Key Metrics That Impact Hiring, Candidate Experience, and Institutional Success
With so many touchpoints and factors that influence the talent journey, there are well over 80 metrics HR teams can track. It can be easy to get lost in tracking too many metrics and miss the forest for the trees.
To help you streamline and focus your efforts, here are five key metrics you should be tracking to make the biggest impact on organizational goals such as:
- reducing annual recruitment costs
- reducing turnover
- improving the return on investment (ROI) on job postings
- and improving the candidate experience.
Time to fill
Time to fill is the period between the time job posting is made public and the time the vacancy is filled. Tracking this metric will provide insights into where the recruitment process is getting stagnated and where more attention needs to be paid. Knowing how long on average it takes to fill an open position will also help you budget your time and resources and forecast future placements.
Longer time to hires or delays in the pipeline can lead to losing top candidates. High-quality candidates tend to pursue multiple opportunities simultaneously, and delays with one recruiter may mean another recruiter gets the upper hand. HR leaders can help offset this risk with a consistent, transparent and communicative recruitment process.
Cost per hire
Recruiting and onboarding new employees is an expensive process and demands significant resources. The costs involved in a recruitment process may include advertising, recruiter fees, referral fees, HR’s work hours dedicated to sourcing and interviewing candidates, the opportunity cost of staff and/or faculty covering for the workload of the open position, and administrative expenses for the training and onboarding of new employees. The annual sum of all these costs divided by the number of new hires for the year gives the cost per hire. Understanding how much it costs per successful hire helps leaders plan recruitment budgets and create benchmarks for future planning.
Offer acceptance rate
The offer acceptance rate is the ratio of offers made to offers accepted. This metric is very reflective of the company’s understanding of the job market, competition, and compensation. It answers the question of mutual selection – they may be the best fit for the job, but do they want to work for you?
If your institution’s offer acceptance rate is low, it begs a more in-depth analysis of the candidate pool’s demographic data and preferences, transparency and accuracy of job descriptions, the brand and culture of the institution, the candidate experience and perception, and competitive compensation in the market.
Source performance
Tracking where most applicants come from – and where most hires come from – will help you decide where to focus your recruitment budget. Your recruitment marketing mix may include job boards, social media, agencies, your career site, referrals, etc. Monitor which of these are most successful over time, not only for the volume of candidates but the quality of hires.
Close monitoring can inform how changes on the respective channels are affecting traffic. For example, if your social media has been a consistent source over the past year but applicants have gone down lately, you may need to realign your ad targeting and revise your social media strategies.
And once you know which sources are the best performers, you can reallocate your resources accordingly. For example, if your efficiency of referrals is better than job boards, then focus on incentivizing employee referral benefits better, as candidates who come through referrals and internal mobility are already aligned to your business, have been pre-vetted, and have already chosen your company over the competition.
Turnover rate
Monitoring the rate at which people leave the institution, either voluntarily or involuntarily, can help inform an effective talent replacement plan to tackle any seasonal or anticipated departures. This metric can also reveal where on their career trajectory high potential employees typically leave the organization. This can give us insights as to when you should engage them with extra efforts to retain them. You can also compare turnover across departments or colleges to identify any issues or replicate successful leadership practices. If you’re able to influencer turnover and retain high performers, you can reduce the need to recruit their replacements.
Better metrics and better decision-making with PeopleAdmin
Tracking each of these metrics individually provides invaluable insights to the recruitment process, but when combined, it becomes possible to pull out hidden trends and patterns that can improve overall hiring and retention. PeopleAdmin brings key metrics from across talent systems into centralized reporting for holistic visibility into performance and compliance.
Robust analytics dashboards provide real-time insights to help inform better staffing and budgeting decisions and defensible, evidence-based decisions. Built exclusively for the specific needs of HigherEd institutions, PeopleAdmin provides intuitive analyses of recruitment metrics that can be differentiated across various job roles, departments, and colleges through customizable workflows.
Schedule a demo today and let us show you how powerful analytics can help transform your hiring.