The Top Five Recruitment Metrics To Enhance Your Hiring Strategy

Recruitment metrics can be like gold dust for recruitment teams. They can be used to provide the hard data to inform and optimise your hiring strategy, allowing a more streamlined process for both your team and candidates. They can also provide evidence which may occasionally be needed to report to leadership for changes to ineffective hiring methods or new resources you need.  Below we explore five metrics your recruitment team should consider including in your strategy.

Application completion rate

What is it?

Application completion rate measures how many of your applicants fully complete their application form and submit it to your hiring team.

Why is it important?

Application completion rate is crucial to understanding if you application process is as streamlined and simple as it needs to be in terms of being easy for your applicant to fill out and submit, while still gathering all of the information your recruitment team needs to decide which candidates should progress to the interview stage. If you application process is clunky, confusing, repetitive or too long, you risk losing valuable talent.

How do you calculate it?

The calculation for application completion rate is simple. You simply divide the number of completed applications by the total number of started applications, and then multiply by 100 to get a percentage.

Applicant to interview

What is it?

This metric is used to evaluate if your job adverts are pulling in the right talent that is strong enough to progress to the interview stage of the hiring process. For example, if your organisation receives 200 applications for a job and 25 of those applicants progress to interviewing, then the applicant to interview ration would be 8:1.

Why is it important?

Applicant to interview ratio helps your recruitment team assess your applicant screening process. If your team are often overwhelmed with a huge amount of interviews, you may be moving on too many applicants. Meanwhile, if you have very few candidates to interview, there’s a chance your hiring criteria is unrealistic or too specific.

When reviewing this metric, it’s key you also consider factors such as the current state of the market, the industry you’re hiring in, if your package is competitive, and the seniority of the role. For example, in an employer-led market, chances are you’ll be able to be a little pickier about the candidates you move onto interviewing.

How do you calculate it?

First you count the total number of applications held for the job or time frame you want to calculate the applicant to interview ration for. Next, you count the total number of interviews held for this same job or time frame. Finally, divide the number of applications by the number of interviews.

Check out our article on the five ways you may be using hiring data wrong.

Offer acceptance rate

What is it?

An offer acceptance rate, otherwise known as an OAR, refers to the percentage of your organisation’s candidates who accept a formal job offer extended to them.

Why is it important?

OAR is an important recruitment metric because it reflects on your entire hiring process. Factors which may cause candidates to reject offers include poor experience, such as with communication or constantly very long, high stress interview processes. They may have applied due to the job advert stating a flexible working policy or a competitive salary, only to find five days a week in office are compulsory and the salary is not what they had in mind – anyway, if it’s so competitive, why not put it in the job advert?

If you find your offer acceptance rate falls behind the generally acceptance benchmark of 90%, this may flag a need to survey candidates on what is preventing them from accepting your offer to try and spot any consistent issues that need addressing.

How do you calculate it?

An offer acceptance rate is calculated simply by dividing the number of offers accepted by candidates by the total number of offers given.

Quality of hire

What is it?

Quality of hire measures how much your new hire brings to your organisation once they get to work and how well they perform.

Why is it important?

Only 33% of companies feel like they’re using strong tactics to measure quality of hire while 39% of talent leaders agree that the metric is the most valuable for evaluating performance. While it’s easy to focus purely on metrics like time-to-hire or cost-per-hire in such a bottom line focused world, scoring well in these two metrics and others like them will mean very little if you’re not brining in talent that makes a positive impact and difference to your organisation.

How do you measure it?

Quality of hire doesn’t have a standard formula as what organisations consider valuable contributions from their employees can significantly differ. Performance review scores, retention rate, customer service score and rate of salary increase are popularly used. Your team may want to consider using at least five metrics to bring together when measuring your quality of hire so that a holistic approach is taken. While one employee may thrive and contribute significantly in one area, and other employee may shine better in another, and it’s a workforce with diversity of talent which often brings about the most innovative and forward-thinking workforce.

Source of hire

What is it?

Source of hire refers to where your candidates were sourced. This could be through referrals, social media job postings, or recruitment agencies.

Why is it important?

Source of hire is an excellent metric to track as part of your hiring strategy because it can be utilised in numerous ways. It can be valuable not only to see if a certain source provides your organisation with significantly more talented candidates than other sources, but also if particular sources are better for different roles. While some may seem more obvious, such as younger people flocking to social media platforms as part of their job hunt, you may notice that sources also correlate to other demographics like education level, geographic location, or desirable skills for your industry.

You may be interested to read our four tips for evaluating your recruitment marketing metrics.