To attract and retain top talent is both a challenge and a priority for business leaders. Many recognise the need for an effective talent acquisition strategy but do not have a model in place to monitor and measure its success.
Should an organisation fail to assess and reflect on its recruitment strategy, precious time, money, and resources will be wasted. The wrong people with the wrong skills will be hired again and again with no understanding of why.
These are some metrics you may like to use to assess the performance and impact of your talent acquisition strategy.
Time to Hire.
“Time to hire” refers to the number of days between the first day of the hiring process to the day the candidate gets hired. On average, many of the top candidates are only ‘on the market’ for 10 days. The more efficient your process is the more likely you are to bag the best.
To optimise your time to hire, leaders should break down the entire hiring journey into stages. You should then measure in days how long it took each candidate to move through each stage.
Cost per hire.
Do you know how much each new hire costs you? Business leaders need to factor in all the associated costs, including any recruitment partner fees, the purchase of equipment, onboarding, administration, and benefits. This will, of course, vary greatly according to role, seniority, who conducts the interviews, and the recruitment channel chosen. For example, you may like to source external recruitment partners to help with more senior or specialist roles.
There are some strategies a company can introduce to help reduce cost per hire. You may like to consider talent referral schemes, social media channels, and building a candidate talent pool as ways to streamline recruitment costs.
Suitable candidates per opening.
Here, it is worth noting that “suitable” refers to any candidate that passes through the application screening process and moves into the next recruitment phase.
This metric is, of course, far more useful than using the total number of candidates as a yardstick. It allows you to assess how good the candidates you are attracting are. This is important; if you are attracting unsuitable candidates, you won’t fill the position with the right candidate – if at all. Knowing you aren’t hitting the right cohort will allow you to adapt your talent acquisition strategy for the future.
Sourcing.
Sourcing refers to the performance of the channels you use to advertise your jobs. Whether you use social media, job boards, a corporate website – or a hybrid of all of these, companies need to know which perform best.
To measure this, candidates need to be tagged according to their acquisition source when they submit their application.
Knowing and understanding the most effective talent source ensures that you will get the best return on your investment, and where you should target your efforts in future.
Quality of Hire.
Quality of Hire measures the value new hires bring to a company. Quality hires leads to less turnover, better productivity, and company culture.
Quality itself is a difficult concept to measure.
However, you may like to think about performance metrics instead. These may be useful KPIs to consider when considering measuring the quality of your hires:
- sales targets,
- good customer satisfaction ratings
- turnover
- retention metrics
- hiring manager satisfaction ratings
- percentage of new hires promoted within a certain time frame
Measuring ‘Quality of Hire’ needs a consensus within leadership teams. Together, you need to decide the factors that constitute a quality hire. Once these are established you can decide if your talent acquisition strategy is successful or not.
Offer Acceptance Rate.
The number of ‘offer accepts’ you receive is a good indication of how successful your hiring processes are.
If a candidate refuses your offer, you should try to find out why. Of course, candidates refuse offers for external reasons too, but often they cite a reason that is company-related. If a refusal comes because of culture, remuneration, the benefits package, or mismatched job duties as per job description, then perhaps those could have been managed better by the hiring team.
Satisfaction Rate.
This refers to the satisfaction your candidates have with your hiring process.
To measure this, companies can survey both candidates and new recruits. To ensure your talent acquisition strategy is working, you need to understand why it might be broken. Are you getting a high number of interview no-shows or cancellations? Or maybe your new hires are leaving soon after their start date?
You need to establish a framework that allows you to measure your candidate experience. A short and easy survey that focuses solely upon key satisfaction metrics will allow you to see how your process measures up.
You may like to include questions regarding employer/candidate communication, instructions for any tests required, interview, or CV feedback as part of your survey.
In conclusion.
Data-driven analysis of the talent acquisition strategy gives companies the ability to develop their hiring strategy. Knowing how your hiring process is performing allows you to make adaptations to ensure you are working to attract, secure and retain the top talent.
Using some of these metrics, you will be able to ensure your business hires strategically – the best hire for the biggest return on your investment.
Let us help you with your tech and digital talent acquisition. We work quickly and efficiently using our large talented candidate pool to source the best tech, digital and data professionals in the UK.
Our candidates move through the hiring process seamlessly and will enjoy a first-class candidate experience along the way. Reach out to us today to find out more about how we work and how we can elevate your recruitment efforts.
