Turning Recruitment Metrics into Meaningful Business Success Indicators

The internet is full of great resources if you want to review your recruitment metrics. There are 51 suggestions on this list and a comprehensive 83 ideas here.

But despite the abundance of information, turning recruitment metrics into meaningful business success indicators is the third biggest concern for Oasis HR’s Think Tank’s members. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the choice of metrics, never mind sort through multiple data sources!

At Hollaroo we’ve spent a lot of time configuring meaningful metrics for our platform. Here I’d like to share some of our top value-adding metrics and offer some ideas for making sure they translate into business success indicators rather than being confined to the realm of the recruitment team.

I’m not going to talk about time to hire, cost to hire, source of hire here. These are the 101 of hiring metrics but we know from our work that recruiters care more about what happens before and after the actual hiring takes place.

So, what else can you be measuring?

1. Return on engagement. Why? ROE is “the overall brand strength gained from a particular brand action, strategy, or product”. In our case, it’s the strength of our clients’ talent brands within their target audience. Are we able to demonstrate with whom we generated influence? Generated a positive reaction?
2. Candidate experience. Why? 78% of candidates say the overall candidate experience they get is an indicator of how a company values its people and 80–90% say a positive or negative candidate experience can change their minds about a role or company according to Career Builder.
3. Recruitment funnel effectiveness. Why? The recruitment is a funnel which begins with an initial engagement and finishes with successful onboarding. By measuring the effectiveness of all the different steps in the funnel, you can specify a yield ratio per step.
4. Offer acceptance rate. Why? A low rate is indicative of potential problems. If you’ve successfully engaged with, nurtured and created interest and excitement with good-fit candidates it’s important not to fall at the final hurdle!
5. Renege rate. Why? This has a serious financial impact on the business. Candidates are invested enough in your brand to make the commitment to joining. But they’re not on-boarded. This is where recruitment metrics need to have an external as well as internal lens.

And now, make sure they’re business-relevant

1. Start with why: Select metrics based on a hypothesis. What do you need to find out? What do you think is happening in terms of renege rates or drop-outs? Ask yourself a question to prevent data overload.
2. The data has got to be credible: Senior leaders will find reasons to doubt credibility. Use data that you trust and remember suppliers often have better data analytics than their clients, especially tech providers – it’s our job!
3. They’ve got to be future-focussed: The most powerful metrics are relevant to strategic business objectives as well as talent strategy and day-to-day recruitment. They inform the future – what’s likely to happen next? What should we do?
4. Not all metrics are %s: But they can be quantified. Think of perceptions, reviews, feedback. Consider all types of data to answer your question and use tech to quantify them.
5. Recruitment isn’t standalone: Josh Bersin talks about recruitment metrics as part of broader talent analytics. Recruitment analytics extend well before and after the actual activity of ‘recruitment’.

In our own context

Based on what we’re trying to achieve at Hollaroo, our analytics centre around return on engagement, the re-hiring of alumni, the success of referrals, organisational knowledge retention, diversity of hiring, and the conversion of engagement into applications and hires.

There are plenty more! but these few demonstrate the direct relationship between meaningful business success indicators and our purpose as an organisation.