Have a love/hate relationship with your metrics? Metrics can indicate that new initiatives are working well, but they may also reveal when recruiters need to work harder for results. They’re an important tool for analysis and improvement of your hiring process.
But what about recruiting metrics that matter to your candidates? Are you measuring performance by how well you deliver a fast and simple hiring experience? Or if your process helps talent gain meaningful insight into your organization? As candidates’ expectations change (and increase), these could be the recruiting metrics that are most valuable to your team.
How do you identify recruiting metrics that matter?
Though there are nearly two dozen common recruiting metrics, only a handful concern your candidates. To identify these, start by understanding the kind of hiring experience that can catch and keep the attention of today’s talent. If you don’t think so, look at candidate drop off rates when the hiring process is slow and disrespectful of candidates’ time! Fast and easy are two of the hiring process characteristics candidates want most.
Transparency is another priority for candidates. They want to be kept in the loop and to understand what’s next for them with you. Based on the expectations of modern candidates, some of the recruiting metrics that matter most are:
- Time to fill – Don’t let your process drag it out. Let candidates know quickly if they will move on.
- Interview to hire – Candidates don’t want to be one of ten candidates being considered. If you advance them to the interview stage, they want to be one of two investing the time in your hiring process.
- Post-interview satisfaction – How would candidates respond if asked about their experience with your hiring process? Would they recommend your company to their social network? More than half (57%) of candidates with poor hiring experiences have shared their negative impressions online.
- First-year turnover – This metric provides insight into how closely the impression candidates form of your organization and employment experience align with their everyday job experience once hired.
What if you don’t like what your recruiting metrics reveal?
Take heart if you’ve focused your dashboard on recruiting metrics that matter to candidates and the results are less than stellar. You’ve given yourself a baseline for measuring improvement and hopefully gained insight about where in your hiring process to concentrate your efforts.
Innovative hiring technologies can help you move your process and your metrics forward. If your goal is:
- Identifying best-fit talent faster: Implement a science-based hiring platform that combines advanced selection science with assessment, video interview, and workflow automation tools. With the collected candidate data and predictive analytics built into the platform, hiring teams can make smarter hiring decisions with every size pool of talent.
- Faster hiring: Use an intelligent hiring platform that automates the scoring of assessments and interviews and can automatically advance candidates between steps to reduce and even eliminate hiring delays significantly. Some platforms offer job-specific ready-to-implement workflows that enables you to begin hiring sooner, too.
- Personalized, time-saving and seamless experiences for candidates: Don’t expect candidates to log in to multiple systems as they advance through your hiring process. Go with an all-in-one platform to create personalized, friction-free hiring experiences that reinforce your employer brand with candidates and show you respect for their time.
- Enabling candidates to give feedback: Make this high-value strategy a priority. Candidates appreciate the opportunity to provide input and be heard. Plus, they’re a rich source of intel on your hiring experience. Post-interview online surveys are just one of the many ways to collect this information and create another point for candidate engagement.
Are there emerging recruiting metrics that matter to candidates?
Diversity hiring metrics matter to candidates. Three in four candidates (76%) say that a diverse workforce is essential in evaluating companies and job offers.
With new technologies and different generations in the workplace, ways to measure diversity are evolving. Traditional diversity metrics such as demographics and representation may not be as acceptable to younger professionals who think of a diverse workforce in terms of a range of opinions, experiences, and personal identities.
What can recruiters do to improve diversity hiring? Concentrate on reducing bias. Deploying a science-based hiring platform is the most advanced strategy for reducing hiring bias because it focuses on job-related performance. Hiring teams can have candidate selection discussions and make decisions around objective, validated data rather than relying on resumes and other traditional tools which allow unconscious bias to influence the process.
It’s clear that recruiting success measures need to adapt along with new solutions in the ongoing struggle for talent. The recruiting metrics that matter to candidates are those that will matter most to organizations, too.