With all the focus on analytics, your hiring team can go into a data daze. You know the value of utilizing recruiting metrics during early-career recruitment, but which ones are crucial to measuring your success?
More important, how does your team use data throughout the recruiting process to push qualified candidates through the hiring funnel?
Here’s a straightforward guide that’ll show you how to analyze the efficacy of each stage in your team’s process.
No one wants to waste money. So start by measuring your sourcing effectiveness. What’s the cost of recruiting applicants through each method, and how many qualified candidates does each produce?
For instance, is digitally showcasing your employer brand cheaper and more effective than having recruiters on campus? (Spoiler alert: it is.)
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Regardless, if you’re not evaluating each source’s efficacy, your hiring team’s efforts won’t be excellent.
To support sourcing effectiveness, use Google Analytics to analyze how users are interacting with your website. GA will tell you where the users come from in the first place. Is the bounce rate on your Careers Page unusually high? (Remember that anything over 60 percent is considered a bad bounce rate.) GA can tell you that. How much time are users spending on your page? Yup, GA lets you know.
The average job application abandonment rate is 60 percent. So if your company’s is higher than that, then there are major issues to address. They can be quick-fix ones, like decreasing the amount of questions you ask applicants. Or they can be more involved ones, like overhauling your employer branding because applicants aren’t aware that your company hires for roles in fields you’re not known for. That’s a challenge Nasdaqwas able to overcome by partnering with WayUp.
Remember, the only way job applicants turn into great candidates is if they actually finish the application.
Your team should keep track of its time-to-hire, but with three different focal points from when they posted the job, according to LinkedIn:
Paying attention to all three helps you understand where—and why—candidates drop out of the hiring funnel. Did it take your team several weeks (or months!) to offer qualified candidates the position? If so, candidates likely have moved on.
Candidates, unfortunately, may accept the job, only to change their minds before they start. In this case, it can be because of a lack of employer branding. It’s possible your team needs to sell your company culture even more during the hiring process. Or, in some cases, candidates were offered a job with their dream company.
If candidates start the job, only to quit within a few days, then you have a retention issue—something we discuss later in the article.
Now that your hiring team has made the offer, what’s your acceptance rate? Your acceptance rate gives you an idea where you stack up against the competition. Is your hiring team selling your company culture well enough? Is your employee benefit package competitive?
Just remember, though, a great consumer brand can mask a lot of inefficiencies in your hiring process. So while acceptance rate is important, take a nuanced approach to this metric. Remember that it’s also important to pay attention to your retention rate. If there is a discrepancy between your acceptance rate and your retention rate, it could indicate your team is overselling a position or not effectively communicating what the role will be like.
Let’s start off with this eye-opening statistic: The National Association of Colleges and Employers reveals the cost-per-hire for companies that do on-campus recruiting is $6,275 per employee (with personnel costs included). That’s three times as much as the cost-per-hire without on-campus recruiting!
So, yeah, cost-per-hire is a must for recruitment metrics. Because if you’re not keeping track of it, you won’t see how an inefficient process is costing your company money.
Recruitment metrics help your hiring team make smarter decisions to get stronger candidates. But you want stronger candidates to get better employees, so if you’re not evaluating whether your interns and entry-level employees are good hires, you’ll make similar decisions over and over. Do you really want to do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results?
Work smarter, not harder by calculating your quality-of-hire. Once you figure this out, your team can look to emulate the traits that your higher-scoring employees have.
Recruit once, hire twice is a cost-effective way to view your team’s early-career recruitment process. It means that companies should choose interns with the idea that they’re auditioning them for a full-time role. So keeping track of your team’s intern-to-full-time conversion rate is a critical recruitment metric you need to analyze.
Keep in mind, NACE claims the average conversion rate is 46 percent, so if one out of every two interns becomes an entry-level employee, your team is on the right path.
One part of winning the war for top talent is hiring qualified candidates. The other major aspect, however, is keeping them as employees. No one wants to train tomorrow’s future leaders…of other companies—which is why you need to track your team’s retention rate. Case in point: 43 percent of Millennials plan to quit their job within two years, according to Forbes.
One way to address this is to recruit candidates who live near the job location. They’re less likely to leave, as 23 percent of employees have quit a job because of a bad commute.
A strong employer brand also showcases company culture. An employee, therefore, better understands the work culture and environment they’re joining instead of being surprised. An alarming stat: 30 percent of job seekers left a job within 90 days of starting because company culture was a problem. An accurate representation of culture through employer branding can prevent this.
To retain your new early-career hires, it’s critically important that your team is honest about job responsibilities. An employee whose daily responsibilities are constantly changing will make them unhappy. This is a major contributor to stress, which affects more than 80 percent of workers. Stress, unfortunately, causes demotivated workers, or even employees quitting.
Avoid the data daze by focusing on these recruitment metrics. They’ll enable you to create a more efficient hiring funnel and help you hire the kinds of candidates who will quickly become your organization’s future leaders.
