Using Recruitment Metrics in Getting the Right Candidate

A company's main asset is its workforce. It goes without saying that when a company needs people, it needs to get the right people. Otherwise, productivity would be compromised and expenditures increased. As it is the HR department's responsibility to hire people for the company, it is their job to protect the company from these possible losses. The HR recruitment staff cannot just accept nor discard applicants without just measure. Thus, recruitment metrics comes about.

Though there are many different types of metrics, they drive at one common goal. This is getting the right, if not the best, applicant for a job. The process of hiring people in the past has somewhat limited metrics to cost-per-hire and time-to-fill. Cost-per-hire, as its name suggests, looks at the recruitment cost in relation to the positions filled. This is the most common measure in recruiting. Given the many direct and indirect costs involved in recruitment, there is no universal formula in calculating this expense. Though this measure is important, it has one big flaw. It only focuses on the initial cost of recruiting. It does not take into consideration long-term costs, such as whether the recruit will be productive or not.

Time-to-fill, on the other hand, measures how long it took to fill the position from start to hire date. This calculates the costs associated with positions while it was left vacant. As with cost-per-hire, its downside is also not taking into consideration long-term costs. To fill the position faster, HR recruitment runs the risk of hiring the best among their pool of candidates, even if he does not exactly fit the position. In the long run, they may just incur additional costs for hiring the wrong person.

In addition to the basic screening of applicants, a more modern metric takes into consideration the performance and quality of new hires. This is perhaps one of the most important metric when hiring candidates. Quality, in this sense, is not quantitative. The company's standards for quality have to be clearly established even before recruitment begins. The recruiters and hiring managers should already set the standards so they know exactly what to look for in prospective candidates. However, quality measure does not stop once the recruitment team has hired the best person for the job. Performance appraisal of the new hire on his first 90-180 days in production would also be part of the metrics.

Another important metric that recruiters practice is manager satisfaction. This looks into how satisfied the organization and the hiring managers are with the new hires as well as with the hiring process. This data starts with the managers' preferences prior to recruiting and are assessed after the employee has been on the job for some time.

There are many other important recruitment metrics that are being practiced today. Among these are source of hire, referrals, and even candidate satisfaction. The first one looks into the percentage and quality of new hires from different defined sources. This metric lets the recruitment staff focus on their sourcing strategy. For the referrals metric, recruiters tap existing employees for referral of new candidates. Recent studies have shown that this generates the best performing hires. Lastly, there is the candidate satisfaction where the focus is on what the applicants think about the quality of service provided by the recruitment team.

By Sam Miller

Using Recruitment Metrics in Getting the Right Candidate