7 Crucial Recruiting KPIs to Track and Why

At a glance

• The main takeaway: HR teams can’t evaluate and improve their recruiting efforts if they don’t measure them with appropriate metrics.
• Impact on your business: Establishing KPIs for different points of the recruiting cycle allows HR teams to hire more capable talent with greater success and reinforce their value to leadership.
• Next steps: Using Aprio Talent Solutions can help companies and their HR teams level up their recruiting processes and gain access to tools that offer intelligent data and insights.

Schedule a consultation with Aprio today

The full story:

Management consultant, author and educator Peter Drucker famously said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Drucker’s sentiment has resonated across all areas of business, including talent acquisition and recruiting. Why?

Measuring the results of your recruiting practices not only helps you improve your efforts and hire better, more qualified candidates; it also helps your HR team reinforce the value it provides to your organization as a whole.

There are several key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics your HR team can use to measure the success of your new hires and recruiting efforts:

1. Time to hire

Time to hire is one of the most popular KPIs that HR professionals and recruiters track. This metric measures how long a position is vacant for, or how long it takes for you to fill a position after an existing employee resigns from it.

Time to hire can also represent the average length of your recruitment cycle, from the moment a candidate applies for the position to the moment they accept your offer. This particular component of the KPI matters because a long time-to-hire period can have several negative effects. For instance, the longer your team takes to extend an offer, the longer members of the department with the vacant position are picking up the slack of a missing employee. What’s more, a longer time-to-hire period leads to poor candidate experiences — including rejected offers in favor of competitors or negative reviews of your company that diminish your brand.

2. Quality of hire

How well do candidates fit the roles you’re hiring for? Is your recruiting team accurately explaining the expectations of the role so that candidates’ expectations are aligned? These questions are critical to improving quality-of-hire results. The KPI is defined exactly how it sounds: it measures the “quality” of the candidates who are applying for vacant positions in terms of skills, expertise, educational and industry background, cultural fit and job knowledge.

Tools you can use to measure the quality of a hire include:

• Employee engagement surveys, particularly with regard to organizational culture, relationships, and environmental, sustainability and governance (ESG) commitment
• Exit and stay interviews
• Performance reviews
• Manager feedback

Once you develop a consistent framework for measuring quality of hire internally, you can use this data to compare new employees to more seasoned employees and assess their level of job satisfaction and success.

3. Quality of hiring resources and tools

How effective are your hiring channels? Are you securing a solid ROI from your chosen channels, or are you posting positions that sit for months on end? Are you receiving applications from too many unqualified candidates, or are you hearing from qualified candidates as well? These are the questions you should continually ask when evaluating your hiring tools and platforms. Not only can poor channels diminish ROI, but they can also lead to employment brand ramifications and poor credibility. Make sure the tools you’re using add value and are consistent with the image you want to portray in the marketplace.

4. Skills evaluation

Like many organizations with specialized positions, you may require a skills evaluation test as part of your hiring and interview process. It’s important to reassess your evaluation and testing criteria on a regular basis. How well do your tests assess strong performance in the role? Are they relevant to the actual job you’re asking candidates to do? For instance, you may have a copywriting candidate who aces your writing test, but they start the job and realize it requires a completely different editorial skill set. If possible, design your tests so that they recreate a real project the team is working on and represent the bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQs) associated with the position.

5. Offer acceptance

This KPI measures the rate at which candidates are accepting jobs with your organization. What does the offer acceptance process look like? How many “Grade A” hires did you attract versus “Grade B” hires? Are candidates countering for more money in the way of salary compared to what you budgeted for? Different organizations use different measurements for success when it comes to offer acceptance. Ultimately, you should strive for complete offers with staying power, versus offers that fall through at the last minute due to misaligned salary expectations, among other reasons.

6. Salary benchmarks

Going forward, salary benchmarking will be an increasingly important KPI for recruiting teams to track, as some states are requiring companies to include salary ranges in job postings to create more transparency. When measuring salary benchmarks, ask yourself: what do salaries look like between new and existing hires? Are the offers you’re extending equitable compared to your current employee base? Asking these questions at the outset will ensure greater pay equity and improve long-term employee satisfaction and retention.

7. Diversity

The business case for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) has long been apparent. Eighty-five percent of CEOs with diverse, inclusive cultures have seen increased profits. Organizations with gender-diverse teams earn 41% more revenue, while companies with racially and ethnically diverse teams are 35% more likely to perform better in the market.

Make sure that you design a KPI that measures the success of DEI in your recruitment approaches and set up checkpoints for continuous feedback so that you can improve your efforts over time.

The bottom line

Once you have identified the right KPIs, you may find that you need support in tracking them and upgrading your recruiting efforts. The Aprio Talent Solutions Team can implement data and analytics tools within your organization to help monitor your KPIs. Plus, we can provide the services you need to find qualified candidates that can propel your business to new heights. We have a deep network of high-performing professionals, which allows us to connect top candidates with top job opportunities across the US and Canada.

Schedule a consultation with our team today.

Related resources

• About Aprio Talent Solutions
• Top Tools to Help Businesses Attract Better Talent, Faster
• 4 Flexible Recruiting Solutions for Growing Businesses