We often talk about the importance of analytics, data, and measuring key performance indicators when it comes to the basics of running a successful business. When it comes to sales, marketing, and operations – measurement is a no-brainer. But, many companies do not measure their hiring and recruiting process at all. Instead, hiring and recruiting is often done as a function that is done in a silo, without much data at all.
Having the data and measurement when it comes to hiring and recruiting is crucial to running a successful company. In order for your company to run well, you need to hire and retain top talent – period.
How do you know you are achieving the best possible hires if your process is completely unmeasurable? You could be missing key factors that are making your company miss out on top talent.
What Do I Need to Measure?
You want to audit your entire process, from the application to the time it takes to get an offer signed and received. You will also likely want to look at your on-boarding process as well, as that is a huge factor on reducing new hire churn. But, for now we will stick to the basics of hiring and recruiting.
Here are some things you will want to measure:
Job Posting
- Visits to the job posting, on which sites
- Engagement with the job posting
- Number of applicants received per job posting tactic (LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.)
- Data on your paid promoted applications (views, clicks, applications)
- Clarity on the role – verbatim information from recruiters, hiring managers, and applicants
You want to know which job postings perform well, and which tactics receive the most engagement. Once you know which ones perform and which flop, you can start to understand what aspects work well. Was one application too wordy or too vague? Who wrote it? Can that person train others to write good posts? Are applicants interviewing for the role and realizing the description had nothing to do with their interests or experience? You want to know these things because a bad job posting could lose you seriously good talent.
Application
- Time it takes to get through the application
- Drop off rates
- Ease of use for the applicant and for the team
If an application process is too confusing, clunky, time consuming, or not working well online or on mobile, you will lose talent simply because your application is a pain to complete. You want to understand where the pain points are and remove the roadblocks. Also, you want to know if you can add any information to weed out bad candidates, if your hiring/recruiting team is finding they are not optimizing their time well when sifting through résumés.
Interview Process
- Time from application to interview
- Response rates from hiring/recruiting team
- Number of calls
- Number of interviews
You want to ensure that candidates are receiving calls in a timely manner, and that the interview process as a whole is running as effectively as possible. The last thing you want is to lose a star candidate because your hiring team was taking a week between each step and the candidate lost interest. As well, you want to make sure your recruiting and hiring team is working well and making the right amount of calls per week/month as you would like, searching and finding the best candidates to apply.
Read More: Want to Build a Great Team? Get Your Interviewing Skills Up To Scratch
Offer Process
- Background and reference check time
- Time getting new hire the offer
- Acceptance of offers
Lastly, you want to know that candidates are getting an offer in a timely manner so that you do not lose your first pick. If you find your offers are not getting accepted, dig deep and figure out why. Ask the candidates why they did not accept, and check to make sure you are offering competitive benefits and salary packages.
Why Is Measurement Important to Hiring and Recruiting?
It is not cheap to have open positions on your team. It is also not cheap to be hiring and recruiting for a role for way too long, or to lose good talent, or to hire the wrong person. If you are measuring every single step, then you can identify the bottlenecks and gaps, and optimize the entire process so that you know it is running as smoothly as possible.
You can use things such as surveys, project management software, software or apps that track time management and calls (such as Salesforce), and analytics from your digital efforts on sites such as LinkedIn and Indeed, which all offer their own data for you to download. Make sure that you have someone responsible for handling the reporting and from there, make sure that senior people see this data. Data is only as good as the actions you take because of it!
It is important that conversations around your process are happening, because a lot of companies tend to “set it and forget it” when it comes to hiring and recruiting. This is a huge mistake! If your process is dated, your team is stagnant, strategy and goals are two years old, then your company could be really missing out on efficiencies and finding the right people for the jobs that you are hiring for. The best companies measure everything, so why not measure your hiring and recruiting process?
If you work with an external recruitment company, this is even more important. You want to make sure they are doing the work for you in a way that makes it worth your investment with them. If they are not being held accountable to KPIs, then you need to find another firm. How would you know that, if you did not look at the data?
Read More: Five Ways Your Hiring Process Can Lose Top Talent (And How To Stop It)
Build Out KPI’s and a Hiring Strategy – Now!
Once you have a better idea of the measurement and data, you can start building strong KPIs which ladder up to a hiring strategy. You cannot have a strategy if you have no numbers to back it up – it is that simple. In order to run a successful company, you need a strategy across the map to achieve your business objectives. Hiring 
the right people is what is going to eventually ensure the success of your broader objectives.
Measurement of your hiring and recruiting means that you can have a line of sight into every single business aspect your company does – people included! Once you get the right talent in the door, the sky is the limit. Do not have your head in the sand when it comes to your hiring process. With all of the technology available out there, there is really no excuse.
Kathbern Management is an executive search consultancy based in Toronto, helping companies find the executives and senior managers who not only have the experience and credentials to fulfill their responsibilities, but also have the emotional and “fit” requirements that will enable them to be successful in a particular environment. We simplify the process and, through our deep research, are able to bring more and better candidates forward than would ever be possible through a do-it-yourself passive advertising campaign.
Contact us today for a free consultation about your key person search.