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Receive the latest on recruitment automation directly to your inbox
March 8, 2024
4 min read
Marketing Specialist at Talkpush
The success of a recruitment team depends heavily on both their mastery of the medium they use and the behavior of their target audience. Just like in sales, recruitment is all about numbers. Numbers provide a clear picture of how candidates interact with the company and its sourcing channels. Ideally, managers focus on specific data points to determine which part of the recruitment process needs optimization.
Recruitment teams need access to in-depth analytics of their channels. Without it, how would they know the performance of each one?
But numbers alone don’t mean anything—they must be transformed into actionable insights. With quantifiable data, you can create brilliant analyses on how to reduce recruitment costs, optimize the recruitment process (find out which channels work best with your audience and provide the highest return on investment), and help establish meaningful key performance indicators aligned with your recruitment process.
In recruitment, speed is the name of the game. Candidates are becoming increasingly impatient with traditional recruitment timelines and delays in communication.
Therefore, speed-based metrics highlight the team’s efficiency and provide insight into the candidate experience.
This metric counts the number of days between when a job is officially posted and when a candidate is hired. In 2020, the global benchmark was 42 days, but the average time to fill across industries ranged between 14 and 63 days.
This is an important metric because a shorter time to fill equals time saved! This means increased productivity and reduced cost per hire since less time is spent on each requisition.
Our advice? Don’t just wait for candidates to apply! Having a strong employee referral program and an established candidate database can serve as a great talent reserve to make your next hire.
This metric measures how long it takes for a candidate to reach the hiring stage after applying. The complexity of the application process plays a big role, as the more complex the process, the higher this metric is likely to be. Currently, the global benchmark for time to hire across industries is 26 days.
However, it’s best to keep your time to hire as short as possible for two main reasons.
First, the longer the process, the more likely the completion rate will drop.
Second, companies with shorter hiring times will use that opportunity to snatch up the best candidates for the job.
The good news is that you can significantly reduce your time to hire to one or two weeks by automating your recruitment process.
Interested? Schedule a demo to review your process and learn how Talkpush can automate 95% of it!
Depending on how your process is set up—if you use a CRM like Talkpush, for example—the folders in your campaigns will give you a good indication of where your candidates are in the process.
With this, you can track the average time it takes for candidates to progress through each recruitment stage. This allows you to identify opportunities for improving the process by detecting bottlenecks and reviewing areas where candidates face unnecessary delays.
Time to complete is not a typical recruitment metric because it can be difficult to measure how long it takes candidates to submit their applications. However, with Talkpush, you can track how long it takes for a candidate to start and complete their application when they do the pre-screening interview.
With the convenience of applying to multiple jobs from a smartphone, 20% of today’s candidates spend no more than 20 minutes on an application.
However, candidates are selective about where they invest their time. If pre-screening takes more than five minutes to complete, a significant number of candidates are likely to drop out of the process.
Therefore, time to complete affects the completion rate and sets the tone for the candidate experience.
Of course, in recruitment, it’s not all about speed (though that’s half the battle). You also need to be able to produce quantifiable results.
These results mainly come in the form of potential candidate numbers and conversions. Quantity-based metrics determine how effective your team’s efforts have been in attracting candidates.
Similar to the time to complete metric, the application completion rate emphasizes how many candidates have (or have not) completed their application at the start of the process. This is particularly important as a low completion rate immediately signals a possible blockage preventing candidates from proceeding with their application.
These blockages can range from something simple, like an interface that isn’t user-friendly enough, to more complex issues, like a system-browser compatibility problem.
That said, if there’s no apparent issue causing candidates to be blocked and the completion rate is still low, the problem might be with the application format. If it contains more than 25 questions (which should be more than enough), candidates are likely to abandon their applications midway through the process.
A recruitment funnel starts with sourcing and ends with a signed contract. Generally, the natural flow is that the number of candidates narrows as they progress through each stage.
However, you must ensure there aren’t any drastic reductions from one stage to another, as this could indicate a significant drop-off rate.
Consequently, this metric measures how many candidates reach each stage of the process and allows you to analyze at which point candidates begin to lose interest.
Applications per channel refer to the total number of applications received from each recruitment channel and determine the job offer’s popularity. A large number of applicants for the same offer is not necessarily a good sign, as it could mean there is high demand for that type of job among job seekers. It could also mean the job description is too general.
By increasing the complexity of the job description and including a few “tough” requirements, the total number of applicants should decrease without losing qualified candidates. However, if the number of applications per job offer is low, it could mean you’re using the wrong sourcing channel to attract your desired talent.
Channel effectiveness by hire can be measured by the total number of hires you get from each of your sourcing channels. These typically include:
A study by PageUp shows that more than half of all applications are submitted via job boards, but only 17% of these convert into hires.
Meanwhile, applications from companies’ talent pools make up only 2% of total applications but account for 22% of total company hires.
This means that re-engaging with your existing talent pipeline is 34 times more effective than job boards at producing successful hires.
But don’t worry, re-engaging with these candidates doesn’t have to be tedious work thanks to high-volume automated messaging in the Talkpush CRM.
Simply put, the offer acceptance rate compares how many candidates accepted the job offer versus the total who received it.
A low acceptance rate could suggest potential compensation issues—try to discuss salary earlier in the recruitment process to minimize rejections during the offer stage.
However, this is a fairly rare scenario, as the benchmark acceptance rate across all industries is 95%. If your acceptance rate is lower than that, it’s time to think about transparency, clear communication of benefits, and setting expectations from day one.
The selection rate, also known as the hire ratio or candidate-to-hire ratio, compares the number of candidates hired against the total number of applicants.
Quality-based metrics allow a company to ensure they didn’t waste their money! They assess whether all the resources (capital) invested in the recruitment process succeeded in producing quality candidates and competent new hires.
Yes, it’s possible to measure happiness (sort of). The candidate experience metric attempts to represent in numbers how candidates perceived your selection process, employer brand, and the likelihood of referring you to others.
It’s typically calculated using the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which can be gathered by asking candidates who have completed their application questions about quality, speed, and communication during the process using a scale from 1 to 10, 1 to 5 stars, or even smiley faces—you choose.
Some examples include:
This metric measures how much each hire costs through each channel. The formula is simple: divide the advertising cost of each platform by the number of hires made.
It’s crucial to stay on top of this metric because you could be losing money without realizing it if some channels produce potential candidates but not enough qualified ones.
This metric is typically measured using the first-year performance of a new hire. It’s essential because a bad hire can cost more than $10,000 in investment.
It’s especially important in high-volume recruitment because it helps talent acquisition teams identify undesirable trends in the recruitment process, flag unqualified candidates early, and optimize the process.
That said, one bad hire doesn’t mean your entire recruitment process is flawed.
Instead, focus on keeping your success rate (number of high-performing hires divided by the total number of hires) high! If it’s low, it indicates there’s a significant problem with your selection process.
Also known as the first-year turnover rate, this metric tells you the rate at which your candidates stay with the company beyond their first year. In some industries, like BPO or retail, a low retention rate is not alarming—seasonal hiring, part-time work, and high turnover are characteristic of the industry.
However, it’s important to note what the normal retention rate is for your industry and ensure it doesn’t fall below the standard.
You can increase retention in high-volume recruitment with a bit of transparency at the start of the process. When a candidate leaves, it usually indicates they had unrealistic expectations, such as a mismatch between the job description and the actual work.
Last but certainly not least, this is one of the most important metrics—your total recruitment cost divided by the total number of hires.
This isn’t just the cost of ads or job board subscriptions—it’s the cost of everything. Recruitment time, marketing, training/onboarding periods. It’s crucial that talent acquisition teams are aware of how much each hire costs the company so they can make informed budget decisions about what’s working and what’s not.
Talkpush users can review the performance of each campaign, as well as specific portions of the recruitment funnel.
For example, they can see how many potential candidates are in the arrival folder versus the pre-screened folder, or how many candidates tend to be pre-screened from specific job boards, or how many candidates are hired versus rejected on each sourcing platform.
In Talkpush, recruiters can obtain these charts in an instant:
If you’re running paid ads for open applications, don’t lose sight of these:
You can elevate your recruitment by managing your hires through our Onboarding Solution. Create workflows specifically designed to give new hires a great start in their new positions. How will you guide your new hires if they’re floating around in Talkpush folders?
Knowing what worked and what didn’t during the onboarding phase will provide lessons for future processes, helping you shape and transform how you recruit and onboard, ultimately creating extraordinary candidate experiences.
Revolutionize your marketing. 💸 You want marketing to increase your company’s recruitment performance, right? Well, it’s possible with the help of accurate data. This enables marketers and strategists to analyze the effectiveness of current marketing strategies and plans based on past results, such as:
There may be a pattern you’re missing that’s causing your company to invest money in poorly performing channels while missing better opportunities.
Want to take your metrics to the top? 🚀
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