In today’s competitive hiring landscape, tracking the right recruiting KPIs is no longer optional — it’s the foundation of effective recruitment analytics.
Recruiting KPIs (key performance indicators) are essential metrics that help talent acquisition teams measure performance and improve outcomes. But metrics alone aren’t enough. That’s where recruitment analytics comes in — a broader strategy that combines data collection, trend analysis, and predictive insights to drive smarter, faster, and more equitable hiring decisions.
If you’re looking to refine your hiring strategy, this guide will walk you through the most essential recruiting KPIs. You'll learn how to measure each one, why it matters, and how it fits into a scalable recruitment analytics framework that enables continuous improvement.
1. Time-to-Fill (TTF)
What it is: The number of days between when a job is posted and when an offer is accepted.
How to Measure: Total days to fill all open roles ÷ number of hires.
Why it Matters: Time-to-fill reveals inefficiencies in your hiring process. A long TTF may mean bottlenecks in sourcing, screening, or approvals. On the flip side, a short TTF isn’t always good news if quality is suffering. Senior roles naturally take longer to fill than technical roles, which often require speed.
2. Quality of Hire (QoH)
What it is: A composite metric reflecting new hire performance, retention, and cultural fit.
How to Measure: There’s no single formula, but companies often combine first-year performance scores, retention rates, and ramp-up speed. Here’s a good starting point.
Why it Matters: Quality of hire ensures you’re not just filling seats — you’re hiring people who thrive. It’s a central metric in any recruitment analytics strategy, revealing how well your hiring efforts translate into long-term value.
3. Source of Hire
What it is: Tracks which channel (referrals, job boards, sourcing tools, etc.) your hires came from.
How to Measure: Use your ATS or recruiting platform to tag each applicant’s source.
Why it Matters: Recruitment analytics thrives on attribution. Knowing your most effective sources helps you focus spending and time where it yields the highest ROI. Here’s how to improve yours.
4. Candidate Satisfaction
What it is: A reflection of how candidates feel about your application and interview experience.
How to Measure: Use candidate surveys or a post-interview Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Why it Matters: Your candidate experience is part of your brand. Positive interactions encourage future applications and referrals, while poor experiences damage reputation and pipeline health.
5. Offer Acceptance Rate
What it is: The percentage of candidates who accept offers out of those extended.
How to Measure: (Offers accepted ÷ offers extended) x 100
Why it Matters: If your offer acceptance rate is low, candidates may be opting for better packages or rejecting culture fit. Recruitment analytics here helps assess gaps between candidate expectations and your offer strategy. Benchmark here.
6. Cost per Hire
What it is: The total cost associated with hiring divided by the number of hires made.
How to Measure: (Total recruiting expenses ÷ number of hires)
Why it Matters: Tracking cost per hire allows better budgeting and helps identify waste. Use it to optimize your recruitment spend while maintaining quality.
7. Retention Rate
What it is: The percentage of employees who stay beyond a specified period (usually 1 year).
How to Measure: (Remaining employees ÷ total new hires) x 100
Why it Matters: Low retention means more backfilling, higher training costs, and team instability. Learn how to improve it as part of a holistic hiring strategy.
8. Applicant Drop-off Rate
What it is: The percentage of candidates who start but don’t complete your application process.
How to Measure: (Incomplete applications ÷ total started applications) x 100
Why it Matters: This KPI flags friction points in your candidate journey. High drop-off often means your process is too long, confusing, or poorly communicated. Fix it fast.
9. Cost of Vacancy (CoV)
What it is: The estimated revenue lost or cost incurred while a role remains unfilled.
How to Measure: Average daily value generated by the role × number of days unfilled
Why it Matters: Vacancies are expensive. Recruitment analytics reveals which open roles are creating the most business risk so you can prioritize accordingly. Here's the math.
10. Time-to-Hire
What it is: Time between a candidate entering your pipeline and accepting the offer.
Why it’s different from Time-to-Fill: Time-to-hire measures your internal process efficiency; time-to-fill includes external factors.
Why it matters: Highlights inefficiencies in interviews, decision-making, or offer stages.
11. Application Completion Rate
What it is: Percentage of candidates who complete the job application after starting it.
Why it matters: Helps you spot whether forms are too long, confusing, or mobile-unfriendly. A dip may signal UX friction.
12. Interview-to-Offer Ratio
What it is: The number of interviews conducted per offer extended.
Why it matters: High ratios could indicate poor screening or misalignment in candidate expectations.
13. Hiring Manager Satisfaction
What it is: Post-hire feedback from hiring managers on the quality of candidates and the recruiting process.
Why it matters: Provides qualitative insight into the perceived success of hires beyond performance data.
14. Diversity of Pipeline
What it is: The demographic breakdown of your candidate pipeline (gender, ethnicity, etc.).
Why it matters: A vital component of recruitment analytics tied to DE&I goals. Helps track bias and outreach equity.
15. Sourcing Channel Efficiency
What it is: Measures hires per channel versus cost, time-to-hire, and retention.
Why it matters: Combines multiple KPIs into a channel-specific ROI measure — helps decide where to double down.
16. First-Year Attrition Rate
What it is: Percentage of new hires who leave within 12 months (voluntarily or involuntarily).
Why it matters: High rates often indicate a mismatch in expectations or poor onboarding.
17. Forecasting Cost-Per-Hire Based on Seasonal Hiring Surges
What it is: Using historical hiring data to anticipate how much it will cost to fill roles during seasonal peaks (e.g., Q4 retail or post-funding tech hiring).
Why it matters: Accurate forecasting lets you better plan budgets, adjust strategy early, and avoid costly surprises when hiring needs spike.
18. Predicting Role-Specific Time-to-Fill Using Historical Data
What it is: Leveraging past time-to-fill data by department, title, or level to estimate how long future roles will take to fill.
Why it matters: Supports better hiring timeline planning, stakeholder expectation-setting, and resource allocation based on real trends—not guesses.
19. Identifying Traits Common to High-Retention Hires
What it is: Using recruitment analytics to uncover shared characteristics (skills, backgrounds, sources) among long-tenured, high-performing employees.
Why it matters: Helps refine your ideal candidate profile and improves quality-of-hire by focusing on what actually predicts success and longevity.
Why Recruitment Analytics Makes KPIs Actionable
KPIs tell you what’s happening — but recruitment analytics tells you why and what to do next.
When you track these KPIs in isolation, you get fragments. But when you combine them through analytics, you see patterns: maybe your time-to-fill is down, but your quality of hire and retention are suffering. Or your cost-per-hire looks great, but you're underinvesting in sources that produce long-term employees.
Recruitment analytics adds this context. It connects KPIs across time periods, departments, geographies, and roles to help you make strategic improvements — not just tactical tweaks.
Closing Thoughts
Mastering your recruiting KPIs is just the start. To truly compete in today’s hiring market, you need the broader perspective and predictive power of recruitment analytics.
Ready to level up your hiring performance? Fetcher provides automated sourcing plus a built-in analytics dashboard that helps you track KPIs, measure ROI, and uncover the insights that move the needle.
