How to measure your recruitment effectiveness

Recruitment is an essential process for any organisation, as it needs to be done efficiently to ensure no hold-ups in the company’s growth. And whilst most companies track data around sales, productivity and marketing functions, some are still not monitoring data around recruitment.

Tracking this data is vital to assess how effective their recruitment campaigns are and to be able to improve further. We are very much in a candidate-driven market, so perfecting your recruitment process to provide the best possible experience is key to becoming an employer of choice.

The recruiting process is also time-consuming and, if done incorrectly, can lead to dissatisfaction among new employees, a loss of production and even increased burnout for existing staff covering unfilled vacancies.

So here we’re going to look at the most important data to measure and how to do it.

Time to Hire

As we have already mentioned how time-consuming the recruitment process can be and the business-wide effect it can have, it makes sense to start with this data.

According to a report published by Glassdoor, the average length of the job interview process was 27.5 days; however, this will vary significantly depending on the industry, job level and role. For example, a director role may depend on someone giving 3 months’ notice, whereas an entry-level position may only need to provide as little as 1 week’s notice.

There are two ways you can track this information, and each provides its own benefits.

Firstly is the number of days between a vacancy being received and the candidate accepting an offer. This can help a company measure the effectiveness of their internal and external recruitment advertising as well as internal processes such as application sifting, interview scheduling, and sending out an offer of employment.

The second measure is the number of days between an offer being accepted and the candidate starting their first day. This helps measure the effectiveness of onboarding processes and communication.

This is a particularly important measure as if candidates are left too long between being given an offer and actually starting, or they don’t have a great onboarding experience, they may accept another offer or end up leaving sooner than the business would want.

Cost per Hire

Recruitment can be costly to any organisation. When you factor in the costs of advertising a vacancy, the number of hours various staff members spend on the entire hiring and onboarding process, new equipment and more, these costs can quickly spiral.

Understanding how much it actually costs to fill a vacancy is the first step to finding ways to reduce it, if possible. One of the simplest ways to calculate the cost per hire is to total the entire internal and external recruiting costs and divide this by the total number of new hires.

Internal costs include things like the salaries of staff involved in the recruitment and onboarding process, interviews, equipment, benefits, training etc., whereas external costs include things like advertising, agency fees, job fairs, and travel costs.

The good news is that there are many ways to make the recruitment process more efficient when it comes to reducing your cost per hire.

Taking advantage of social media posts can reduce advertising fees – particularly if the business has a good social media presence. And, since hybrid and flexible working options have become much more mainstream, travel and interview costs can be reduced by using video interviews.

Prefer to leave it to the experts? At RecruitmentRevolution, we facilitate relationships and champion the process of ‘organic hiring’ to help create stronger and longer-lasting engagements. As a result, you reach talent faster, save time and reduce your cost per hire.

Source of Hire

If a business understands where the majority of successful candidates are found, it can focus its marketing efforts on these areas. Again, there are two ways to track this information.

Firstly, the quantity measurement. This tracks the number of candidates each channel generates over a given timeframe. As an example, if you advertised on a local job site, your company’s social media and used an external agency – which of these generated the most candidates over the space of 1 week?

Secondly, the quality measurement. This is the number of candidates for each channel that were then successfully placed in a role. And this may be measured over the period of one campaign or the entire business year. However, we recommend doing this over the business year to generate the most accurate data.

Quality of Hire

Until this point, the data has been very objective and based on actual numbers. However, the time to fill a vacancy and the cost is only part of the puzzle. It’s really no use hiring a candidate in record time and under budget if they’re not suitable and will result in the business hiring again soon.

After all, it can cost anywhere up to 3x a person’s salary to replace them – as well as being financially costly, it’s also not good for company morale or employer branding.

However, tracking this data can be much more subjective. Feedback from line managers as well as the new hire themselves is going to be most helpful. And retention data will also help you assess the suitability of new hires.

Just a side note here, though, when using retention data, be sure to assess whether the candidate left due to a lack of suitability or if there could be internal issues such as onboarding improvements that need to be made.

New Hire Retention

Tracking new hire retention is very similar to monitoring all retention within the business. However, it is done over a much shorter time frame and can even be done over several. For example, try tracking how many new hires are still employed after 30, 60, 90 days and even a year.

If you find that a significant number of new hires are leaving within a short time frame, it may signify that something needs improving within your onboarding process.

Candidate Experience

This is another subjective measurement but it’s essential for a business to continually improve its recruitment effectiveness.

Also, many organisations miss a trick here by only speaking to successful hires. Now, obviously, there are going to be candidates disappointed that they weren’t successful in the process; however, that doesn’t mean they haven’t had a great candidate experience.

Hopefully, your organisation contacts all applicants to inform them of their interviews’ outcome, and at this time you can ask for some feedback on the process.

Ask questions such as how did they find the initial application process? Did they feel the interview process was professional? Were they happy with the level of communication they received?

These types of questions can help make improvements to future campaigns and iron out any issues that may come up.

Conclusion

In our opinion, these are the most important measurements to include if your organisation is new to tracking its recruitment effectiveness. And when you measure this data consistently to focus on improvement, you’ll see better quality of hires, less money spent and a slicker, more efficient recruitment process overall.

Need help with your recruitment process? Get in touch!