Recruitment KPIs to Measure Success

Having the right people in the right places can make or break a company. Research reveals that businesses are now placing more and more emphasis on human resources to promote organizational health and continued growth. Efficient staffing has to start somewhere, though. That’s why understanding recruitment KPIs is now more important than ever. Let’s look at what they are, how to set them, and which ones are the most important.

What are recruitment KPIs

Recruitment Key Performance Indicators are metrics that reveal how effective recruiting has been for a company, as well as the health of the process overall. They can also reveal the recruitment team’s strengths and weaknesses. 

This data provides insights that can influence a company’s decisions, budgets, goals, and direction. These numbers, along with other important factors such as company culture and history, can prove to be crucial in helping a company continue to attract the right people for the right positions.

How to set recruitment KPIs

If data is going to impact major decisions for the recruitment of your company, it’s important to make sure it’s high-quality. How can you rate the quality of your recruitment KPIs?

High-quality data will be specific. It will clearly measure what the business needs to know, providing meaningful insights that are up to date.

As these KPIs are compared in the context of both a specific industry and their respective benchmark, you will begin to clearly see both their strengths and weaknesses in their departments and processes. 

The most important recruitment KPIs

Now that we understand what recruitment KPIs are and how to set them, we can analyze the most important recruitment KPIs.

• Time to hire

Time to hire measures the time it takes to get a person into their hired role, from start to finish. This includes shortlisting the candidate, interviewing them, making the decisions surrounding the hire, and then finally onboarding.

All of these components deserve scrutiny to get a clear picture of the efficacy of the hiring processes. It will allow you to develop your growth strategy accordingly, with the right people in place at the right time. 

• Quality of hire

Merely understanding how long it takes to fill a role doesn’t mean we fully understand the recruitment process. We also need to see how well that choice has played out.

A quality of hire metric can vary a great deal from one company to another. One industry can have a variety of companies within it, each with a different direction, mission, and goal. 

To help measure this KPI, pay attention to factors such as the time required to bring a hire up to full speed. Other important factors are team fit, manager satisfaction, and any negative repercussions the hire has been responsible for after filling the role.

• Sourcing channel efficiency

Paying attention to where hires are coming from can provide meaningful advantages, allowing you to shift your focus and efforts to the most productive sources.

To do this, analyze where each hire has come from. Once this is established, begin to monitor any patterns relating to the quality of each hire from their respective source. 

From there, you can focus your attention and resources to those specific sources, strengthening those channels and refining any recruitment processes related to them along the way.

• Candidate experience/satisfaction

If companies land the best and brightest talent available, they have to pay attention to the point of view of the hire. Ignoring this type of KPI might lead to candidates passing on an offer, which can ultimately lead to other human resources woes. 

A simple survey sent to post-interview candidates can constitute useful feedback on your entire hiring process. These short surveys provide a fresh, outside perspective that can help identify what needs refining in the recruitment process.

• Adverse impact

A company that doesn’t recognize its hiring bias is likely sorely lacking in diversity. As individuals, it’s not something we can readily identify in ourselves. It’s therefore important to take a proactive approach to avoid discrimination and promote a happy, inclusive workforce.

There’s an established rule to help avoid adverse impacts called the “four-fifths rule”. This recruitment KPI states that there’s bias if less than 80%, or four-fifths, of a protected class gets hired compared to the class with the highest representation. 

Paying attention to the four-fifths rule will ensure your hiring process is set up in an inclusive, welcoming way, thus attracting talent of all backgrounds and demographics.