Your leadership teams needs to understand the value of your hiring process—How effective is it? How efficient is it? How are you constantly trying to improve it? Analytics can provide the data you need to make decisions about your hiring process, demonstrate how your department can deliver business benefits and help justify future hiring and recruiting budgets.
But before you dive into an analytics project, take a step back to develop the right metrics for your organization. There’s no “one size fits all” suite of metrics that will work well for every company, but here are a few tips for developing hiring analytics that matter:
Focus on Hiring Efficiency and Effectiveness
Consider creating a portfolio of metrics that focus on both hiring efficiency and effectiveness. Researchers at Cornell’s Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies make the distinction between the two:
• Efficiency metrics provide insights into factors that affect the speed of hiring processes.
• Effectiveness metrics relate to the quality or cost effectiveness of recruiting activities.
Based on their unique needs and strategies, you may want to develop a suite of hiring analytics that blend both efficiency and effectiveness measures. Examples of efficiency metrics include recruiter workload, time to source and time to fill. Effectiveness metrics include cost per hire, source of hire and new hire productivity.
Decide Which Metrics Will Provide the Most Value
There are many analytics you can use. Some of the most popular include:
• Time to fill. This metric quantifies how long it takes to fill different positions. You may want to break down time to fill into different analytics that highlight different phases of the recruiting cycle. Examples recommended by Cornell include time until the screened candidate pool is returned to the hiring manager, time until offer is made to the selected applicant and time until the candidate begins work.
Measuring time to fill and comparing it to industry averages can be helpful. SHRM found companies that hire faster than others in their industry often have a competitive edge. When applications linger untouched for days, strong candidates may be hired by competitors who are more efficient.
• Cost per hire. The cost associated with hiring depends on factors such as the cost of online job postings or agency fees. The expense associated with recruiting depends on the type of position that needs to be filled, the industry and the geographic area where the company is located. Cost per hire is an important metric for HR teams according to SHRM because it creates a “direct line of sight” between recruitment performance and bottom-line cost savings for organizations.
• Time to start. This metric quantifies the number of calendar days from the time a requisition is approved to the first day an employee starts on the job. Experts believe time to start is a good way to evaluate a firm’s onboarding process.
• Source of hire. There are two ways organizations may want to quantify source of hire. One is by the number of candidates that originate from different job boards and other recruiting sources. A second is by the cost per source.
Equip Your Team with the Right Tools to Measure Performance
Analytics can be a powerful tool, but gathering the data and calculating them manually can be time consuming. An easier approach is to implement an applicant tracking system that captures all aspects of the recruiting process and automatically calculates key analytics. Once the recruiting team has been empowered with the tools needed to generate analytics, it’s essential to monitor performance and look for trends. A good practice is to hold monthly or quarterly recruiting performance reviews. These meetings are a good forum for evaluating recruiting analytics and identifying where additional work may be needed to improve processes.
Hiring analytics can be a great way to streamline recruiting, contribute to the organization’s bottom line and increase your competitiveness. The keys to success include developing a customized portfolio of metrics, arming the recruiting team with the right tools and then measuring performance over time.
Hyrell’s online hiring system lets you access the real-time analytics you need to make critical hiring and recruiting decisions. For example, you can measure job position analytics to find out which positions get the most applicant traffic, calculate time to hire and more.
