5 Recruitment Metrics You Should Track In 2021
Why should you track data as a recruiter?
Tracking recruitment metrics is a good way to measure the effectiveness of your recruitment process. It also gives you an overview of the quality of your work across different tasks. These tasks range from sourcing, interviewing, sending reachout letters, to making offers to the candidate.
Data can be a cornerstone for your decisions on how to do things better. It can also give you a better understanding about what are your strengths and weaknesses as a recruiter. And if you know that, you’ll be able to work and plan your time more efficiently.
For instance, if you know how much time it takes for you to fill a role and where the best candidates come from, you will know how to plan your recruitment budget.
Or, if you know you are a strong sourcer, but lack interviewing skills, you may allocate extra time to learn more about conducting job interviews.
To put it simply, the purpose of tracking recruitment metrics is to know what you are doing, how you are doing it and then making decisions based on that.
Can I be a good recruiter if I don’t track data?
Relying on your gut-feeling to make recruitment-related decisions can only take you so far.
To be a great recruiter, you must know your numbers.
See, if you don’t track any data, you don’t know where to make improvements. And if you can’t make improvements, you aren’t efficient. In other words, you work hard, not smart.
That’s why here at TalentHub, we started tracking different recruitment metrics. We wanted to know what areas we are already good at, and what we need to work on. If it took too long for us to hire a candidate, was the problem in our reach out messages, screenings or was it something else?
Tracking data not only allows you to identify these problems, but also allows you to prepare yourself for future roles you’ll be hiring for.
Five recruitment metrics every recruiter should track
1. Time to Fill
Why is this important to track?
Time to fill is quite a common recruitment metric, which can be used to measure your recruitment efficiency. It measures how many days it takes for you to fill the position from the day the opening was approved.
Unlike time to hire (another popular recruitment metric), which measures how many days it takes for a candidate to go from applying to accepting the offer, time to fill takes into consideration the whole recruitment process.
The recruitment process knowingly consists of different stages, such as sourcing, screening, interviews, home tasks and finally … the offer stage. If, let’s say, you expect to fill a role within 40 days, and your actual time to fill is 90 days, then it is a clear indication that you need to make some changes within your process.
How do you track it?
To calculate your time to fill, you need to take the date the job opening was approved, as well as the date your candidate signs the contract. The number of days between the two dates is your time to fill.
What is the average for this metric?
According to SHRM, an average time-to-fill is 36 days. This, of course, depends on the role. For example, hiring a software development lead may take twice or even triple the time.
2. Average days in stage
Why is this important to track?
Once you track your time to fill, you have to dissect the time between different stages of the recruitment process. That way, if your time to fill is too long, you’ll know during which stages you can be more efficient. In other words, in which stages do your candidates spend too much time? Is it the interviews, the home task round or is it the offer stage? Tracking the average days your candidate spends in each stage allows you to identify these problems.
How do you track it?
Dissect your recruitment process into different stages, from sourcing all the way to the offer stage. Then, track how many days each candidate spends in each stage.
What is the average for this metric?
That really depends on the stage. For instance, if your candidate spends two weeks in the interview stage without a decision, then that’s too long.
Or if you make your candidate wait 10 days for an offer, then don’t be surprised if they have already decided to go with another company.
3. Pass through conversion rate
Why is this important to track?
By now, you know your time to fill as well as the time your candidates spend in each stage of the recruitment process.
Now, it’s time to see how many candidates convert from one stage to another. What is the conversion rate from candidates moving from screening to the interview round, from the home task to the offer stage?
This is important to track to see how effectively you are working. Are your reachout messages good enough? Are screened candidates going through to the interview stage? It allows you to analyze, in which part of the recruitment process do candidates fall out.
For instance, if all your candidates pass through the screening round, but only a few of them make it past the home task stage, then maybe you have to change something in your screening call.
Furthermore, tracking this metric allows you to do reverse planning. To put it simply, you will know how many candidates you have to source and screen in order to get a hire.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you reach out to 47 people regarding a senior software engineering role.
Out of those 47 people, 26 people respond to your message.
Out of the 26 candidates that respond, 7 go into screening.
All of the 7 candidates get a home task, but only 3 make it through to the final interview stage.
2 out of the three candidates end up getting an offer.
One candidate rejects the offer, the other one accepts.
In the end, you sourced 47 candidates, out of which one candidate got hired.
Next time you are hiring a senior software engineer, you will know you have to send a reachout message to around 50 candidates.
How do you track it?
This metric is best tracked in an applicant tracking system (ATS), such as Greenhouse or Loxo (that’s what we use at TalentHub). However, you can also track the conversion rate manually in an Excel sheet.
What is the average for this metric?
According to Lever, these are the average conversion rates in the recruitment funnel.
- 17% – Candidate to screening conversion rate
- 32% – Screening to interview conversion rate
- 31% – Interview to offer conversion rate
- 1.2% – Candidate to hired conversion rate
4. Offer acceptance rate
Why is this important to track?
In today’s competitive landscape, offer acceptance rate is one of the most important recruitment metrics to track. This is because you’ll want to know how attractive your company is to candidates compared to other organizations.
The last thing you want is to put in hours of effort into sourcing, interviewing and assessing candidates just for them to decline the job offer. If that happens, you’ll need to collect feedback and make sure it doesn’t happen again in the future.
How do you track it?
The calculation for an offer acceptance rate is straightforward: just take the number of accepted job offers and divide it with the total number of job offers given within a period of time.
What is the average for this metric?
The industry average for offer acceptance rate is 64%. This means out of the 100 candidates you make an offer to, 64 will accept.
If your offer acceptance rate is lower than that, it may mean you need to take a careful look at your offer and your candidate experience. Maybe your salaries aren’t competitive enough or your hiring process is just too slow.
5. Source of hire
Why is this important to track?
Don’t forget that data can also be qualitative. Once you have found your suitable (and unsuitable) candidates, you need to track the channels they are coming from. Is it referrals, LinkedIn, Stack Overflow, or other job boards?
Tracking source of hire gives you a good overview which channels work well and which ones don’t. Then, in the future, once you have a similar role on the table, you’ll be able to focus only on the channels that have worked in the past, and invest more resources into those.
For instance, let’s say you’ve hired 30 people in the past year. Data shows that 15 of those were directly sourced through LinkedIn (50%), 10 applied through job boards (33%) and 5 of them were referred (17%).
Now, you can use data like this to make future decisions relating to allocating your recruitment budget between different channels.
How do you track it?
Again, source of hire can be most easily tracked using an applicant tracking system. Whilst using an Excel spreadsheet is possible, it can be time-consuming.
What is a good average for this metric?
In this case, there is no “average” standard to aim for. Tracking this data simply gives you information where the most quality candidates are coming from, which helps you make strategic decisions relating to your future recruitment efforts.
