When it comes to setting goals and making decisions for your business, it pays to be informed by data. Just as with other aspects of your business, understanding your recruitment metrics is key to a successful hiring process.

Measuring the right things allows you to set realistic hiring goals and make data-driven decisions. But with so many potential metrics to consider, how do you know which ones to prioritise?

The answer is, of course, that this very much depends on your organisation and its overall business goals. That being said, here is a rundown of our nine essential recruitment metrics that you should track. 

Nine of the most important recruitment metrics you should track

1. Time-to-offer

Time-to-offer is the number of calendar days between first advertising your job role to finally offering a candidate the position. Alternatively, you might want to measure time-to-hire, the length of time between a prospect submitting an application and offering them the job. 

Both are good metrics to understand the efficiency of your recruitment pipeline. This is incredibly important in the current jobseeker’s market as 76% of people say that not hearing back from an employer after submitting a job application is more frustrating than not hearing back from someone after a first date.

To improve your time-to-offer, map out your recruitment pipeline and measure how long each stage took for your past few new starts. Are there stages that could be simplified or skipped? Are there any bottlenecks that need to be examined? 

2. Cost-per-hire

As with most business activities, there are costs associated with hiring new employees. For example, paid ads to promote your job vacancy and the cost of your HR Manager’s time as they sort through applications, get back to candidates and conduct interviews. Or, if you choose to outsource to a recruitment agency, this will save you a lot of time and hassle but also incurs a cost. 

The standard formula for working out your cost per hire is calculating the internal and external recruitment costs divided by the number of new hires that year. 

It can be difficult to quantify your internal and external recruitment costs, especially when it comes to working out how much of your team’s time was spent on recruitment activities. 

Examples of other recruitment costs include: 

  • Compliance costs – ensuring all documents are processed correctly for legal compliance
  • Administrative costs – such as office equipment or expenses like accommodation, travel and food if your hiring manager has had to travel for interviews
  • Background checks – if you carry out any checks to ensure an employee is fit for hire, these often come with a cost

It’s essential to understand your cost-per-hire to know if it makes more sense to work with an external agency in the future or to be aware of areas where you can reduce business costs. 

3. Candidate experience

This is arguably one of the most important of all recruitment metrics. It’s been reported that the number of employees leaving new roles in the first 90 days is as high as 30%, so ensuring good candidate satisfaction is vital

This can be harder to measure as it’s more subjective than other metrics. Still, by surveying candidates during and after the hiring process about areas such as quality of communication, clarity of information and other areas, you will learn if there are any significant issues in your process. 

Improving the candidate experience will help reduce your attrition rate because employees will feel welcomed and clearly understand their roles.

4. Applicants per opening

This is the number of people who’ve applied for your job vacancy across channels. It’s an important metric as it allows you to gauge the overall popularity of your job role and the effectiveness of your adverts. 

If you find that you’re overwhelmed with applications but no suitable candidates, you need to revisit the information in your job description. Equally, if you’re barely getting any interest in a vacancy, you can look further to understand whether this is an issue with your particular role or reflective of the sector in general. 

5. Application completion rate

This is the number of candidates who start an application versus those who complete the application process. If you use online application systems and you can see that significantly more people start the application than the number of completed applications you’ve received, you’ll understand that there is a problem with the efficiency or experience of your application process.

To better understand the problem, identify the points where most candidates drop out and test out the process for yourself. Does it require applicants to manually enter their entire CV rather than simply uploading a PDF, for example?

Improving this metric will improve your candidate experience and prevent you from missing out on top-quality candidates. 

6. Candidate Diversity

Candidate diversity is another vitally important metric to pay attention to. Diversity of experience, thought, and background is key to a creative and well-balanced company, so if you’re attracting many of the same types of people, then you have a problem. 

When it comes to diversity metrics, look at the diversity of applicants, the diversity of the hiring panel, and the diversity of candidates hired. This can help you understand if there might be any hidden biases throughout the application or if your job advert is perhaps not as accessible and inclusive as it needs to be. 

To improve this metric, you can use software in the hiring process that helps to reduce bias. You can also research how people perceive your employer brand and work with diversity and inclusion consultants to improve this. 

7. Attrition rate

This refers to the rate at which employees leave your organisation. Hiring managers might also be particularly interested in first-year attrition rates, the rate at which new hires leave in the first year. 

While attrition itself isn’t strictly a recruitment metric, hiring new employees can be costly. So it’s important to understand why attrition might be high by conducting effective exit interviews and listening to your employees’ reasons for leaving to improve on any areas of concern. 

8. Offer acceptance rate

This indicates the number of job offers that candidates accept compared to the number of offers given. This metric should be high. A good benchmark is around the 90% mark because this indicates that your hiring process has been consistent and efficient and your team has met the candidate’s expectations throughout. 

A low offer acceptance rate is a sign of a mismatch in expectations and candidate experience in your recruitment process. Candidates may be put off by lengthy, bureaucratic interview processes, or feel a misalignment of values after talking to your hiring panel. 

It’s a good idea to speak to candidates who have rejected job offers to understand their reasons for not continuing with the application.  

9. Source of hire 

Source of hire refers to the channels where you advertise jobs and attract candidates, for example, job boards, your own website, or social media. 

When looking at this metric, if you see that most of your candidates come from the same channel, this could mean that you have an issue with your diversity metric, or it could show an opportunity to reduce your cost-per-hire by reducing channels.

Looking at this metric alongside other recruitment metrics will give you a better understanding of your hiring process as a whole. 

Ready to bring technology to your recruitment process?

At crooton, we believe that technology and data are essential tools in the recruitment process. That’s why we offer our unique employer fencing technology to help you target your job adverts based on location. You can also learn more about using data and technology to streamline your hiring on the crooton blog.

For help tracking all the essential recruitment metrics, get in touch with the crooton team, we can’t wait to hear from you!