In any organization that decides to double down on hiring, there's going to be immense pressure to fill desks. 
Often, the actual hire is the be all end all in terms of measuring success, with all other concerns regarding organization building and team development falling by the wayside. It's easy to see why higher-ups may fall into this line of thinking, but I'm sure you all know there is more to a good recruiter than number of offers accepted. Let's take a look at why number of hires is out of a recruiter's hands, and consider some more telling recruiting success metrics.
Firstly, a bad hire is far, far worse than no hire. Bad hires are immensely expensive, in terms of the time you and the team spend interviewing, onboarding, and training them, plus their salary, plus the production you lose by not having a better hire in their place. As a recruiter it will often fall on you to be the gatekeeper and not resort to pushing candidates through the hiring funnel just because you desperately need workers.
Secondly, candidates may be denied an offer for a variety of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with the recruiter. Once you've passed a candidate off to a hiring manager, whether they get the offer will probably be out of your hands. They might not have a deep command of relevant skills, compensation expectations could be off, or maybe your hiring manager just didn't like the cut of their jib. This is the clearest problem with hires as a success metric--it is evaluating sourcers and recruiters based on an area of the hiring funnel over which they have no control. On the other hand, here are some areas where a recruiter is in control and can demonstrate their success.
Churn numbers
Rather than allowing your higher-ups to look merely at number of hires, frame the question in terms of the quality of hire. Making a small amount of hires who stick around a long time is better than a massive amount of hires that rapidly churn.
Funnel Progression
Especially in organizations where the recruiter may not effect the close of the candidate, a far more telling statistic will be the number of candidates the recruiter has messaged, engaged, screened, and brought in for interviews. Unless the feedback from the hiring manager is that candidates are consistently unqualified and not even close to what he or she is looking for, moving candidates through the funnel to the point of interview should be considered success for the recruiter.
As the War for Talent rages on, recruiters are competing with a great deal of noise just to get their organization's roles on the radar of top candidates. As a result, even a successful engagement ought to count in the recruiter's favor. If a message is thoughtful enough to prompt even a "thanks but no thanks" response, these engagements are going to turn in to interviews and eventually hires.
To wrap things up, it is inappropriate and unfair to assess employees based on an area that is ultimately out of their control. Looking a bit further up the funnel provides a much clearer look at a recruiter's efficacy, and it a much more telling barometer of skill than mere hires.
