Building an effective recruitment strategy takes hiring managers with formidable experiential knowledge and ingenious foresight. It’s not a paradox to say that you need to learn how to recruit top hiring managers and recruiters. Long-term, the main goal is to create a collaborative recruitment team that’s communicative and open to revising hiring strategies when needed (no one should fear the evolution of their process regardless of how rigid their industry is, or how deeply rooted in the past their credos may be).
So let’s assume that you already have an all-star recruiting team that’s social and synergetic. They’ve done an excellent job of imagining and circumscribing hiring strategies for your company, and they’re ready to build a superb workforce. Before you get too excited, take a step back and think about the leveled perspectives you want to gain regarding their performance.
Here are a couple shrewd questions you want to ask:
How do I measure the performance of their cultivated hiring strategies to make sure it’s not just some gilded collection of concepts that, when tested, fizzle out? How do I measure the success of my recruitment team?
Tracking recruitment and retention rates are the first steps you’ll take to gain a comprehensive view of the causal outcome of the decisions you’ve made. First, let’s look at some key performance indicators and then grapple with understanding how well your hires actually perform.
- Time to hire: This is pretty straightforward—measure the amount of time it takes for a recruiter to hire (this will fluctuate depending on the position and the current dynamic of the job market).
- Recruitment cost ratio: Calculate recruitment campaign costs (internal, external, signing bonuses, travel, relocation, and visa expenses etc.) with the total compensation recruited to really see your staffing efficiency.
- Longevity: This one is really simple too—keep track of how long your new hires stay with the company.
- Recruitment source potency: Constantly assess the performance of sources that help you bring candidates in, and how you proactively find talent.
- Time-to-productivity: Make sure to get detailed metrics on how long (and the reasons why) it takes your new hire to perform their role. If a substantial amount of training is required for the position then measure this too.
- Rehires: Returning employees are more efficient at returning to the process of how you do business (do you best to take this into account).
- Turnover: Keep track of the turnover rate for everyone (recruiters and managers included).
- Number of vacancies: This one is relative to the size of your company and its staffing goals, but keeping track of this will help you focus on the most pressing tasks.
- Quality of Hire: Create some insightful surveys for managers and other employees to take 6-12 months after a hire. Don’t let this assessment slip purely into the subjective, be aggressive by paying attention to the work your new hires produce (don’t shy away from communicative evaluation). Ultimately, how well recruited people perform is the greatest measurement of success regarding your recruitment strategies.
Staying current on these metrics is a lot of work, involving some re-calibrations, but it will give you an extensive purview of the effectiveness of your hiring strategies—in addition to fostering insights into how well your recruiter team and hiring managers are actually implementing the system they helped put in place. So let’s move on to how you can appraise the performance of your recruiters (a surprisingly uncommon practice).
- How actively involved are your recruiters in understanding your employment needs? Make sure your recruiters are always paying attention to correctly defining the desired skills necessary to adequately fulfill your positions (since this can change over time, they need to actively engaged). Of course you will hope a prospective candidate has an impressive set of qualities and abilities, but make sure your recruiters are being realistic about employee traits and performance. Spend time looking at the best qualities of your current workers and go from there.
- Are your recruiters always in motion? If you have recruiters that are paying attention to employment and business trends—keeping people pipelined, screened, and interested in working for your company—then they will consistently have people of interest profiled. This is an enormous asset even if you’re not currently hiring because you’ll have a great list of prospective candidates. Keeping your eyes open for talent and letting your recruiters know is just as important as recruiters networking with people in the profession through meetings, conferences, and conventions etc.
- What’s your recruiter’s timing like? The pace of the modern world isn’t going to slow down so your recruiters need to be assessing and interviewing candidates in a timely manner. Since the best candidates receive offers quickly (sometimes within a week after they begin their job hunt), your chances of landing top talent increases relative to how quickly your recruiters move through the process. Also, getting to the right candidates fast demonstrates your interest in them (they’ll know you value their experience).
- Have you empowered your recruiters? The success of your recruiters boils down to three elemental things: the quality of the sourcing tools (and inside knowledge) you provide them with; your budget for bringing on top tier candidates; and how much time you give them to make the recruiting process inviting for prospective candidates. With respect to the budget, it’s very important that you give your recruiters the ability to craft strong offers that meet candidates complex needs.
This is only a beginning overview of how to measure the success of your recruiting strategies, and the performance of your recruiters. The stronger and more detailed your process framework is—in unison with measuring palpable details of the process in motion—the better you’ll be at engaging and impressing candidates.
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