Do you work in recruiting for a company, perhaps as a headhunter? Is it your job to make the right hires and to fill vacancies as soon as possible? Are the leaders of your company looking to you to make smart decisions for hires in the company so that the business can thrive and meet customer needs for the future? There are few things worse for a company to make hires that are not a good fit or that leave after a short period of time. 

If you’re involved in RPO and staff on any level, then read on to learn our seven top recruiting metrics that you should really care about for the future. If you’re not paying attention to these recruiting metrics, you should be. With a little research and by making tracking these metrics part of your daily workflow, you’ll gain the expert know-how to save your company money and to make the right choices for your RPO and staff workforce.

Tip #1: Tracking the Candidate Pool

As a recruiter, you’re going to be pulling candidates from many different pools. You’ll want to track this in a platform like Application Tracking System so that you can know where your top candidates are coming from and so that you can pay attention to diversification. It’s great if you can pool top candidates from one company — but that also means you may be missing out on just as qualified or even better candidates from another one. So cast your net wide while at the same time noting your top companies. You’ll get a more diverse pool in the end. 

Tip #2: Be Intentional About Diversity

And by diversity, we mean all kinds. A workforce that is diverse is going to be a more well-rounded and creative workforce. Because everyone brings something different to the table, it’s important to recruit employees who offer diversity in areas such as race, gender, and sexual orientation. Track your diversity and track how that diversity plays out in certain positions. You can have diverse workforce that still discriminates if you have all women in administrative positions and all men in senior leadership positions, for example.

Tip #3: Tracking Your Hiring Times

The time it takes from the when you post a job announcement to when you actually fill the position is a really important metric to track. When you have needed positions that are not being filled, your company is losing money. But you don’t want to hire too quickly or select the wrong person just to fill a vacancy because that can result in a premature investment especially if the person decides to leave quickly. Track averages in your industry because this statistic can change — and then determine what a good goal is for you to fill positions within your company. Sometimes it does take a little longer to fill a position because the position requires from specific qualifications and expertise. But in general, set a goal for and try to meet it.

Tip #4: Keeping Hiring Managers Accountable

Did you know that a company can loose a great day of money simply by not regulating the number of hours their hiring managers are working without a ROI (return on investment) attached to it? A hiring manager should be able to show, in dollars, how his or her hires are benefiting the company and making it money. This is going to look a little differently at every company, but the point is your hiring manager needs to work out an accountability plan with the CEO or CFO to determine what baseline he or she needs to hit every month in terms of dollars invested and dollars returned via new hires.

Tip #5: Total Cost of Investment

You’ll want to track the total cost of investment your company is making via the hiring process. Does your company have to pay a recruiting fee to a headhunter? The total cost of investment is going to help your company determine whether it is over-extending its resources with each new hire. This investment will be weighed against retention rates, of course. If that CEO you went over budget recruiting stays for 10 years, maybe you actually saved your company money. But if the reverse is true and that CEO leaves after a few months or years, then you may be costing your company a great deal of money. So track your total investment in each new hire over time.

Tip #6: Acceptance and Retention Rates

Tracking acceptance and retention rates — and how they relate to each other is extremely important. You want to know how many offers you have to make for each new position, how many acceptances and rejections you get (along with any details supporting why the applicant accepted or rejected), and how long the person stays in the position before leaving or getting promoted. By tracking this data, you’ll be able to better identify weak areas in your recruiting process or in your work culture. Sometimes they are related, but it’s always helpful to have data to show you where problem areas are and to help you tweak and redefine recruiting, hiring and managing strategies.

Tip #7: Weak vs. Strong Hires

Every company should have a baseline expectation for employee performance. From there, you can determine whether an employee is performing below, at or above average of your company’s expectations. One huge challenge hiring managers have is that they are tasked with filling vacancies left by weak hires with strong ones. There is a lot of damage that can be done by weak hires, studies show, including making your customers angry. This is going to always result in some kind of negative feedback for your company — including bad online reviews, boycotting your products, and poor word-of-mouth reviews to friends and family. So make sure you are tracking how you are replacing employees. Strive to replace weak hires with strong ones that are at or above your baseline performance expectations.

Conclusion

Keep these seven metrics in mind as you begin work each day. Depending on your position, you may find more than one of these seven pro metrics helpful in gaining insight into not only the recruiting industry but gaining insight into how you can become a better recruiter or hiring manager.

The recruiting professionals who may attention to these metrics save their companies on time, energy and most importantly, on the bottom line. That’s because when you replace weak hires with strong ones — and you fill vacancies with employees who are going to stay at your company awhile — you’re adding to the the loyalty and energetic culture that makes a company strong. Start your next work day by developing a habit of studying and deploying these metrics and you’ll begin to see a big difference in the way business gets done.