Recruitment and HR professionals like to talk about recruitment metrics and KPIs. In reality “time to hire” is often the major and mostly the only degree of a recruitment department effectiveness used by the management and even HR Managers to measure how the recruitment department of a respected company performs.
The problematic side of this KPI is that is involvement in recruitment process of other (important) parties like hiring managers, and that is how good and fast they are in decision-making, administration and even existing of notice periods (one of my former candidate’s boss on his previous job wanted to keep him for a couple of months by any means) makes “time to hire” ineffective measurement tool.
So, here are other recruitment KPIs you can use to measure and motivate your recruitment team. The list is not exhaustive and does not apply to be versatile. It is based on my own experience and not always supports the settled terminology:
- Productive Index – the time from when a job opens until the first candidate is presented to a hiring manager by a recruiter (clear indication what is the time a recruiter has spent to find right candidates)
- Hiring Manager vs. Recruiter Cooperation – the number of candidates presented before a final candidate was identified by an internal client (indicates a recruiter’s capability to build effective relations with a hiring manager)
- Engagement Index – offers accepted vs. offers received (a recruiter should be able to connect firmly with a candidate to reach 100% value for this KPI)
I always believed that recruiters are 100% responsible for the recruitment process from time when a job opens until candidates are presented to a hiring manager as the interview process is more hiring manager’s responsibility.
There are also few indirect metrics which can assist to measure recruiter’s performance in a longer term perspective:
- Replacement Index – how many replacements of candidates who did not pass a trial period a recruiter had to make through (some indirect but still you can use this to measure how a recruiter understands company needs, a hiring manager’s management style and corporate culture)
- Candidate’s Success Index – measured by a candidate’s performance in fulfilling his or her first annual KPIs (very indirect)
We can use a lot of metrics to evaluate how social networks and advertisements work for us or internal candidates index but the beauty of measuring recruitment, or any other corporate process, is not to issue reports or put the grades but to plan, optimize and improve in a distribution of resources.
About the Author
Andrey Verinchuk – talent acquisition and executive recruitment veteran, HR branding and Social Media enthusiast, spent many years in executive recruitment consultancy and in-house corporate talent acquisition management.
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