Recruiting metrics are a critical part of a business’ hiring strategy. These metrics offer a tangible way for companies to evaluate the effectiveness and health of their hiring process.
With the right mix of recruiting metrics, businesses can efficiently determine what is working and what isn’t. This mix helps hiring managers understand where they need to focus and allocate their resources. However, the number of recruiting metrics and data points available for recruiters to choose from can quickly become overwhelming.
This post will highlight the top fifteen recruiting metrics that hiring managers should track to ensure maximum efficiency during and post-hiring.
What are recruiting metrics? What is meant by recruitment metrics?
Recruiting metrics are measurements used to evaluate the effectiveness of your hiring process and gauge the quality of recruits.
These metrics are crucial for hiring managers to make data-driven decisions and optimize their recruiting initiatives.
A recruitment process lifestyle includes planning, sourcing, screening, interviewing, recruiting, onboarding, and retaining engineers. The applicant management system (ATS) or the human resources management system (HRMS), an integrated suite of software tools, helps process and organize information about the recruitment life cycle.
Let’s look at the fifteen recruiting metrics hiring managers should be tracking.
Fifteen recruiting metrics that directly impact your hiring process
Time to Hire
Time to hire is one of the most crucial and frequently used recruiting metrics. This metric measures how quickly and efficiently an organization can source and hire candidates. Time to hire measures how quickly your recruitment strategy takes to fill a vacant position. It generally reflects the number of days between a software developer applying for a role and the same developer accepting the job offer.
This recruiting metric provides insight into two aspects of the hiring process:
Recruiting efficiency. It shows how fast the HR team processes, assesses, interviews, and gets the candidate to accept the job offer. If the time to hire is long, it shows that the company’s current recruiting process is slow and inefficient.
Candidate experience. A low time to hire provides the candidates with a better experience. Any candidate would prefer a company that takes two weeks rather than two months to hire a developer.
Source of Hire
Source of hire gives companies information about what percentage of their new employees have entered their hiring pipeline through each recruitment channel or source they use. These sources could be job boards, websites, direct sourcing, or referrals.
The source of hire (SOH) recruiting metric helps businesses distribute their resources along the most effective recruiting channels at a base level.
Based on the type of ATS that a company uses, the system should automatically track the application source through which a candidate entered the company’s pipeline.
This data plays a huge role in helping businesses strategize the allocation of their recruiting budget and resources more effectively.
Here are a few ways source-of-hire recruiting metric helps companies:
– They can pinpoint exactly where they can reduce expenses. – What are the most valuable recruitment platforms or agencies to direct more resources? – How to best allocate their advertising budget? – The efficiency of their hiring team.
Businesses can also break down this recruiting metric based on team and job roles to understand their hiring process betters.
Cost per Hire
Cost per hire is a crucial recruiting metric for businesses. It measures the total cost of hiring to fill a vacant position. This number includes all the expenses associated with filling an open job role, for example — recruitment event expenses, equipment, administrative costs, advertising costs, recruitment software platform subscription fees, relocation costs, and more.
This metric can apply to internal promotions or transfers within the company and external hires recruited from outside the company.
Application Completion Rate
The application completion rate metric is vital for businesses with a complicated online recruitment system.
Several organizations require candidates to manually enter a lot of information before applying for a job. This step leads to most developers dropping out of the application process due to an excessively long application process, inconsistency of the web browser with the application system, or an interface that isn’t user-friendly.
By definition, the application completion rate compares the number of candidates that started filling out an application and the number of candidates that submitted their application.
Based on the number of candidate interactions, this recruiting metric helps evaluate how successful your application platform and method are.
Applicants per Opening
Applicants per hire, also known as applicants per opening, is the number of candidates who have applied to a role. This metric indicates a job’s popularity in the labor market. A high number of applicants could indicate a high demand for jobs in that particular domain. On the other hand, a high number could also mean that the job description for that position was too generic or broad.
Remember, the number of applicants per opening does not indicate the number of qualified candidates. While this may seem like a straightforward metric, it’s important to consider why you are measuring it and what the results mean. The number of people who apply for a job is an indicator of your recruitment marketing efforts.
Qualified Candidates per Hire
Qualified candidates per hire is a recruiting metric that measures the number of applicants who qualify past the first stage of your recruitment process.
Depending on the process, this metric can be defined as the number of people who make it past the first step (screening stage) and are asked to appear for an interview.
You can calculate this metric by dividing the number of qualified applicants by the number of people who originally applied for the position.
Diversity
Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace has been an important goal for companies worldwide in the past few years. Many resources get directed towards improving the gender and diversity mix.
According to a report by McKinsey & Company, over $8 billion is spent every year on diversity training in the US alone. Candidates are proactively looking for businesses that focus on DE&I in the workplace. Companies that focus on diversity and inclusivity have also seen a significant increase in their profitability, productivity, and level of innovation compared to their competitors, who don’t have any DE&I goals.
The diversity and inclusion metric helps keep unconscious hiring bias in check. The simplest way to measure diversity in your hiring process is to take the total number of developers you’ve hired and divide it by your DE&I goals.
Offer Acceptance Rate
By definition, the offer acceptance rate reflects the percentage of candidates who have accepted your job offer.
The higher the offer acceptance rate, the better the candidate’s hiring experience since this number directly reflects the attractiveness of your job offer.
A lower offer acceptance rate decreases the company’s chances of recruiting skilled candidates. A lower rate also implies that your job offer isn’t competitive enough to attract the right developers.
To calculate your company’s acceptance rate, take the number of developers who have accepted your offer and divide it by the number of developers you’ve made the offer to within the specific period.
Selection Ratio
The selection ratio, also known as the Submittals to Hire ratio, compares the number of hired candidates to the total number of candidates who had applied for the job.
The selection ratio provides insights into the value of assessment and recruitment tools. What’s more, this ratio can also provide an estimate of the utility of a recruitment system.
First-Year Attrition Rate
The first-year attrition rate is a highly straightforward recruiting metric that helps businesses identify the percentage of developers who voluntarily leave the company within the first year.
Many companies spend a significant amount of resources sourcing and hiring candidates; however, having a full-proof retention strategy is as important as finding and hiring skilled developers. A high retention rate boosts the team’s morale and helps reduce the cost of recruitment.
If your company’s first-year attrition rate is high, it could mean that your job description doesn’t match the actual job responsibilities at the time of hiring. On the other hand, a high attrition rate could also mean that the company doesn’t have an effective onboarding process or needs to optimize its strategy to retain remote developers.
Hiring Manager Satisfaction
Hiring manager satisfaction is a crucial metric that reflects the success of the recruiting process. Companies must calculate this metric because hiring managers are heavily involved in the hiring process.
Most importantly, when the hiring manager is satisfied with the new hire, they are likely to perform and gel well in the team. Simply, such a candidate is more likely to be a successful hire.
Candidate Job Satisfaction
Candidate satisfaction measures how a candidate views your hiring journey. Candidate job satisfaction helps track whether the expectations set during the recruiting procedure match the actual process. A low candidate-job satisfaction reflects mismanagement of candidate expectations.
Candidate Net Promoter Score
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) gauges consumer satisfaction. However, this metric can also determine the satisfaction of candidates.
The Candidate Net Promoter Score measures how candidates liked or didn’t like their experience with your hiring process, how they felt the company treated them, and what they’ll tell others about their overall experience with the company. Simply put, NPS denotes how your candidates rate their experience with your company.
Percentage of Open Positions
The percentage of open positions refers to the number of open positions for a department vs. the total number of open positions at the organization. A high percentage of open positions in a department denotes that those positions are in high demand. A high percent of open positions may also reflect that there’s a low supply of workers in the market for those positions.
And thus, this metric can help hiring managers analyze the labor market and devise hiring strategies accordingly.
Sourcing Channel Cost
This metric determines the cost efficiency of different sourcing channels. Hiring managers can calculate the sourcing channel cost by dividing the amount spent on ads on every platform by the number of candidates who applied through the job opening on that platform.
Recruiting metrics are a crucial part of the hiring process.
With the global software engineering talent shortage impacting businesses worldwide, a highly functioning recruiting process is crucial. With the aforementioned recruiting metrics, hiring managers can consistently optimize their recruitment process to deliver skilled developers.
If you’re looking for a better way to source and hire remote software developers than job boards and social media platforms, Turing can help you.
Turing is a deep jobs platform that enables companies to recruit skilled senior remote developers. You can take advantage of Turing’s tried-and-tested vetting process to have your pick of qualified remote software developers.
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15 Recruiting Metrics All Hiring Managers Must Track
Description
What are recruiting metrics? Why should you track them? This post shares 15 metrics that hiring managers can track for maximum efficiency during & post-hiring.
Jaya is a copywriter & content writer & has worked for businesses in over 27 different niches. When she’s not writing, she can be found obsessing over a book.
