Recruiting KPIs — key performance indicators – are how organizations measure the effectiveness of their talent acquisition process and the performance of individual recruiters.
KPIs are not exclusive to the recruiting and HR function. All departments and businesses have KPIs, even if they call them by some other name.
Retailers, for example, measure “sales per square foot” and “customer retention,” among other KPIs. Restaurant KPIs include “revenue per available seat hour” and “table turn rate,” a metric that tells the manager how often new customers occupy a table.
Typical Recruiting KPIs
As with all other company operations, recruiting has multiple KPIs to measure different aspects of the talent acquisition function. The most familiar and most often used among them are these:
- Time to fill: The time from the point at which a recruiter receives the job requisition to the day the hired person starts work.
- Time to hire: The time from when a candidate first applies to the time they accept an offer.
- Cost per hire: The cost of making a hire.
- Quality of hire: How well the hire performs in the job.
- Diversity: The number of diversity candidates hired and as a percent of all hires.
- Source of hire: How did the person hired find out about the job.
There are literally dozens of other KPIs. The larger and more data-driven the organization, the more likely it is to also include candidate and hiring manager satisfaction, conversion rates (the number of job seekers who after clicking into a job posting go on to apply), offer acceptance rate, and first months retention.
Individual recruiter KPIs are similar to those for the entire talent acquisition function. In addition to the first four on our list, companies increasingly are including an individual diversity KPI in judging recruiter performance. Typically this includes the number of diverse candidates sourced, presented and hired.
Recruiter KPIs also include individual productivity and effectiveness measures such as the number of open jobs each recruiter has on average, the number of interviews to offer and also to hire, and the number of jobs filled by the recruiter.
What are the most important recruiting KPIs?
Ask a dozen talent acquisition leaders and all of the ones we’ve highlighted will be on their list. Each will also have a number of other KPIs reflecting their importance to their organization and its strategic objectives.
Companies looking to measure the effectiveness of their various recruitment marketing channels will want to know more than just the source of hire. They’ll look at where the applications are coming from and which of them yields the highest percentage of candidates selected for interviews. That KPI will be a source conversion rate.
Other companies will want to evaluate the candidate experience. That KPI may be built around a measure of improvement in candidate satisfaction.
Visier, the HR data analytics firm, lists KPIs to show the direct impact of talent acquisition on a company’s strategic goals. Such KPis as “revenue per employee,” “new hires that become innovators and top performers,” and the “dollar impact of recruiting on the business” require a high level of data sophistication, but are powerful tools for recruiting to demonstrate its importance to the organization.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” said management guru Peter Drucker.
KPIs make it possible to measure an organization’s recruiting effectiveness and help improve it. By comparing an organization’s KPIs to those of others in the industry and to businesses generally, they serve as a scorecard, showing where the recruiting team is performing well and what needs improvement.
Contribution by John Zappe
