Which are your most effective recruiting channels? What is your application completion rate? What’s your candidates per hire rate? How long does it take your company to fill an open position?

One of the advantages of using recruiting and ATS software is that it collects metrics to help you answer these questions. Here are the metrics that are most helpful to track, what they can tell you about your process, and how to use this data to improve your recruiting practices.

Using Recruitment Metrics to Improve Your Recruiting

If you’re not sure where to begin with recruiting metrics, start with the so-called “Big Three.” Many companies pay close attention to the Big Three metrics, and they’re a strong backbone for any evaluation of your recruitment efforts.

The Big Three are:

Time to Hire

Sometimes called time to fill, this measures the time from the beginning to the end of the recruiting process. The end can be the date an offer is made, the date an offer is accepted, or the date a new employee shows up at their new office for their first day. Regardless of how the end is defined, this measure helps you determine how much time your company is spending recruiting, which can raise the cost per hire.

Cost per Hire

Cost per hire takes the total costs spent on recruiting, including recruiter fees, and advertising, and divides this cost by the number of hires made from those efforts. This helps your company estimate the average amount spent to hire a new employee, which in turn helps with developing hiring budgets and plans.

Quality of Hire

The most important of the Big Three is also the most complex. It takes factors such as job performance, engagement, and cultural fit, gives them a score from 1 to 100, and divides their sum by the number of factors.

Quality of hire metrics also give insight into the health of your recruiting process. Consistently high quality of hire scores mean your recruiting process is hitting the mark; low quality of hire scores mean something needs to be adjusted.

Think about how these metrics relate to each other in order to improve your recruitment and hiring process.

For instance, if both your time to hire and your quality of hire is low, it suggests your company is not taking the necessary time to find the right employees. Perhaps the recruitment process needs to be longer, or your company needs to institute second interviews for candidates.

Other Important Metrics

  • Sourcing channel quality. Rather than looking at the total numbers of candidates a particular channel — LinkedIn, referrals, a certain job board, etc — provides, measure how far candidates from each channel go in your hiring process. If candidates from job boards rarely make it to the interview stage, is it worth posting positions on those boards?

  • Application completion rate. If your company has an online application process, it’s important to know how many people who start filling out an application actually get to the point of hitting “submit.” If your application is too complicated or has technical issues, it may discourage qualified candidates from applying in the first place.

  • Candidates per hire. Many companies have a goal of interviewing 3-4 candidates before making a hire. Too high a candidate per hire rate, and you’re taxing your hiring manager’s time. Too low, and your company may not be casting its net wide enough to find the right person for the job.

  • Employee referrals. Everyone loves referrals. They are a cheaper and faster way to hire, usually produce better hires, and contribute to lower turnover at your company. If you’re not getting any employee referrals, it could point to unresolved company issues that make employees reluctant to recommend working at your company to people in their network — and that is a recruitment issue.

Recruiting Software Makes This Easy

If you read that list of recruitment metrics and wondered how on earth you’re supposed to track all of these factors, don’t worry: you’re not. It’s way too much to expect anyone to devise a complicated spreadsheet to track all of these factors — and then convince others in the company to use the same spreadsheet.

Instead, BirdDogHR’s recruitment system automates this process for you and ensures data is consistently captured in the same way. Then it generates reports for you, so you spend your time on analysis rather than measurement.

In addition to tracking the recruitment metrics discussed above, BirdDogHR also helps with more advanced HR functions, such as:

  • Maintaining a roster of previous applicants (applicant tracking system) which you can tap into when you have an opening — at times eliminating the need to go through the time and expense of an open recruitment process.

  • Generating AAP reports which satisfy affirmative action plan documentation.

More and better data helps you develop better recruitment and hiring practices, saving your company time and money, and helping you hire better candidates.

Interested in tracking your recruiting metrics more closely? Schedule a demo to see how BirdDogHR can help your business.