Ever wonder about the average time it takes to fill an open position in your company? Or, how many of your interviews lead to hires? These are essential questions to answer if you aim to fine tune your recruitment process and ensure that the HR department functions as proficiently as possible. This is where tracking hiring metrics can help.

But what are recruitment metrics? And should you track every single one? 

This blog provides an easy-to-understand definition of recruiting metrics and a list of 20 important recruitment metrics that HR professionals need to know.

What are Recruitment Metrics?

Recruitment metrics are key data points that help organizations track the impact and ROI of their hiring processes. These metrics are crucial to curate data-driven HCM strategies and help you evaluate the quality of your recruits, along with other vital measures of success.

Who should be tracking recruiting metrics?

Recruiters or HR managers are usually in charge of tracking recruitment metrics. The executives can monitor the metrics for their respective departments and functions if your company does not have a dedicated hiring team. You can also leverage hiring software like an HRIS or a CRM to auto-generate reports for certain parts of your recruitment process. 

How do I calculate recruiting metrics?

When calculating recruitment metrics, make sure you keep the following in mind: 

• Establish what to measure: Some metrics may be essential to your company, such as quality of hire, while tracking others may be unproductive. Taking a business-outcomes-first approach will likely reveal to your C-levels that recruiting has one of the highest business impacts in the organization, let alone in HR. And once executives know that impact, you’ve got a louder voice in the room. 

  
  

• Don’t fixate on the past:  This is a trap that’s easy to fall into with reporting. Instead, use historical data to predict the future. 

  
  

• The best comparisons are internal: regardless of whom you’re reporting to, include the percentage of improvement over the last quarter/year, comparison to the best quarter ever, or to performance in other business units where possible. 

  
  

• Figure out the why:  Find out why something happened or is happening, rather than only on hat happened. If you see a drop in quality of hire, find ways to improve it. Your data is only as good as it is actionable. 

  
  

• Decide how to gather the data: The easiest method is using spreadsheets and entering data manually. But then, this method will be inefficient and overwhelming if you’re working with large datasets. If you want to simplify things, it’s best to utilize analytics software or your ATS to store and report data automatically. You can also import information from these systems to spreadsheets whenever required.

  
  

• Identify the right timelines: Look for the formulas and choose a time frame needed to calculate the different metrics. For example, you may calculate new hire retention rates yearly but decide to track your source of hire quarterly.

How do you set recruiting benchmarks?

Everyone has a different perception of recruitment goals. For instance, your recruiting team might be anxious about hiring C-suite applicants, but another team may be concerned about recruiting more junior associates. Hence, it’s imperative to comprehend your recruiting goals before setting benchmarks.

Recruiting benchmarks can range from increasing the offer acceptance rates to reducing the cost of hire and more. When setting the benchmarks you want to measure against, don’t forget to look at the past performance of your hiring team. You can also ask questions like,

• Have we met our hiring goals compared to other quarters?

• Did we reduce the time and costs associated with recruiting?

• Has our attrition rate of new hires increased or decreased?

• How effective are our sourcing channels?

• Have we noticed any changes in offer acceptance rates?

This list of questions isn’t thorough, but understanding past performance can help you plan and manage future improvement. It also gives you the insights you require to determine which recruiting metrics you should emphasize.

20 Important Recruitment Metrics You Must Track

Now is the time to implement your learnings. That said, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to measure all of the available talent acquisition metrics. However, it’s a good idea to evaluate which ones will make the most significant impact on your recruitment process.

1. Time to fill

One of the most vital recruiter productivity metrics is time to fill, which describes the timeframe between when your hiring process begins and when a candidate gets and accepts your offer. 70% of job seekers lose interest in a job if they don’t hear back just one week after an interview. Make sure your time to fill is as low as possible since it’s a win-win for the company and candidates alike.

It is super easy to calculate too. You just need to add the number of days from the 'beginning’ of recruiting to the ‘end’ of the process.

Time to fill = the number of days job positions are open/total number of open positions

2. Selection time/Time to hire

The “time to hire” is the timeframe between an applicant applying for a specific role and accepting the job offer. You can speed up your time-to-hire metric by having a simple application process, using skill assessments, and investing in applicant tracking software (ATS).

The average time to hire depends on the industry and can range anywhere between 14 days to 60 days. It also depends upon the seniority of the role, i.e. it will take a longer time to hire a CTO when compared to hiring an SDE 1. 

Time to hire = the number of days from the time the job is posted to the first day on the job

You can either calculate the time to hire for a single position or average it across multiple hires.

There are various stages in a standard hiring process which include:

• Application,

• Screening,

• Interview,

• Assessment,

• Reference check,

• Final offer, contract, and negotiations

Once you are able to decipher how much time the applicants generally spend in each of the different stages, you'll realize which areas of the process need improvement. For e.g., if the interview stage is taking a long time due to scheduling issues, you can always look at organizing video interviews or other suitable means to improve efficiency.

3. Source of hire

Source of hire (SoH) tells you about the breakdown of the channels the candidates used to discover you. It is one of the best talent acquisition metrics for assessing applicant outreach.

You may broadcast new job openings through various channels, such as job boards, direct sourcing, and social media platforms, but employee referrals have always been the main source of hire.

4. First-year attrition

65% of employees in their current position believe they can find a better job elsewhere. You shouldn’t ignore the first year of attrition when it comes to recruitment reporting metrics, as employees who quit their jobs within their first year can be costly. So, to keep hold of high-quality talent, you need to up your game.

You can experiment with a few strategies if you wish to improve your first-year attrition rate. For e.g., to begin with, you can ensure that you are taking the proper steps to hire a suitable candidate for every role. Another tip is to avoid overselling the position so your candidate pool focuses on quality, not quantity.

5. Quality of hire

Hiring the right candidate can be tough. One of the most important recruiting metrics for predicting a candidate’s job performance is the quality of hire because a bad hire can cost your company about $240,000. 

To calculate this metric, you need to evaluate new employees. You can measure their success over their first year to understand their overall quality. Here are a few methods recruiters can use to measure the quality of hire:

• Performance Reviews

• Hiring manager satisfaction

• Turnover and Retention Tate

One way to boost quality of hire is to prioritize hiring that matches specific business goals. For instance, if your goal is to improve revenue, focus your efforts on hiring candidates for revenue-generating roles.

6. Interview-to-hire

One of the most insightful recruitment efficiency metrics, Interview-to-hire focuses on the number of interviews you conduct turn into hires.

To calculate this metric, you must compare the number of interviews conducted to the number of hires made, and this doesn’t include rejected job offers.

For e.g., if you conduct 20 interviews and hire one person, your interview-to-hire ratio is 20:1, which can be expressed as a whole number. In this case, it would be 20. 

7. Hiring manager satisfaction

It is also essential to consider a corporate recruiting metric known as hiring manager satisfaction. It indicates how successful the recruiting process was and helps recruiters recognize probable pitfalls. To understand this, ensure you get the answers to the following questions:

• Does the new hire fit the culture?

• Are they producing the work and creating the impact the HM hoped they would? 

• Are new employees happy in their roles and with their teams?

• Does their experience match the expectations set by your job description and conversations with your team? 

You can get these answers through surveys, direct inquiries, or by using a 1-10 satisfaction score similar to a net promoter score. If hiring managers aren’t satisfied, it doesn’t matter how good your other metrics are—because they won’t hold up over the long term.

8. Candidate job satisfaction

Job dissatisfaction is now at an all-time high. According to CNBC, 60% of employees reported being emotionally detached at work and 19% as being miserable. 

Retaining a dissatisfied new employee is definitely not an easy task. There can be many factors that may lead employees to feel dissatisfied. For e.g., your job description may be misleading or not accurately convey the nature of the role. 

You might want to send out a survey after 30 days of employment and again after 6 months. Ask questions specific to recruiting in your 30-day survey to gather data on how candidates feel about the application, interviewing, and onboarding processes. Here are a few examples:

• How well do the requirements in the job post match the skills and abilities needed to do your job?

• How well do the responsibilities in the job post match your actual day-to-day responsibilities?

• Is there anything in the job post that was unclear or confusing?

• Is there any information we should have included in the job post but didn’t?

• Are there any discrepancies between the role as written in the job post and the actual job?

9. Applicants per opening

Also known as applicants per hire, the metric helps you identify how many candidates apply for one job posting. It can help you gauge the desirability of a given role and can help you understand why specific roles are more in-demand than others.

However, recruiters can boost their applicants per opening in various ways. The recruiters can choose an appropriate channel to post on to gain more applicants with a well-defined, accurate, and enticing JD.

For instance, choosing the right channel to post on and ensuring that the job description is clear, accurate, and enticing could help you to gain more applicants.

Applicants per opening = number of jobs posted / number of applicants

10. Selection ratio

Regarding recruitment efficiency metrics, the selection ratio helps you understand how smooth the hiring process is. The more applicants you have, the larger the talent pool you will have to pick from.

Selection ratio = number of hires / total number of applicants

11. Cost per hire

Filling a vacancy is costly, and the longer it takes for the candidates to move through the hiring process, the more it will cost your company. The average cost per hire now is $4700 and will only get higher.

Cost per hire = total recruiting cost (internal + external) / total number of hires

Understanding the cost per hire is the first step in lowering it. The key is making the hiring process more efficient and, in turn, less expensive to the business. 

12. Candidate experience

Nowadays, candidates want to associate themselves with a company that has a positive work culture where they will be genuinely appreciated and valued. 

Before accepting an offer, the candidates evaluate every aspect of their candidate experience from the moment they apply. Hence, creating a strong candidate experience right from the beginning is vital.

You can leverage a recruitment CRM to automate most of the above-mentioned processes and offer candidates a positive candidate experience. 

13. Offer acceptance rate (OAR) 

The offer acceptance rate (OAR) is the percentage of candidates who accept a job offer. A 90-95% acceptance rate shows that there is a good fit between a candidate’s expectations and company’s requirements. 

If your company is experiencing lower rates of acceptance, it’s important to evaluate and take a look at your strategies. If the candidates refuse an offer, there has to be a substantial reason. In this case, you’ll have to identify why this is happening and promptly address the root cause.

14. Percentage of open positions

75% of candidates research a company’s brand before applying for a role. If your company has hundreds of job advertisements scattered all over different platforms on the web, it could deter candidates from applying and hamper your employer brand.

Percentage of open positions = (number of open positions/number of existing positions) x 100

If you have a high percentage of open positions, it may be an indicator of a high employee turnover at your company.

15. Application completion rate

Candidates are already overwhelmed with their job search, and nothing frustrates them like a lengthy or complex application process. The average application completion rate is just 10.6% when a job application asks a candidate up to 25 questions. 

Application completion rate = (Total number of completed applications / total number of candidates who started the application) X 100

You can reduce application drop-offs by optimizing your application experience for mobile and tablet views. You can also integrate ATS software to simplify the process for applicants when they apply for an open position. 

16. Recruitment funnel effectiveness

You may know this metric as “passthrough rates,” or “conversion rates between stages,” or “average number of days in stage.” It allows you to analyze the effectiveness of each stage in your funnel, giving both a bird’s-eye view of your pipeline health and a granular view of its phases. 

Where are candidates dropping out of the process? Where are there bottlenecks in your funnel? The answers to these questions alert you to inefficiencies so you can pivot in real-time. 

Remember that conversion rates that are too high can be as much of a red flag as those that are too low. If too many candidates are passing your take-home test, maybe you’re not filtering out enough unqualified talent, and your test needs to be more rigorous. Otherwise, you’ll be straining recruiting resources at the onsite stage. 

As a best practice, survey candidates who drop out at any stage to identify what went wrong. Patterns in those responses will help you know where to improve. Aside from ratios, recruitment funnel effectiveness will also alert you to the average number of days candidates sit in a given stage. This will allow you to observe and benchmark how efficiently your recruiting coordinators are working to schedule the next steps and whether your hiring managers are taking too long to make decisions. If your time-in-stage varies wildly between stages or your entire “source-to-close” metric is too slow, you may be offering a poorly-structured process.

17. Sourcing channel effectiveness

While Source-of-Hire tells you the best sources to attract top talent, you must also know which sources yield the best hires quickly because that’s how you’ll determine where to reallocate your recruiting expenditures. It can also tell you which channels are ineffective and which tools you can invest in to enhance your sourcing efforts. Recruiters have identified sourcing channel effectiveness as their second-most-useful metric.

Effectiveness for a specific sourcing channel = number of qualified candidates generated by channel / total number of qualified candidates

So determine how best to categorize your sources and start tracking with a system that will record candidate source. How did you find previous top performers? How did they find you? This is how hiring teams will know where to direct their time and effort in the future. You can also use an AI sourcing solution to supercharge your candidate sourcing efforts.

18. Sourcing channel cost

Keep in mind that the pricing structure varies between different job ad platforms. Posting a job on LinkedIn may cost $0.10 per day, whereas other channels may allow you to do it for free. Once you learn which channels are effective, you can monitor your spending.

Sourcing channel cost = Advertising and posting expense per channel/number of applicants per channel

19. Time to productivity

Training new recruits always takes substantial time, finances, and energy. Time to productivity is one of the recruiting metrics that assist you by measuring how long this process takes. 

Basically, it shows how long employees can become ‘fully productive’ in any given role. On average, it is expected to be somewhere between one to two years, but you may be able to outdo the standard by recruiting the perfect fit for every role.

20. Diversity Recruiting Metrics

95% of CEOs are now focusing on fostering diversity in the workplace, but this begins with analyzing your current diversity hiring metrics. This data can show where systemic biases might appear in the recruiting process or why some candidate segments get stuck at certain funnel stages. It can also tell if certain groups are disproportionately dropping out of the funnel at certain stages. 

You can track and measure these metrics in the following ways: 

• How many applicants from minority groups apply to your open positions compared to the overall job market? 

• How many URM applicants successfully make it to the next stage of the hiring process compared to all candidates? 

• How many individuals from minority groups are hired compared to members from other groups? 

Covey can help hiring teams meet their diversity goals by providing a complete overview of their talent pipeline.

5 Strategic Tips to Measure Recruitment Effectiveness

Collecting and reporting recruitment metrics is just the initial stage. You require a planned strategy to align your business goals with rewarding results. Improve your recruiting efforts by using these tips to gather recruitment effectiveness metrics: 

Assess Current Need

Keep a keen eye on the current openings and the areas with high turnover to analyze the present recruiting needs. Look at your current requirements and recruitment funnel, and examine how it stacks up to the modern hiring trends. 71% of job seekers use mobile devices to look for jobs at least once every day. So, use these current trends to your advantage and track the results with metrics like net promoter score and candidate experience.

Forecast Future Need

Have foresight and anticipate possible hiring requirements. For e.g., are new sites, product lines, or projects being rolled out? Are some of the positions that need to be filled usually competitive? Do you have past data to indicate how long those positions might take to fill?

Always stay ahead of the game and be well-informed of future hiring needs. Check your recruitment metrics if they indicate a limited supply of in-demand candidates and whether your engagement trends increase or decline during competitive job market cycles. Share this information with your hiring managers to keep them abreast of the situation and implement hiring strategies that align with your business objectives.

Examine the Current Talent Pipeline

Maintain a talent pipeline that includes a list of the in-demand candidates, specific skillsets management, and talent gaps. Keep an eye on the positions with the longest time-to-fill metrics. 

Track data on those job openings with unfavorable results in the critical recruitment metrics so that you can facilitate changes wherever necessary. Look at the interview-to-hire ratio, selection ratios, and applicant-per-opening metrics, and share your findings with your recruiting team and hiring managers.

Determine the Talent Mix Required to Fill Talent Gaps

Once you define the skillsets and experiences to fill talent gaps in your company, you can actively source and engage candidates with those experiences and skills to improve your overall talent mix.

Assess the Availability of External Candidates

Have a proactive strategy by recruiting candidates even before they actively look for a job; this definitely can pay long-term dividends. Engage with in-demand candidates even before you need their skillset expertise and continue to assess their availability with strategic touchpoints.

Wrapping it Up

Data-driven recruitment is the future of talent acquisition and recruitment professionals must get on board. It is critical to understand that while every metric need not be measured, you must identify the right recruiting metrics to improve your hiring strategy as a whole.