If the right KPIs are measured and tracked, it is much easier to make decisions based on them. The same applies to HR, which is why we'll look at the 10 key recruiting KPIs here.
By improving your recruiting analytics, you can improve your entire recruiting process. Because if you track and measure the right recruiting KPIs, you'll be driving all your decisions on sight. You will then know how a change in strategy will directly impact the effectiveness of your recruiting and therefore which tactics are successful and which are not. So let's talk about the 10 key recruiting KPIs.
Recruiting suitable candidates costs a lot of time and money. Along your entire Candidates Journey, you therefore need to invest and adjust a lot to get the right job postings in front of the correct target group, invite the best of these for an interview and ultimately hire them. Recruiting is always a big investment and you should treat it as such.
Because as with any major financial and time investment, you want to be sure that your money and energy are going into the right measures and areas. That's why we at jacando have a golden rule: Recruiting must also be profitable.
To do this, however, you naturally need to know how your recruiting efforts are reflected in quantitative terms. In other words, you need to get your recruiting analytics up to speed. You need to measure how successful you are in this area, because that's the only way to identify unrecognized potential and continue to improve as a result.
That's why measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) is central to recruiting, because they're the only way to ensure you're on the right track. But what are recruiting KPIs and what do they mean?Was sind Recruiting-KPIs?
Recruiting KPIs are specific metrics that help you measure the effectiveness of your hiring process and recruiting team. They are at the heart of your recruiting analytics. Namely, KPIs use quantitative data to give you a sense of the degree to which you are achieving your recruiting goals. Through this, they help you make more strategic decisions about where to spend your time and money.
On the surface, many KPIs look like numbers. Only when you analyze them in the context of your organization will you understand how effectively you're really connecting with any candidates. Based on this, you can make adjustments and then achieve your goals even more effectively.
However, KPIs only ever have the correct meaning in the right context. So whenever you look at your KPIs, make sure you know what you are comparing them to. You can look at recruiting benchmarks and/or compare your results to previous time periods, such as month over month or year over year.
There are hundreds of recruiting KPIs out there, and all of them hold important significance in certain contexts. That said, let's focus on the 10 most important ones in the first step. At the end of the article, you will find a longer list that briefly explains many other metrics. This list will be extended by us on a regular basis.
There are many recruiting KPIs that you can track and measure. But which ones you should measure depends on your goals. In general, though, you should always choose the recruiting KPIs you want to track based on your company's hiring and growth goals. In our opinion, these 10 recruiting KPIs will best help you with those goals. Throughout the rest of this article, we'll briefly introduce the KPIs and, if necessary, explain what they mean to you in a variety of cases.
It's always nice when many applicants apply for a job. After all, the more people who apply, the more choices you have.
However, if those candidates aren't qualified for the position, you're just wasting your time.
If you're not reaching out to qualified candidates, it may be a sign that you're not creating compelling job ads or posting them in the right places. It may also be a sign that you have unrealistic expectations about the type of candidate you want to hire.
To find out if there's a bigger problem at play, you can track the Quality-of-Hire KPI.
This KPI is pretty self-explanatory. The ratio of qualified candidates to your open positions tells you what percentage of people applying for an open position are actually qualified for that role. A good way to tell if a candidate is "qualified" is to invite them beyond the first step of your hiring process.
Tracking this performance indicator will help you determine if you are reaching the right people from the start. If you find that your qualified candidate rate is low, consider how you can redesign your job postings to better engage your target audience.
2. Drop-Out-Rate
It's not uncommon for candidates to start filling out an application and then stop.
But if the number of candidates who drop out before completing an application is high, you could be missing out on top talent. High application dropout rates could be a sign that your application process is too complicated.
To determine your application success rate, take the number of applications submitted divided by the total number of applicants who started an application.
However, don't limit yourself to numbers when tracking application completion rates. If you are contacting quality candidates who are qualified for the position, a low application completion rate is not necessarily a bad thing.
Never try to attract unqualified candidates just to improve your success rate.
3. Channel Effectiveness - Your Channel Performance
If your resources are already stretched thin, make sure you're getting the most out of every recruiting channel you implement. If you're sourcing candidates from multiple channels, such as job boards, LinkedIn, or referrals, you don't want to waste your time on a channel that isn't delivering you quality candidates.
Measuring your channel effectiveness can help you ensure you are only investing in the best channels for your recruitment process. This will help you build a healthy and reliable pipeline to improve your overall recruitment process.
To determine the quality of your channels, take a look at the number of high-quality candidates coming from each channel. But just as you determine the number of qualified candidates you have, you also want to see where each high-quality candidate is coming from.
Look for patterns. While there may be outliers, you may be surprised to find that all of your top candidates are recruited through the same channel. For example, if you find that your top candidates are coming to you through referrals, you should strengthen your employee referral program.
Ultimately, it's always about learning which candidate channels have the highest application completion rates and therefore which channels you recruit from the most.
Time-to-hire is the time it takes to screen, interview and hire a new employee from the moment they apply. It should include the entire process, not just the period after you make your decision.
Knowing how long it will take to hire a new employee can help you make predictions and shape your overall hiring strategy. If you know that your hiring process typically takes two to three months, you'll know when to start your hiring campaign to bring on a newly needed employee at the right time.
If you can better plan the time it takes to find the right employee, you can keep your team from being overwhelmed and ensure things always run smoothly.
You can also find out where the bottlenecks are in your hiring process, so you can prepare strategies that will reduce your hiring time.
5. Cost-per-Hire – the cost per successful hire
Recruiting new employees is always an investment in the future of your company. And that's why you also need to be sure that you don't spend more than necessary and that your money results in high-quality hires.
Keeping track of your cost-per-hire will tell you how much you spent on average to hire a new employee. This can help you make sure you're not frivolously throwing money down the drain. At the same time, it also allows you to budget and plan better if you have a large expansion coming up, as an example.
It's important to look at your average cost per hire, but also examine each hire individually. By comparing this number to your average, you can determine if there are ways to reduce costs without reducing the quality of your hires. But you can also determine if investing a little more money can result in an even better candidate.
6. Offer-Rate – The number of interviews to be conducted
Interviews are one of the most complicated and time-consuming parts of recruiting, but they are also critical to finding the right people. However, you should always make sure that each interview is productive.
Knowing how many interviews you need to conduct to ultimately make a candidate an offer can help you determine how productive your conversations are. This can help you better understand how many candidates you need for each open position and how many people you need to invite to each round of interviews.
Since most companies have multiple rounds of interviews, you can also look at this ratio from one stage to the next. You might invite a handful of candidates to a phone interview and then a smaller portion of that group to an in-person interview. Knowing how you'll progress through each interview stage will help you make sure you're talking to the right number of people at each stage.
Whenever you offer someone a job, you hope they will accept it. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.
While you can't expect every candidate to accept, it would be a classic red flag if most candidates didn't take the job. It could be a sign that you've done something wrong in your recruiting process, or that there are major issues within your organization that you should address.
For this reason, offer acceptance rate should be one of the KPIs you track when recruiting.
Offer acceptance rate is another self-explanatory metric. It shows you the number of offers accepted. Simply divide the number of accepted offers by the total number of extended offers.
A good interview experience with a company can leave a lasting impression. When candidates are satisfied, they are more likely to accept a job offer. It may even encourage them to apply for another open position if they don't receive an offer.
You can measure candidate satisfaction by sending out a simple survey. Simply asking your candidates if they had a positive or negative experience during the interview process will usually give you enough information to identify trends and draw conclusions.
Try to keep your survey short. You can ask one or two yes-no questions and perhaps add an open-ended question where candidates can share their thoughts and opinions if they wish.
You can then use this information to improve your candidate experience.
9. Early turnover - turnover rate in the first year
High turnover rates are expensive for companies. Because, after you've invested all that time and money in recruiting, you don't want to have to do it all over again.
A high turnover rate is also a bad sign for your company as a whole. This is because it usually means that the employees you brought onto your team are not happy with the position. Occasionally, it may just not be a good fit, but a high early turnover is usually a sign of a larger problem, such as unrealistic job expectations or a toxic company culture.
You can calculate the first-year turnover rate by dividing the number of employees who leave after less than a year of employment by the total number of employees who left. This will allow you to see how many of the employees leaving your company have not been there for a year.
If this number is high, you may want to take a closer look at your recruiting process, onboarding approach, or even overall company culture to analyze what you can improve.
Just as it's important to measure how satisfied your candidates are with the interview and hiring process, you should measure your hiring managers' satisfaction with the people you hire.
After all, if hiring managers are not satisfied with new hires, it may indicate that your selection criteria are not relevant to the roles or that hiring managers are not invested enough in the hiring process.
You can measure hiring manager satisfaction with a survey or short interview. Since these are internal team members, feel free to go a little deeper in the questions you ask.
Don't forget to ask the hiring manager what they think you can do to improve. If you include them in the decision-making process, they will feel more satisfied and that their ideas are being heard.
You can expand the recruiting KPIs you track based on the initiatives you are working on. For example, you can select specific sourcing statistics, employer branding metrics, or recruiting marketing statistics to supplement your overall recruiting KPIs.
This will help you better understand the effectiveness of your overall recruiting funnel. You can do all this easily and quickly with jacando's HR software, because as you may have realized by now, jacando has HR professionals working for HR professionals. Take your recruiting analytics to the next level with jacando.
Tracking KPIs can help you get the information you need in your recruiting process to make better decisions. By understanding how your decisions and behaviors impact your hiring outcomes, you can find specific ways and strategies to improve your processes and achieve your recruiting goals. So, in the end, better recruiting analytics will keep you driving on sight.
Think of KPIs as a feedback loop for monitoring and evaluating results and taking action.
| Recruiting KPIs | Explanation of the recruiting key figure |
| Time-to-Interview | The period from the advertisement of a position to the first interview |
| Cost-per-Hire | The sum of the total costs incurred for a recruitment |
| Cost-of-Vacancy | The cost of a vacant position |
| Page dwell time on the career page | How much time potential candidates spend on the career site |
| Source-of-Hire | This indicates the channels through which candidates are recruited |
| Churn-Rate | The churn rate in the application process helps to find out where and when candidates drop out of the application process. |
| Candidate-Conversion-Rate | Percentage of visitors to your career site who apply |
| Cost-per-Application | The total costs incurred for a single application (personnel expenses + marketing expenses) |
Would you like to find out more about recruiting? Then take a look at our free guide to active sourcing.
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