As a recruiter, you’re a people person and data analytics may not top the list of things that excite you about your job. We don’t blame you! But we also know that tracking and analyzing hiring data is an essential element to your success. How can metrics make your life easier?

First off, you want to know how effective your efforts are. Metrics help you determine which sourcing channels are paying off, and which you can leave behind. Understanding your hiring metrics also allow you to predict the quality of your hires and point you to the best talent. Lastly, recruitment metrics help you evaluate your current processes and identify areas that need improvements. Fortunately, collecting these important data points doesn’t have to be overwhelming or time consuming thanks to recruiting automation tools like Fetcher.

Measuring Your Sourcing Efforts

When it comes to sourcing, there are several metrics you need to track to ensure you're finding the best talent and filling your top-of-funnel efficiently. At the top of the list is sourcing channel effectiveness. Where are most of your candidates coming from? And more importantly, where are your quality hires coming from? Perhaps recruits sourced through referral programs, on average, outperform those sourced from LinkedIn. If so, you’ll want to give more attention and resources to your referral program. Knowing which channels result in the most top-tier candidates will help you determine where to spend your recruitment marketing dollars.

Fetcher can assist with all your outbound sourcing metric needs. For each role, Fetcher records:

• The total number profiles sourced (including those sourced from Fetcher and manually sourced via our one-click LinkedIn web extension)
• Number of candidates contacted
• Percentage of outreach emails opened
• Outreach response rate
• Number of interested candidates (That’s right! Fetcher’s AI “reads” a candidate’s response and will track whether they are interested or not)

Looking for more specific metrics? Our world-class Customer Success team can pull reporting on this to help guide your decision-making.

You can also review your current recruiting metrics against what our calculator predicts. If the number of candidates contacted to get to 10 interested candidates is too high or varies widely per hire, this could be a sign that your current sourcing method is inefficient, the role you’re looking to fill isn’t clearly defined, or your interview process isn’t working.

Measuring Conversion Rates

Determining and analyzing conversion rates will inform you of the effectiveness of your email outreach and interview strategy. Subpar conversion rates can also signal wider organizational problems like poor company culture or whether or not your organization stacks up against competitors. Some important conversion rates to measure are:

• Passive Candidate Conversion Rate. This measures how many of the passive candidates you contact are interested in moving onto the interview stage. Getting a passive candidate interested is a huge sign of success because it’s harder to capture their attention. If you’re not getting much interest from passive candidates, you may want to rework your outreach messaging, job description, or careers page.
• Interview to Offer Ratio. If you’re interviewing dozens of candidates but making few offers, it may be time to reevaluate your vetting process. A low interview to offer ratio means you may be letting too many candidates into the interview process and it’s time to tighten your qualifying criteria mid-pipeline. Monitoring this ratio ensures you aren’t wasting time and effort on too many interviews with little results. On the other hand, if you are interviewing a few candidates but making a lot of offers, you’re likely not capturing the best quality talent.
• Offer to Acceptance Ratio. This ratio can help you identify where you are losing candidates. Does your company’s culture need work? Did your candidate go with a competitor that offered them a better salary? A low offer to acceptance ratio indicates that there may be a problem outside of your recruiting pipeline.

Measuring Cost and Time

Cost per hire and time to hire averages are two important metrics because they help you stay within your recruiting budget, ensure you have a sustainable hiring schedule, and can be easily understood by decision makers outside of HR.

• Cost Per Hire. This measures how much money your company spends to hire one new employee. It encapsulates dollars spent on recruitment advertising, TA software, interview travel, and labor.
• Time To Hire. This measures how long the hiring process takes from when a candidate applies (or is contacted) to when they accept the offer. You may also want to track how long a role remained vacant. While there may be a few specialized or very senior roles that take longer to hire, if your average hire time to hire is more than 3 - 4 weeks, your hiring process is inefficient.

Measuring Team Performance

Whether you run your own recruiting agency or manage an in-house talent acquisition department, it’s important to know that everyone on your team is contributing. You want to recognize team members who are performing above average and work with those who might be falling behind. Traditionally, managers gauge individual output through group stand-ups and one-on-one meetings with team members.

With Fetcher, managers can see each recruiter’s total searches, percentages of how many candidates have been vetted and contacted, candidate response rates, and number of interested candidates. With the data Fetcher captures, TA Managers have an immediate, high-level picture of individual team member contributions and how well they are nurturing their talent pipelines.

Measuring DE&I Efforts

Today, many companies are setting DE&I goals as we all work towards creating workforce equality. How can you make sure you are on the right track? From a recruiting perspective, make sure you’re measuring candidate demographics throughout the recruiting funnel.

Fetcher currently offers role-specific diversity metrics to users by request, and it will soon be a standard feature for all users! Diversity analytics help teams understand if they're over or under indexing on a particular gender or demographic and need to course correct. If you know you need to diversify your pipeline, check out our Diversity Hiring Guide for tips or schedule a demo today.

Knowing your hiring metrics is only helpful if you use the information to make improvements to your processes. Once you’ve compiled the metrics mentioned above, you can establish qualitative and quantitative goals for improvements. And best of all, with Fetcher, you won’t have to dedicate extra time to data collection and analysis as the platform captures key information for you. You’ll be continuously capturing these metrics to make sure you’re progressing towards your goals, saving you time and money.