, and therefore might not be as interested as they were at the start of the process.

    While not every candidate will accept, nor will everyone deny job offers -- you should note when there are many different job offers being turned down. This could be a big red flag to denote when you’ve done something wrong in your recruiting process.

    Keeping this KPI in mind is a key metric when making sure that you can close out a recruitment campaign. You can get this ratio by dividing the number of offers accepted by the total number of offers extended.

    Average Contacted

    Keeping your stockpile of candidates handy in an applicant tracking system is something that can be hard to keep up. Let alone, contacting the ones that may be viable for a given position. However, this is the only way you are going to make placements in the end.

    Contacting your candidates should be a priority, otherwise nothing will really get done. Having this number stay consistent over time can help you avoid lag in your candidate pipeline and keep placement numbers high as a result.

    Post-Hire Satisfaction

    Whether the employee is happy or the employer, either can reap great benefits for your recruiting in the future. Obviously, you want to make sure that both have a positive outcome in the end, otherwise - the recruitment process could have possibly made it better.

    Having a good interview with a potential employee can leave a lasting impression. This is important in the grand scheme of things when it comes to the candidate wanting to accept a job offer. Sending out a simple survey can help you determine both the strengths and weaknesses of your recruiting and make adjustments for the future.



     

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