Yep, you know that metrics are an important part of improving your hiring process. We assume you’re already measuring a bunch of stuff, but we know from experience that most teams are either missing a few key things, or they're measuring so much it's hard to get any benefit out of them.
So, what metrics do you actually need to know you’re tracking in the right direction, and where you can make changes that’ll soup-up your process? We’re glad you asked. Here are our top 8 all-time talent metrics you need to be measuring.
I mean, obviously, getting the whole thing (from job opening to hiring) done more efficiently is always a good measure – but it’s not the be-all and end-all, because different role requirements and different markets conditions can impact on your time to fill significantly. Even so, these benchmarks let you track your improvement overall, and mean hiring managers have a realistic idea of how long it’ll take them to fill a role.
This is perhaps a more interesting measure because it’s less affected by external pressures. Because it measures how quickly your team moves candidates through the recruitment process once they have applied, it’s a solid indication of how efficient it is. Speeding up your time to hire isn’t just a good way to measure your recruitment performance, it’ll also mean you can nab the best candidates before your competitors do and create a better candidate experience. Measuring the time each stage of the screening process takes is super-handy too – this lets you spot and fix sticking points in your process and candidate experience.
What if it turned out that your best candidates all were coming from one source? With that info burning a hole in your pocket, you could get really crafty about how you sourced candidates and where you invest time and budgets. It’s a dreamscape, but you’ll need to be tracking source of hire.
Efficiency in the hiring process is kind of useless if you end up employing all the wrong people. I mean, getting good people on the pay-role is kind of the point of the whole thing, so keeping an eye on the quality of hire is a major one. You’ll need those metrics to assess the effectiveness of your screening by determining your success ratio – that is, what percentage of your hires are considered satisfactory. You’ll also need to know your quality-of-hire scores to judge the value of your hiring sources.
If people leave within the first year, you can assume one or more things have happened. If employees quit of their own accord, you can safely assume that they were a bad fit or were given unrealistic expectations about the role or the company during recruitment. If they’ve been ‘managed out’, that tells a slightly different (but equally negative) story – they were a bad fit with the role, or with the team. Harvard Business Review backs us up on this, noting that about 80% of employee attrition occurs due to hiring the wrong candidate and could happen at any level – junior, mid or senior. The numbers vary, but one study suggests that replacing an employee costs between 10-30% of their annual pay – that includes recruiting and training the new employee. It doesn’t include the opportunity cost of losing someone you’ve invested training into.
We know everyone has a degree of unconscious bias and humans are just programmed to prefer people similar to ourselves. Also true? Pushing to eliminate the bias in your recruitment process isn’t just the right thing to do – an inclusive workforce makes for better business. Measuring diversity at each stage in the recruitment process will help you spot your internal bias – do numbers of female candidates reduce disproportionately at the initial screening stage? Are you losing too many older applicants or people of colour at the phone screening? Knowing these moments of bias means you can override them by tweaking processes or implementing new tools.
Candidates are customers. Chances are they buy from you, and certainly, they’ll be recommending you (or not) to other job-seekers. So yeah, candidate experience matters – if you know you’re quietly undermining your employer and consumer brand, you can do something about it. We’ve developed a new metric, which we’re calling Net Experience Score - similar to NPS, but the X stands for experience. While NPS reports on customer loyalty based on answers to a simple question, NXS gives you tangible metrics around candidate experience using a similar question.
Interviews are, essentially, a way for hiring managers to get a feel for a candidate’s soft skills. And you know (and we know, and everyone knows) that they’re a very, very bad forum to do that in. You generally end up with a person the manager likes – and it’s a question of luck if that also happens to fit with what the role requires. You also won’t get any quantifiable insights that’ll help you improve your recruitment process.
Far more useful is to work out what particular soft skills are indicators of high-performing employees. To do that, start measuring 10-12 soft skills you think will indicate great hires. Over time, you’ll be able to see a link between 2-4 soft skills and those quality-of-hire scores. There’s no single metric that could super-charge your time to hire, lower your employee attrition rates or improve your quality of hire. If you know the three soft skills that indicate potentially great employees, you’ll be able to spot and nab those right up front.
“Building efficiency into the system like this requires some smart technology: nimble, well-integrated, and user-friendly methods of assessing soft skills.”
Good idea, Jason Finkelstein, writing for Forbes.
If it looks as though you’ll be adding a bunch of new metrics to your data set, don’t panic. There are some pretty handy tools out there that’ll deliver this info as part of your normal recruitment process. And if you now get to ignore some of your current metrics – yay! You’re welcome.
For more info on how Weirdly can help you get the metrics you need - including Soft Skills, Candidate Experience and Diversity - get in touch for a demo.
