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Elizabeth T.02.09.20193 min read

Waste $20 Billion Dollars or Create HR Metrics for Recruitment

If your goal is to find qualified people, you may want to consider HR metrics for recruitment. Hiring talent usually remains one of the top priorities for most companies. The Conference Board Annual Survey reported that CEOs believe finding talent is their top priority.

And it shows: companies spend $20 billion on human resources; most of that goes towards recruitment vendors. The process of recruitment may take many forms—from the subcontractors in India scouring LinkedIn to application-tracking software to personal interviews.

The challenge is with the plethora of hiring strategies, companies are still unsure of how effective they're hiring practices actually are.

In fact, few companies actually monitor their own hiring practices and assess whether those lead to good employees. Beyond cost per hire and estimating the time to hire, companies utilize few metrics.

As HR moves from the role of being an administrative necessity to an operational and strategic powerhouse, organizations must be measuring hiring effectiveness.

 

HR Metrics for Recruitment

 

hr metrics for recruitment

 

Customer Metrics


It’s essential that a customer is given a role in measurement. How much weight a customer is given depends on the recruitment team, but it should be quantified to some degree. Quantify a customer’s internal satisfaction with the service an employee or an employee’s team is giving. For those employees working directly with a customer, this would be simpler to measure. For those working in more junior positions, correlating customer satisfaction with specific tasks that a team member is responsible with on a certain team. How they are able to execute and their feeling on the ability to execute can be further clarified in their annual review with their head or with a human resources manager.

 

Process Metrics

Measuring the internal process of HR recruitment provides an opportunity to improve efficiency and employee satisfaction. Look at the output and how much time it takes to complete a process. How many stakeholders were involved? How long did it take for them to complete their part? Rank their quality from 1-4, or a similar metric. Determining the volume of processes executed is also helpful. Job acceptance rates, inquires about compensation guidelines, or the number of errors in certain hiring steps would benefit in how the HR department itself could continuously improve.

 

Talent Metrics

This method quantifies the strengths and other characteristics of talent. By mapping out competencies and gaps therein, the hiring team can create the metrics to figure out what a high performing employee looks like within a specific team. By examining the number of new hires receiving positive ratings after their trial period, for example, a manager can begin crafting 1) how successful a particular candidate was, 2) examine both their professional qualifications and person-to-person fit, and 3) map out the true values the team appreciates. Understanding what managers and employees truly matter will aid in improving employee turnover, satisfaction, and hiring.

 

Financial Metrics

Human resources can benchmark their success based on financial metrics. These will quantify cost of certain processes, employees, and present a strategic overview of how this is adding to the organization’s overall goals. It costs to find, hire, and develop employees. At minimum, HR managers should look at the cost per hire, the time it take to locate talent, and the cost of employee development programs and perks.

When creating metrics for your own company or agency, it’s important to keep in the mind the people reviewing the metrics. Often these will be HR managers, company managers, and executive management.

 

HR Leaders

This particular audience will be interested in the insights and information that HR is interested in being run and operated. Diversity, employee training hours, and how human resources is supporting business goals are topics on their agenda.

 

Non-HR Leaders

For business leaders working outside of HR, their interest may lean towards how the function—how HR is working (or not) working for their particular roadmap. They want to know how HR (if it does) improve their everyday responsibilities as a manager or executive. This may be showcasing past and present open position descriptions or compliance information. HR managers may wish to have these leaders determine specific goals and assign associated metrics. They could be used to find potential leaders and create succession plans by reviewing performance data.

 

HR metrics for recruitment doesn’t necessarily have to be extensive, but it must be implemented into these four sectors at the least. As one researcher famously wrote, organizations "occasionally do dumb things," which often happens when they fail to create an effective management practice around its people. By establishing evaluative metrics, HR managers then possess the groundwork to create predictive metrics, like evaluating potential leaders and establishing a roadmap for the company with its talent trove.

 

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