The number of talent acquisition KPIs is never fixed. Every company has a set of metrics on which they are gauging and projecting the quality of their recruitment strategies. It is possible to classify talent acquisition KPIs according to their value addition and quality optimization. For instance, time-to-hire and quality-of-hire are two different talent acquisition KPIs. Hoping to improve them both in parallel would be like wanting to have the cake and eat it too. It is essentially impossible to list all talent acquisition KPIs and achieve them too. Therefore, a compromise has to be established wherein a certain organization narrows down the list of talent acquisition KPIs. And then align its talent acquisition software with the latest trends in talent acquisition processes.
This article will highlight the top talent-acquisition KPIs that most companies integrate to enhance their recruitment quality. So, if you have been wondering what are the best talent acquisition KPIs to further improve the recruitment efficiency, sift through this article and deploy the strategies that best suit your business model.
Talent Acquisition KPIs of Attract & Engage Phase
Attracting and engaging the talent pool is like a touchdown in the system of talent acquisition. This phase is the first point of contact between recruiters and potential future employees. As they say, first impressions last, the experience of applicants in the “attract and engage” phase does last. Therefore, optimization of talent acquisition starts from the very stage of hiring.
The fundamental recruitment KPI here is to analyze the effectiveness of different job-posting platforms to attract the most qualified talent. Once you have the metrics and insights of which platform is converting what number of the talent pool, it narrows down your options to utilize just the right platforms to invest your time, budget, and efforts. Hence, by focusing on this key performance indicator, you can create a resource-effective talent acquisition system by redirecting your focus to certain dedicated platforms with promising yields. This KPI is also known as Sourcing Channel Efficiency.
Once your recruitment team has scrutinized the talent acquisition KPIs related to the “attract and engage” phase, the next wisest step is to project the quality of your hires.
Quality of Hire
While the popular opinion is that the quality of hire is a tentative KPI and it is innumerable or ranked since it is relative, I believe the opposite. The quality of hire can certainly be ranked. What matters here is that the talent acquisition team should have a crystal-clear projection of the value addition that the new hire is expected to deliver. This can be done by creating the persona of the ideal hire and then gauging the profile of your hire by benchmarking it with the persona of an ideal hire.
A score is assigned depending upon the experience, skillset, and professionalism of the new hire. Now the score for each metric in analyzing the quality of hire can differ from organization to organization owing to multiple variables such as the nature of the business model. For instance, two different IT consultation companies will have different analyzing factors to determine the quality of hire since one company promotes remote workplace culture while the other performs better in an in-house workplace model.
Therefore, the factors calculating the quality of hire are certainly rank-able. But it is a variable equation for every other organization out there.
Typical talent acquisition KPIs to calculate the quality of hire can take such a form:
(Performance + Value Addition + Relevancy + Retention) / Total number of factors
= The Quality of a New Hire
Interviews to Offer Acceptance Rate
After recognizing and shortlisting the quality candidates for further scrutiny, the company has to expend even more resources in terms of time, effort, communication, and money to evaluate and interview them. There is a huge pressure on HR to make the experience of shortlisted candidates a success regardless of the outcome of the interviews. A detailed insight will be provided on Applicant Experience Rating later in this article.
As far as the interviews are concerned, at the end of a certain recruitment phase, the company will send offer letters to the best potential employees. And not all of them will accept the offer letters depending on their experience with HR. The interviews-to-offer acceptance rate determines whether HR is successful in promoting the company’s image during their interaction with shortlisted candidates or not. The greater the value of this KPI, the poorer is the company’s value among the pool of talented candidates.
There can be a number of reasons for this rating to have a high value. For instance, the candidate may have rejected the offer not because of the role or workplace culture, but because of concerns regarding the benefits and perks policy of the company. Similarly, another reason behind an unsatisfactory score of this KPI could be a micromanagement culture in the company which the candidate does not feel comfortable with.
Applicant Experience Rating
Experience rating is also known as Net Promoter Score (NPS) owing to its significance. Since the candidate experience extends beyond a single candidate, it encompasses the entire talent acquisition lifecycle. To understand how candidate experience affects talent acquisition KPIs, let’s briefly outline what activities constitute the candidate’s experience lifecycle. These activities start from the point where a candidate discovers or lands on your job listing across job posting channels and end beyond the point of acceptance or rejection. In between, a number of activities and processes are also part of the candidate experience such as attract and engage phase, first points of contact, the application process, applicant’s journey mapping, communications, interviews, acceptance, and rejection.
Talent acquisition KPIs relating to applicant experience ratings are further categorized into the aforementioned sections. And the experience of each candidate is projected against a scale. In this way, at the end of a recruitment season, the organization can cross-check all the metrics of candidate experience. The inference is drawn as to which phases of talent acquisition need optimizing. For instance, 80% of candidates have rated their experience of interview sessions below average.
It can be inferred statistically that there is room for improvement in the interviews part of the talent acquisition. Similar statistical analyses are used for every sub-category in gauging the effectiveness and productivity of different parts of talent-acquisition cycles.
Conclusion
The applicant experience rating of a poor applicant is not unique to that applicant. At the end of the day, the applicants will be sharing individual experiences with their co-workers, peers, friends, and family. Sharing a good experience boosts the company’s image whereas a poor applicant experience deteriorates the company’s social standing. Consequently, a smaller number of talented applicants consider the company’s offer as their career path.
4 talent acquisition KPIs to optimize your recruitment strategies are discussed briefly in this article. However, as mentioned earlier, these are not all the important talent acquisition KPIs to boost your recruitment strategies. In fact, one blog post would not even be sufficient to cover all the important talent acquisition KPIs. Nonetheless, we have listed more talent acquisition KPIs below. And will elaborate on them possibly in a later article. So, hang on and keep reading!
- Time to Hire
- Cost per Hire
- Pre-hire Quality
- Post-Hire Quality
- Number of qualified candidates
- Number of applications to interview ratio
Numerous recruitment dashboards can help companies project the statistical analyses of their recruitment strategies effectively. One such market leader is RecruitBPM which is offering recruitment optimization features against a wide number of talent acquisition KPIs.
