8 Recruiting Metrics You Should Know (+ How To Leverage Them)
Hiring Remote
Collect, measure, and monitor these 8 recruiting metrics when hiring remotely to ensure your advertising and hiring processes are optimized for success.
Have you been putting your remote company’s recruiting metrics to good use?
Are you even tracking or collecting them?
Recruiting metrics are the secret sauce to boosting retention rates while slashing your hiring expenses. And once you start monitoring them, you’ll immediately spot areas in your hiring process your team can improve.
The result? Greater efficiency and better candidates in your pipeline and on your team.
So in this guide, we’ll be sharing a primer on the most important recruiting metrics you should know, how to measure them, and what you can do to leverage them for greatness.
What are Recruiting Metrics?
Recruiting metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) that give you an idea of how efficient your recruiting and hiring processes are.
You can use recruiting metrics to figure out stats like your average time to hire employees, whether your job boards are delivering qualified candidates, or if you need to update your job offers to be more competitive.
Uncovering this valuable insight may also reveal redundancies in your recruiting or onboarding processes, which may be costing you time and money.
How Do You Collect and Track Recruiting Metrics?
It’s pretty easy to identify which KPIs and recruiting metrics you want to pay attention to, but it can be challenging to monitor them.
You could use a spreadsheet to track data manually. However, this route is probably not going to work for large companies and vast datasets.
Fortunately, many applicant tracking systems (ATS) will do the heavy lifting for you. Yours probably has a dashboard to generate reports based on the metrics you’re most interested in. So don’t be intimidated by this feature, and play around with it after reading this guide.
The Top 8 Recruiting Metrics You Should Know (and How To Leverage Them)
If you obsess over collecting and improving every recruiting metric under the sun, you’ll never get any work done. So it’s best to pick a few essentials to focus on before spreading yourself too thin.
We think these eight recruiting metrics are an excellent place to start:
1. Time To Hire (TTH)
Some HR experts say time to hire is the number one recruiting metric to watch. It defines how effective and successful your recruiting and talent acquisition process really is.
Time to hire is defined as the time between when someone applies for a job to the moment they accept your offer. It’s often measured in days. And you can either measure it per employee or take an average for all your vacant positions.
Long TTH costs your company money. And if you leave your top candidates dangling for too long, they may accept positions elsewhere, and you’ll miss out.
Speed and efficiency are the name of the game here. The best candidates are often snatched up ASAP, so your team needs to be laser-focused on pushing top talent through your hiring process quickly.
To do that, take a deep dive into how long it takes candidates to move through each stage and see if you can find specific areas to work on.
Software like Talview allows hiring teams to screen, give assessments, and interview candidates within a single online platform to make life easier.
2. Source of Hire (SOH)
The source of hire recruiting metric shows you which channel is most effective for bringing in qualified candidates.
Hiring teams have so many sources for talent acquisition, from your careers page and employee referrals to external recruiters and online job boards. So do you know which source brings in the most new hires?
Once you do, you can direct more money, time, and attention to those sources while minimizing spend on underperforming channels.
Your ATS reports will show you where candidates come from. Web analytics will also help you track candidate engagement across your website and social media channels. But you can also add a question to your application to ask candidates where they heard about the position.
To find your best SOH manually, take the total number of candidates from each source and divide it by the number of candidates you interviewed or hired.
To go a step further, you may also want to compare sourcing channel costs (SCC). These are calculated as the total amount you spend posting and advertising on each channel divided by the number of qualified candidates or new hires you receive as a result.
Leveraging both SOH and SCC may help you find more top remote talent for less, so it definitely pays to track these recruiting metrics.
3. Cost Per Hire
Cost per hire refers to all the expenses associated with filling a single position. It typically includes costs such as advertising the opportunity, recruiter fees, subscribing for assessment software, referral bonuses, etc.
Understanding this recruiting metric will help you set and stay within a reasonable budget. It will also illuminate where your hiring team’s money is being spent and whether it’s worth it.
To calculate your CPH, take your total internal and external recruiting costs for a specific period and divide it by the total number of hires in that same time frame.
So let’s say you spent $12,000 to hire three candidates in one quarter. Your average cost per hire would be $4,000 (12,000 / 3=4,000).
4. Application Completion Rate
Application completion rate, application abandonment rate, and application drop-off rate are often used interchangeably. This recruiting metric highlights the percentage of candidates who actually complete your application process versus those who start but never finish.
You may not think you need to calculate this metric if you’re getting an overwhelming stack of resumes. But this number can clue you in to other areas to work on.
For example, a low application completion rate might alert you to a technical glitch you may not be aware of. And if your application process isn’t optimized for mobile devices, many top candidates will be too frustrated to even begin. Same if you ask too many confusing questions or require candidates to submit lots of personal information.
On the other hand, a high application completion rate signals good news for your organization. Candidates are eager to apply. And an easy, intuitive, enjoyable application process says a lot about your brand. It also boosts your candidate experience.
So check your ATS dashboard for this stat, or Google Analytics for your career portal.
Application completion rate can be calculated by taking the total number of completed applications and dividing it by the total number of applications started.
5. Qualified Candidates Per Hire
The qualified candidates per hire metric measures the number of candidates who make it past the first stage of your hiring process.
You can define this as the number of candidates who make it through the first screening call, are scheduled for an interview, or pass a skills assessment.
To measure this recruiting metric, take the total number of candidates you consider qualified and want to consider for the role and divide it by the total number of applicants for the position.
So if you liked 10 applicants out of the 200 who applied, your qualified candidates per hire score would be 5% (10 / 200=0.05).
Low scores here mean your team may need to:
- Learn how to write a remote job listing that sells
- Update your career portal to better explain your company culture
- Post your job ads on niche job boards (like the best job board for remote workers!)
- Add more qualifying or disqualifying questions to your applications, so ATS automatically weeds out candidates who aren’t the right fit
High scores prove your recruiting, job ads, and advertising are working well to attract the best candidates. Go, you!
6. Diversity
Companies are increasingly striving to improve their diversity and gender mix.
As we discussed in our guide on Signs a Remote Company is Committed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Millennial and Gen Z candidates are looking for companies that prioritize DE&I in the workplace. Diverse organizations are also more profitable, productive, and innovative than their competitors who don’t set DE&I goals.
So to measure diversity in your recruiting, take your number of new hires and divide it by your DE&I hiring goals.
For example, let’s say you hoped to hire 10 female software developers in one year. You hired six. So your team met 60% of its diversity hiring goal (6 / 10=0.6).
Use this recruiting metric and your historical hiring data to see where unconscious bias may be creeping into your recruiting efforts. Then learn the top 10 things to change and act on in your inclusive hiring practices to improve this.
7. Offer Acceptance Rate
Offer acceptance rate is pretty straightforward; it’s the percentage of candidates who accept your job offers.
High offer acceptance rates say you’re doing all the right things to build a high-performing remote team.
Low offer acceptance rates may signify that your offer isn’t competitive or attractive enough to lure talent your way. You may need to beef up your employee benefits package or follow some of the best hiring practices successful remote companies do.
To measure offer acceptance rates, take the number of accepted offers and divide it by the total number of candidates you’ve made offers to within the same time frame.
So if you made 10 offers this year, but only four candidates accepted, your offer acceptance rate would be 40% (4 / 10=0.4).
8. First-Year Attrition Rate
Another straightforward recruiting metric is first-year attrition rate. It measures what percentage of your new hires actually stay on board for their first year.
After recruiting, keeping talent around should be your company’s top priority. High retention not only boosts employee morale and team productivity, it also keeps your cost per hire down.
Every time you have to hit the hiring boards again means spending more money and wasting more time to fill a position you should have gotten right the first time.
So high first-year attrition rates could signal that your job ads don’t match the actual job responsibilities or job duties. Or it could mean your team needs to learn how to retain remote talent.
You might want to also consider using these best practices for your virtual onboarding process to make new remote hires feel welcomed and invested on day one.
Now Let’s Put these Recruiting Metrics To Work!
Thanks to the 2021 Great Resignation, remote companies are operating in a candidate-driven market. And if you aren’t leveraging your recruiting metrics, you could miss out on in-demand top talent.
So start using these eight recruiting metrics to help your team make better, smarter, data-driven decisions today. And always use the best job board to find stellar remote workers: We Work Remotely!
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