# Rethinking Recruitment KPIs: What Metrics Truly Matter

Discover game-changing recruitment KPIs that truly drive talent acquisition success. Learn which metrics matter most for strategic hiring and organizational growth.

In the world of recruitment, certain traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) have been long-standing champions. But are these traditional KPIs still relevant today? Talent Acquisition experts Stephanie Baysinger, Mary-Kay Baldino, and José Manuel Delgado Garcia share their thoughts.

In the world of recruitment, certain traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) have been long-standing champions. Metrics like time-to-hire and cost-per-hire are the well-worn paths that have guided recruiters for years. But this begs the question: are these traditional KPIs still relevant today? Have they been challenged recently?

Our recent [webinar in partnership with Recruiting Brainfood](https://www.cronofy.com/webinars/recruiting-brainfood-how-should-recruitment-teams-measure-their-efficiency) delved into the world of recruitment KPIs and which ones we should prioritize. We were joined by talent acquisition experts [Stephanie Baysinger](https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniebaysinger/), [Mary-Kay Baldino](https://www.linkedin.com/in/marykaybaldino/), and [José Manuel Delgado Garcia](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-manuel-delgado-garcía-760804155/).

‍

## Measure processes not people

KPIs are put in place to measure a process, not people. It’s about looking at how these people flow through the process. Keeping an eye on candidate drop-off is a great place to start in terms of measurements as Stephanie explains.

“You have to focus on the process stages and being able to measure the efficiency from one stage to the next. So what is your recruiting funnel? And what follow up do you have at those different stages? Are you collecting too many applications or too few? And the only way to know that is if you understand how people are flowing through the funnel.”

You can speed up your recruitment process by utilizing your ATS and combining with a [scheduling tool](https://www.cronofy.com/integrations), to ensure you're working as efficiently as possible.

‍

## Adapting to change

In such a fast-paced and ever-changing industry, it’s inevitable that the KPIs should adapt alongside it. KPIs should be assessed regularly to make sure they’re reflective of the market and your business goals.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach,” Jose explains. “Different companies need to tackle different things. And the market is always changing; we need to keep a close eye on the advancements. I've been in companies that have really changed the process throughout the time, because the market changes so quickly. So definitely, really understanding the moment and the context is really key.”

### Recruiting Brainfood webinar: How should recruitment teams measure their efficiency?

Duration: 60:23

Hung Lee 0:00
But I think, yeah, I think that's okay. I think we're on time. So it's fantastic. Welcome, everybody to this the second of our webinar series with Cronofy where we are talking about how to measure recruitment, operational efficiency. Our entire purpose here is to figure out, you know, how do you get more efficient is the end goal, but also, what are the measures that you need to put in place to know you're making progress on this, I think it's a topic that a lot of people in the industry are interested in. But the default situation seems to be the person who's got to be there by themselves to figure it out by themselves. And we just thought, let's get some heads together that have done this before, and see whether we can share some best practice on this and see how we go. So folks are welcome to the show, I just waited for a few more people to arrive. For the people that have arrived. Obviously, you should be familiar with Zoom already. Completely overly familiar with it. But as a webinar service, you should be able to operate and have some additional functions that you might want to just get used to. So be aware, of course, the q&a feature, we're going to go to questions towards the end of this conversation. So if you have any particular questions for our panellists that you definitely want to have answered, make sure you use the q&a feature there. Obviously, we love to have a chat with anybody who is involved in this. So I believe you can have the chat function available. In fact, why don't you test that? Anybody who is on chat now just switch it to everyone in terms of defaults? And if you're happy with it, go and send a message in chat. Let me know whether firstly, you can interact with chat and whether you can hear it and see me okay. And, and and yeah, I think we should be ready to go. So why don't we kick off with a few introductions before we go. Mary-Kay online? Why don't you introduce yourself real quick? Who are you? What is you do? Hi,

Mary-Kay Baldino 2:02
I'm Mar- Kay Baldino. I live in the Chicago area and I lead talent acquisition for a company called R1 RCM. We're a revenue cycle management company for hospital and clinical systems, basically making the patient experience better by streamlining the entire process of how people interact with their hospital, their doctors, and all of that

Hung Lee 2:26
Fantastic stuff. Stephanie, why don't we go with you who you are what you do.

Stephanie Baysinger 2:31
Hi. Hi, everyone. I'm Stephanie Baysinger. Also US based I am in Las Vegas, Nevada. It is quite hot here. Already in this desert landscape. I have been working in recruiting operations and recruitment efficiency for over 10 to 12 years, a couple of companies I've worked for I've actually built efficiency measures from scratch, specifically in the technology space. So I've been at HubSpot Clayview And then most recently, a FinTech company called Marketo. That's based out of Oakland and the UK. Fantastic.

Hung Lee 3:05
And Jose, would you like to introduce yourself? Who are you what you should do?

Jose Delgado Garcia 3:08
Yeah, sure. Thank you so much. So yeah, I'm actually based in Barcelona and having me actually leading the team, the hiring team in a company called Global Savings Group as well. We're actually coming from tech companies scale up really from earliest stages from from startups as well. I'm more into like a more advanced stages. And basically, yeah, we've been really working a lot of like, improving efficiencies and processes and building and scaling up as well. So that's really where my main focus has been throughout my career, and always international companies considering euro, but also us and also now across the whole globe. So yeah, thank you so much.

Hung Lee 3:44
Fantastic. Let's kick off with sort of one of the primary questions, I guess, people are gonna say, okay, what are the KPIs I need to care about? You know, do we still roll back to the stuff that we all know? Is it still time to hire? Is it still, you know, a cost per hire, you know, those types of classic things? So tell us like, those sort of all the more kind of conventional measures, are they still useful? If so, why have they been challenged of late? And if so, why is that? Any thoughts on this? Why don't we want to go with you? First of all, it's definitely What's your when you go business to business trying to set these things up? Are businesses still expecting this the old measures to be to be provided for in the reports that recruitment? I give back to them?

Stephanie Baysinger 4:41
I I'd say yes. These are kind of your fruits and vegetables when it comes to your recruitment metrics, and they're also universally kind of understood, I think more and more by various audiences. So as talent acquisition becomes a bigger part of how a business is running. I think we're getting a bigger seat at the table. It's also a lot of metrics, like how long is it going to take to hire? When I work with finance teams, what is the cost per hire? What is the productivity of a recruitment team, these are things that I have built out and had to report to C suite, to other business leaders to the board at every company I've been at. And trust me I have tried to pivot around them are trying to come up with really amazing metrics and a dashboard. And always at the end of the day, and I'll talk more about this, but the simplicity of it, these are simple metrics that if you're working at an organisation right now, and you don't know these, this is worth a week of digging in getting your formulas correct. There's so much great automation. Now just know these and then expand on to the things that help you hit business objectives, what your team is really passionate about. But I think knowing your general funnel metrics, your productivity of the team, and even your time to fill are really good super power basic tools to have going into any meeting.

Hung Lee 6:04
Yep. So a really important point to make. I think in recruiting like any field, sometimes we become like very much, neophilic, is that the right word, where we're kind of always interested in the new and we want Hey, you know, what's the best way to do it is now this all that's well and good. But we have to understand that we are providing the data, not only for ourselves, but for the business, and they themselves have been pre trained to understand and expect certain types of information. So from a non recruiter perspective, things like how long is the job empty? How long? Is it going to? What is the cost to get this person in in terms of the dollar signs or the euro signs? And what is the effort level required to actually do this? So those types of your baseline metrics we have got to be on top of you can't deny them, we can certainly try and evolve the conversation as we go. But we need to be able to negotiate our way forward. Firstly, by having that solid foundation Mary-Kay going to you on this, would you would you kind of agree with Stephanie's view on it or because because you obviously have went into your business? I think about two years or so ago. So you've had the chance to come in? Experiment with a few things you probably got to the point now where okay, we know what the business expects and wants. So can you take us a little bit through that journey? And how does that kind of map towards some of the things Stephanie's just said?

Mary-Kay Baldino 7:27
Yeah, I mean, I think I would agree with somebody that those things are considered baseline, that's table stakes type of stuff. And if you can't measure that, you definitely can't measure anything more sophisticated, right? Because if you're if your data is not clean, and you don't have your you don't have the right formulas, you know, you can't produce basic metrics, then forget evolving. What I would say, though, is the time to fill is the least interesting metric that I can think of in terms of actually measuring recruiting efficiency. I think a couple of things that you do to involve that are start having conversations with the business about well, how can we measure things that actually change outcomes that improve efficiency? So for our one, we have evolved towards measuring time to fill variance. It's not the actual time to fill that's interesting. It's the how much variance around a mean, you know, so we look at setting up a target start date, when we're doing an initial kickoff to search. So based on like, how long is the interview, many interview cycles? And how small and specific is the is the talent pool for this job? We set a target start date, and then how close are we on an ongoing basis across volume? How close are we to actually hitting those targets start dates. When you look at the outliers, then you know, you're looking at the outliers, you're able to really start focusing in on what's going wrong in your process. So it's yeah, you have to be able to measure the basics in order to get to the more sophisticated measures, but boring, just doesn't actually help you drive improvement.

Hung Lee 9:18
No. So let me understand this a little bit more clearly, Mary-Kay, what you're saying is, we can be sometimes seduced by having the one number at all time to fill across the company is, I don't know 80 days or something. But it might not particularly be useful because obviously you've got a huge variance within the rules in your company. Some some rules might be filled in 10 days, another might take 500 days. And obviously those things skew what the overall measure might be. So you need to do variance and in terms of role, and then it's a case of can you improve on that so it's not necessarily one number is a bad number or a good number. It's like oh, this is just historically be In the number, and then have a look at okay, well what things are we doing to get to that number that we can improve? And that's the those are the almost the secondary measures that are going to be more important because you can actually then influence the this is exactly what it's all about the influence the efficiency of it. So excellent. I'm play, please, I understood you well, because I doubt sometimes my ability to grasp information, but you explained it very well. Jose, let's go to you on this. From from what Stephanie and Mary-Kay talked about so far, how much does that resonate with your kind of approach and process? But is there a general consistency? How to do this? Or is it different companies kind of evolve their own way of doing it? And how does it all fit together?

Speaker 3 10:47
Yeah. And I gotta say, I really agree with Mary-Kay, as well. Because in the beginning, also, when you're like, you start your career small, you don't really understand, what's the reason what you really understand over the time, and really, when you're building processes is exactly not the number, but actually the, you know, the alternative by those bottlenecks and bottlenecks and those blockers as well, what exactly do you really need to tackle because every company is completely different. At the end, we're all fighting for the same talent in a way. So it is important to understand how to remain competitive and how to find that. So I think that it's important, as basically as your question, yes, you need to connect that as well, to them, your company to the talent segment, that you're also targeting what you're after, but also really how that evolves. Because I've been in companies that have really changed the process throughout the time, even in the same process, because market changes so quickly. So definitely, really understanding the moment and the context is really key. And that's exactly the number that we are looking at, but just know from the numbers is just because it gives you the key of the blockers and how to connect that actually indirectly with all the areas such as Employer Branding, as well, why are we going quickly? Or why not? Are we the preferred option or not? So those are a lot of different indirect variables that we are actually introducing that number as well.

Hung Lee 12:05
Yeah very, very interesting, folks, just a quick word out to you let us know if we are like going too fast and too deep on this. Because we want to make sure that everyone kind of follows along with what we're talking about. I'm like hanging on with my fingernails here. So if you're like me, you're not quite there, let us know in chat. And you know, I'll try and dumb dumb things down for you. But I think everyone knows generally well. Well, one thing you mentioned really interesting. Jose, was this concept of can numbers be like elastic or dynamic according to need? And I think that's an interesting idea, isn't it? Because sometimes when you throw together a very, let's see, you come to a point, hey, we've got our numbers, we've got our ratios, we've got your this is it. But then how does it then it's how do you keep that flexible, according to conditions that might change very quickly. And of course of the last 12 months or so we've probably seen evidence of that. Because 2021 And off early started 2022 Everything was going northeast, everywhere charge charge charge, suddenly the world changed dramatically and the market changes. So how do we make sure that our metrics kind of are able to adapt to that? Or do we leave it structured and just be able to kind of put a mark in the in the in the chart to say, Oh, this, this terrible event happened? Or, you know, this, this, this scenario occurred, and therefore, we need to reset our expectations, keep those measures fixed. I think Martin said something really interesting. It was it Martin. Martina Okay. Martina said, Okay, could you go over the main areas that you should absolutely measure before go? So we're going to absolutely do that is an evidence of our ability to be flexible. So So let's, let's talk about this. We're coming from a complete blank slate, I am a new person that's in charge of a TA department never done this before. What kinds of things the basics? How do I make sure I've got the right sort of numbers that I need before I even have a single conversation with a C level? Let's start from there. So you're coaching me to do this? What do I need to know? Let's go with you first Mary-Kay?

Mary-Kay Baldino 14:12
Sure. I think the key thing to remember is that you're measuring a process, not people. Obviously, people influence the performance of the process, but you got to focus on what are the process stages and being able to measure the efficiency from one stage to the next. So kind of the what is your recruiting funnel? And what kind of follow up do you have at those at those different stages? You know, do you are you collecting, for example, too many applications or too few. And the only way to know that is if you understand, you know how people are flowing through the funnel. So those kind of basic process measures around fall off are a really great way to start in terms of measuring We're cycle time is important as well, you know, talked a little bit about that already, we've touched on that. So I do think that's really an example of efficiency and then looking at recruiting costs. So I like looking at recruiting costs relative to the salaries of the people who are being brought in. So a recruiting cost ratio, what are all of your recruiting costs, your your talent acquisition team, your employer branding, and recruitment, marketing expenses, any, you know, agency fees, you're paying all out all of those together, and then divide it by the salaries of the people being hired. And you can then turn that over time to understand whether your costs are going up or down relative to how many people you're hiring and how, how those people are paid. Because the tents general, a general rule of thumb is that, you know, the more expensive your labour force, the more specialised it is. So you may need to spend more time and more effort and more marketing numbers, attracting that kind of that kind of a workforce. So you know, and a lot of these things, only mean something if you train them over time. So establishing solid measures that you know, how you have really good data definitions around and then being able to train them over time is super critical.

Hung Lee 16:24
Yep. Let me just read restate some of this. So basically, a very basic level, you need to know what the recruitment events are where to get someone hired, like in your business, what are the things that happen in order for this person to be recruited, you need to understand whether there's variance in those stages according to the different roles, which there probably are. And I guess that you may then have slightly different numbers according to different jobs, but you might then have an overall piece. And then you're looking at the the, I guess, the conversion ratio. So anybody who's done sales understands this, like how many calls you need to make before this thing happens, how many of those things need to happen before the next thing happens, and that's the classic understanding of how the funnelling process works. So understanding of what those numbers might be. Really, I'm gonna go back to the last point you made before I go to the main one, I think, Mary-Kay. But essentially, you also need to understand the historicity, the historicity of it, if that's too many syllables, possibly it is. So you're if you're arrived to a company, you may already be able to go back in time, so to speak, to have a look at some historical highs, and then track back in time, if they've got a decent ATS and they've maintained it or it's been automated in some way you can, you may be able to track that so little bit of data analytical work may be required there. Worst case scenario that hasn't happened, then I guess, you've got to start today and start putting those numbers in. So if you're starting right from the get go, and Martina, I'm just addressing you here, but I'm sure I'm addressing a lot of people also, if you're starting right from the beginning, you need those numbers. Basically, if they're not there, you just got to stop and figure out, start from that point and start putting those numbers in. final final point I thought was super interesting. And I think the finance guys in the C-level will be interested in is the amount of money basically it takes to hire the candidate. The cost-per-hire classic one is calculated by having all of the inputs required to get this to link the labour cost at any advert plus maybe even the time I think sometimes we don't put the time in. But let's say you're hiring managers, they're expensive. You know, if you're they're plugged in to do 20 hours of interviews a week, that's a cost. You could you could put that in as well, your choice or moderate that there's some classic ones in there. And then you divide by the salary of the person. Is that right? Mary-Kay so that you can just basically get a trend lines and figure out where you need to focus your resources. Yeah. Wow. Interesting. So some data analysis work, basically, I hope all of that makes sense. Stephanie, why don't we go with you? How would you add to that? Would you contest any of those of that commentary? Again, treat me as a person that doesn't know what they're doing? What else do I need to know before? You know I charge ahead?

Stephanie Baysinger 19:24
I will agree with everyone in the chat Mary Kay is just such a good thing to remember around measuring a process and not people. Especially spending a lot of my time running recruiting operations. I spent a lot of time in dashboards and looking at the data and I would agree with what Mary-Kay highlighted in terms of what measure I loved what you said hung and when you summarise around knowing the steps of your recruitment process. So as you come in, really being like an anthropologist or a detective and looking through the data that currently exists is the process to hire somebody to come into the company and just taking some time a scratch piece of paper I've done and just mapping it out. I think this can feel like a very overwhelming task to say, what are all the KPIs? What are all the metrics? What I think, you know, we're kind of summarising here, we're focusing on time, we're focusing on cost, and then we're focusing on the events. What we're saying is that these are these are basic things to kind of take a minimal viable product amount of effort. This is not if you're coming into a new role to answer the question more directly. This is not something to kind of put on like a quarterly plan and say, by the end of the quarter, I'm going to understand these metrics, this is coming in even taking a piece of scratch paper within a week and getting a general appetite palette, you know, understanding of where the company is. And then the other side of this that I will just add, when it starts to get more of the art of this art and science job that we do is what are the objectives of the company. And as you start to kind of match what you're hearing from leaders, what you're hearing as friction points from hiring managers, what you're hearing from your own recruitment team, you kind of have this like backboard baseline data to kind of start to match that together is what I'm hearing accurate with the data that I'm seeing, is there a complete disconnect? Where should I focus and that's the other piece of the data collection is kind of the anecdotal experiences that people are having the perceptions they're having within your recruitment events, which I think is a really important just add on to that that I've had to work through. And I think Jose made a fantastic point around meeting the company where it is. I've been in situations, we've had a blank sheet of paper. I've been at places where historical data has existed. And I'm kind of just piecing it apart and asking and poking some questions. And yeah, that's what I would say in terms of like that that next piece is having that baseline data so that when you're going out on roadshows and presenting information and hearing friction points, you have something to kind of bounce that up against instead of kind of taking everything at face value.

Hung Lee 22:06
Yep, very interesting. Okay, well, I have to ask you the same question, Jose, you're, you're training me? What kind of things do I need to so already I've got loads of stuff from Steph and Mary-Kay? What are the things do I need to put in there? To make sure that I've got a good foundation for me to build a business going forward?

Jose Delgado Garcia 22:28
Yeah, I actually need to agree with both of them. But I think at the end of the day, what is important is like when in doubt, go back to basics. And I think what I really measure, always, especially now that I just joined this company, and we're really building and really reassessing everything that we have actually, like, they normally the first number of questions like, How long like they're from, especially from senior leadership, what is the forecast of how long are you going to take or what is expected, you know, and at the end, it's always like, we need to have a Start Date Time. And what's important is to, for me, there are two main different things. One is the quality of the hire as well, considering that what is the source, what are the kind of like the recruiting marketing campaigns that we're doing whatever we whatever kind of even the roles that we're checking, because we cannot assess all the roles or have a process similarly, for all of them, we can unify with we need to definitely localise to each one of the roles that we are looking into it. And the other one is the conversion rates. So normally, what is important is that maybe on top of the funnel, the conversion rate, maybe it's a bit lower, but if we see the de dot conversion rate throughout the stages is going higher, that's what I've noticed, then normally, the cost is actually the lowest because actually, we've done a good job in the beginning, aligning, resetting expectations with everyone. And normally, you really see how they actually turn into higher and actually, given the offer to time to offer the offer acceptance rates, and everything increases so positively. So I think that is really important as well to check the quality, the roles, and also the conversion rate conversion rate. So I think to me, that's really all what has been very, very key.

Hung Lee 24:01
Yeah and conversion rate, by the way, is the classic way, you know, the optimal conversion rate is 11111. Right? Like, okay, one candidate goes through all that the classic process, because you get your hire with, I guess, minimal effort, because let's face it, if you're plugging in loads of candidates, you can, you can kind of over acquire candidates, because you actually expand the access time. And in fact, you know, that's not a particularly efficient way to do it. Of course, the one moment when one is pretty apocryphal by the time recruiters actually get into a business, because that's basically your best friend, go through that process. You know, when you're hiring strangers, typically you have a wider funnel, but at each stage of your of those recruitment events, you can do a conversion, okay? It's a very simple a number to track. And as Jose mentioned, the closer you get to one basically means the more efficient you're going to be getting and the They're less cost involved in doing that work. And a quick question for you guys, in terms of what are the metrics that are important to the business? The first is two things. What are the what are the numbers that are important to the business? And what are the numbers that are important to TA? They can often overlay or overlap, but oftentimes they might not. Because the company, for instance, might believe, okay, we're overwhelmingly keen on like vast numbers of people applying to us. I'm sure there's companies out there or, or leaders in business that just want everyone to apply, because it shows how wonderful we are as a business. But for recruiters, that's not necessarily great. Because what you we want to do is measure how efficiently or how, how, what improvements are in recruitment efficiency is a slightly different set of numbers, we need to think about, how do we play around with the challenge of reporting to the business compared to the challenge of actually getting operating intelligence for our own needs within TA? Do we do those things separately? Or do we kind of mash them together? Or is this even a problem? I'll open up to anybody to answer this, or at least put a thought into this discussion.

Mary-Kay Baldino 26:13
Simply the metrics that get reported on to the business tend to be process metrics. And, you know, if you're measuring the process, there are certain key moments where your recruiting recruiters influence that process. And they have an ability to change outcomes. And so in measuring recruiter performance, you got to focus on those key moments. So for my team, it's things like the quality of the kickoff meeting. And their, you know, because if you if you go upstream in the recruiting process, the first moment the recruiter touches the recruiting process, and really has an opportunity to change the outcomes of the recruiting process or at that kickoff meeting, so quality, their quality of the recruitment strategy and and how effective that is. How are you sourcing? Are you using the right sources? Are you is your outreach effective? You know, are you communicating well, the value proposition of that job, to your candidates, your time to get to a slate of candidates. And I just want to emphasise here that some of the things that business cares about actually are in live in tension with other things that cares about. So everybody wants things fast in recruiting, but Speed Kills diversity of candidates leads. So if your company wants both of those things, how do those live kind of intention with each other, which is why I think Stephanie might have already mentioned this, but getting to kind of a balanced scorecard with the business is important. But in terms of measuring, you know, recruiter, productivity, you have to focus on things that they can actually control and influence and the totality of cycle time is not one of those things. So I don't measure recruiters on how long it takes to build jobs, for example

Hung Lee 28:11
Yeah, really, really important point. But I think actually a lot of the reasons why recruitment teams kind of shy away from putting the measures in, because they're fearful of actually creating a rod for their own back to say, Oh, if I put these measures in and, you know, we had a lucky six months or something, I don't want everyone else to look at us and saying, Oh, we're going to redo that or do better. Because actually, there's tonnes of stuff we don't control. For instance, hiring manager typically is not the recruiter that is someone who is making a hiring yes, no decision. can we influence that person? Yes. But can we can we can we compel that person to make decisions? No. And so you know, it's time to hire cannot be fully our responsibility? When you have a hiring manager that might oftentimes say yes or no, depending on you know, that their own their own purview. So for us in recruiting is like, what are the things that are fully in our control? And that's our activity, and our behaviours, and we can kind of map that to how effectively we might might be relating to the rest of the to the, the business. But it's not like a direct contingency, for instance, classic one will be Have you met the hiring manager? Or have we had a proper kickoff meeting? You know, or is it just, you know, the spec has just been sent by email hasn't been a synchronous conversation. Probably we can say that sort of sub optimal meeting, I would say, and the chances of us having a great experience or being effective in recruiting are going to be constrained because we haven't actually got that information. So stuff like that does is that what you mean by quality of of kickoff meeting by the way Mary-Kay I've assumed it might be. But

Mary-Kay Baldino 30:02
Yeah, we have some pretty specific standards for our team around what a quality kickoff meeting looks like. We we train to those standards for the recruiters, our recruiting managers sit in on kickoff meetings to ensure that, you know, recruiters are continuing to develop in that area, because really the goal is that recruiters can are capable of advising in those in those meetings, and that they are steering the search in a direction that will lead to the best combination of outcomes, a diverse slate, high quality candidates and efficient process.

Hung Lee 30:44
Yep, so basically, would there be a me again, just digging into this? I think it's a really illustrative example. But might there be circumstances where a recruiting process kicks off without a fully sort of fully compliant if you like, approach, and that would be ranked down in some way, in your view, it would be a number that would go into a system to say, you know, what, this is chances of this, you know, being absolutely superb, a kind of minus two, as a result of, you know,

Mary-Kay Baldino 31:16
there there are, there's repetitive hiring in almost every company. I mean, I suppose really small companies, there might not be but you know, we have some high volume hiring areas where you've got the same team that just somebody in another role for the same kind of person that they always hire. Right? Do you actually do a full on kickoff meeting for that? Absolutely not, you integrate that into your broader existing pipeline, and you keep moving, right? So you'd have to have an approach that's adapted to the circumstances. But in general, for most kinds of hiring, that kickoff meeting is where you your process starts to succeed or starts to fail?

Hung Lee 32:07
Yep, absolutely. So and there's other kind of moments of recruiter influence out there. Looking at your situation here or your experience, Stephanie, in particular, what are the moments would you say a recruiter can kind of say, right, we're a little bit in control of this part of it, and therefore should be some of the measures for the TA teams, kind of operational performance drove efficiency.

Stephanie Baysinger 32:34
I think one of the places that recruiters really have a lot of creativity and control is around building a top of a funnel. It's soup, I am a huge advocate around structured interviewing and creating consistency for across the business for how the processes will run, I think where recruiters get to really kind of pull levers within the process is where is our talent coming from? How does it align with what the business needs? And are we creating a diversity, a diverse, focused pipeline, which is which is extends to where we even find the talent. And so that's where really impressive data can really come in and knowing kind of the state of the state of your overall talent, pipeline and funnel is, where are we right now? And then I know, there's a question that I saw in the chat around quality of hire, very loaded question and can't wait to get to it. But when you know, the business is looking for something at the end of the process? What are what kind of mechanisms are you putting in place at the beginning to increase your likelihood of success? And I think recruiters have a very, very big hand in saying, here's the talent market. You know, the past America is point like we have, you know, roles where we might have hired the same role multiple times, let's actually do a quick analysis of what those pipelines look like. Let's be really honest around where we could have done better, what are the measurements of success? And at the top of the funnel, do we need to, you know, work more on our branding, our job descriptions actually bringing in and deflecting the right type of talent? Should we be focusing more on sourcing and I think that is just such a really powerful thing for recruiters to own specifically right now with the market. And I've been in positions where we're, we're sourcing and that's like, the biggest thing that we need to do because the market is so competitive. Now, I know a lot of recruiters gonna be folks out there right now on the call are dealing with hundreds upon 1000s of applications based on the market like we need to be aware of the market and then the recruiters are really really talented and pivoting and adjusting to the new market to get the right type of funnel in to hit that quality of hire. At the end of the day, the ultimate North Star. I'd love the answer to to one day so

Hung Lee 34:55
yeah, we're gonna get to the door and we're gonna get to the call to hire question in a second. By the way folks, even for people that are very base level that might think recruitment metrics are a little bit outside of comfort zone where you you've probably already been doing it in a way that because when you post an advert for instance, you're also intuitively understanding are you getting people applying to this, and you might have posted an advert 18 months or so ago and got very little response, post an advert today, suddenly you get an overwhelming response, that itself is a couple of some signals as the market change. And it could give you an idea as to what you should or should not be doing. Because is it a good idea to post an advert when you haven't got a system in place to handle volume, for instance, and then suddenly, you're exposing your you're jeopardising, potentially your candidate experience your employer branding, because you can't handle 500 applicants that you didn't, you didn't consider that you had capacity for. So all of those things needs to be part of your kind of thought process as you go through this. Okay, Jose, I wanted to sort of shift a little bit here. Because when we're talking about numbers and metrics, like do we also calculate, like the difficulty of the job? Like, I think one of the things that is difficult when you're, you know, you're trying to produce some generalisations, you know, to say, you know, what, yes, on average in this department, it's going to take this amount of time to hire for this type of role, etc. That's all good. But, you know, maybe the rules are so different that it takes just yeah, have to calculate difficulty of hire into the process before you know and communicate it to the business because you know, something that is very much overly generalised is that one, one sort of manager might, you know, have a look at his own department, they go, why am I taking so much more time to hire for the this, why the TA takes so much time to populate the pipeline for this particular function? When you know, my buddy over there seems to be getting better service, quote, unquote. So how do you put in, I guess, the question, how do you kind of inject or calculate difficulty of higher? What's the way to do that?

Jose Delgado Garcia 37:08
Yeah, that's a good question. Actually, that's internal conversation, we're having our company as well, because we're talking about, for example, prioritisation of the role, especially when you're, you know, you kick off a year, and you are really forecasting them on a road, you're gonna hire for that year. And throughout the quarter, something that we're doing actually is considering the amount of roles but also the complexity considering, you know, the talent mapping as well out there in the market, how many companies are hiring for those ones, where it's kind of like, you know, the background and so many different topics. So that is something that we're doing. And the best way that we're doing right now is actually selling mapping right now with our sourcing team as well, making sure that we understand what is the level that we're looking for? How many like the comparison where we can hire where the team base as well. So he's very, very difficult, to be honest, to really answer that question, because that's something that we are checking that we're trying to do that and really try normally to save that on a more creative way, in a way. So really understanding. Okay, is there anybody internally that we maybe think we can we can hire us? Well, what is exciting that we are looking for? So it's very complex? But yes, we are really measuring, we're having that conversation as well, considering the complexity on the front. Let's say we've created vandalism, how are we going to base or measure that as well? And then we'll see how we will affect that as well, specifically with those recruiters that they're going to take care of that. So it is a bit complex to measure Yes, yet for that, how to inject that. But I think it's more like really putting an x ray for extra love with that as well, on other kind of like, campaigns or referrals. So it's really still difficult to measure, if I may, if I may say very, very, completely honest.

Hung Lee 38:48
No, no, I think more I think about it, the more difficult it is. So there's one element, that difficulty is the overall size of the talent pool. So for instance, if you have a very large talent pool, presumably it's easier to hire those people. But if you have very few, then of course, it's harder. But there may be more custom things. Like for instance, your company might have a particularly weak brand in a particular function of thing or for whatever reason, and you do factor that and suddenly, you have to think about okay, market perception of the role. As a classic example, maybe a prominent person in the industry wants to have your business left in disgrace, and you're really hammered your your business in black glass door or something. Yeah, that's probably going to be quite your increased challenge of hiring for people into that company. And again, you need to factor a factor down how well this is a different one, maybe inexperienced hiring managers that you put that is as a factor in the difficulty of hiring because we know that if a hiring manager is less experienced, they're going to be more hesitant to say yes to things compared to, you know, an experienced manager who's often too quick to say yes. Because you know that their magnificent management skills will obviously make you know, any any good Creek diamonds out of anything. So, so yeah, there's lots of complexity. But I guess it's kind of you've got to come into your own kind of DNA of the business to figure out what inputs go into assessing complexity, right? It's definitely Mary-Kay, do you want to chime in on this idea of complexity of role. What kinds of things go into review thinking about creating a number against this?

Stephanie Baysinger 40:35
I love what you said about the hire. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No, no. Go ahead, Stephanie. I love what you said about hiring manager experience. That's a new one. And I just wrote that down that that is a great idea for themselves or to the baseline.

I think Jose kind of touched on this, and I would agree of what is the business trying to accomplish? Like, what are the ultimate business goals? And which roles are going to impact those? And how do you prioritise those? And then what is the complexity of those roles? Like I, I think that's another input of, you know, what is the impact this role is going to have? What's the prioritisation of the business? And then how do you resource that effectively, so that you can get those results? I'll aim there. I'll stop there. So I think that's a bit more high level to your question. But it's just something that's top of mind for me of, we could we could give everyone a lot of scores for other roles and hire those. And then I've been in positions where we're like, Wait, we've done all this complexity measurement. And actually, the one position that we needed is still is still on the on the in the process right now. And if we wouldn't, we just have to just prioritise that from the beginning, and it might have a ripple effect on that hiring manager being in the business and being able to hire more people for their team, etc.

Hung Lee 41:54
Yeah, absolutely. How about your first Mary Kay, how do we how do we calculate complexity of the job? Like, how difficult is the hire that role?

Mary-Kay Baldino 42:01
Yeah, I think that one of the things we haven't touched on yet, but is the, to me, the great enabler of a lot of these things that we have been discussing is strategic workforce planning. And just very, very few companies actually even attempt it. And even fewer get it right. Most recruiting functions are put in a position where really, they just have to react. Because the business doesn't know what it wants until it's right in front of them, they can't give you a forecast of their hiring needs more than 90 days out, they can't give you a succession plan that has any high degree of accuracy below the C suite kind of level. Right? And so, you know, I think we have to accept that in most companies, we have to build a recruiting engine that is capable of pivoting and capable of a great deal of flexibility. The ideal state is we do strategic workforce planning. And we understand those roles in the context of what they contribute to the company's strategy. What they the difficulty of the market factors, right, because street strategic workforce planning is looking at external inputs from the labour market, not just what is our company strategy. If you're, you know, only like navel gazing and looking internally, you're really never going to get to a very strategic view. So not to take us down a rabbit hole on strategic workforce planning, because that could be a whole nother webinar unto itself. But but it is a huge missing factor. And that is, could be an incredibly powerful engine for building a way more efficient and productive recruiting team.

Hung Lee 43:53
Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, a couple of the panellists have mentioned things like talent mapping, and what have you noticed people have mentioned in the chat certain tools that you should be or can be using? Unfortunately, all of them are paid for, I think LinkedIn insights, I believe, is available, but on certain types of paid licence. I think the talent mapping scene is quite healthy in terms of provisioning of tools, but they do cost. So you might need to go to public data at times. Follow lake, the labour market economists understand sort of what the the environment is, for the key roles that you're hiring for. And by the way, if you don't have to do this for every role, but have a think about what the key positions are, that your company, either strategic positions for your company, or their evergreen companies, you know, this is essentially what your company does. If you're a software development house, you probably want to know sort of what it is what the software development market looks like. That's where you need to put some investment in investment of time. And indeed, resources. Folks, we are accelerating through to the we still got some time to go Go to this webinar. But I just want to do a quick reminder to everybody. If you do have any questions that need to be answered and we have managed, pick them up in the chat, ask them in the q&a section because we will definitely go to that towards the end of the conversation. Okay, let's talk practicalities here. I think if we if recruiters had infinite amount of time, of course, we would do all of this talent mapping, of course, we would pour all of these very sophisticated measures in place, all of those things would happen. But there's a reason why talent operations has emerged as as a sub genre within recruiting is because an operation recruiter cannot possibly be doing all of this. This is why we've we've had almost this career path merge, of which Stephanie may not be an exemplar. So bear in mind, though not every organisation is of scale, size, scale maturity to have a tonne ops as distinct function. How do we kind of make the sort of practicalities work where we need to have some numbers in place with this person is still needing to recruit, you know, I'm imagining a figure maybe only we're one recruiter in or perhaps small team around them. How do they assemble something really scrappy, that kind of works for the time being, whilst they still have to knock in a knock down these rules? Any thoughts on the I guess doing a quick and dirty is probably the way I would think about it. Jose, your thoughts on this?

Jose Delgado Garcia 46:28
Yeah, I love this person. Because that's something actually they're coming from scale level as well, like scale up companies as well. It's always a struggle that we had something that we normally would have been doing in this country to actually doing in my current company goals in this group. But also in the past, actually, to really make sure that specifically not consider recruiters are as a service. But actually, as a tea party. I think that is, and that is really key. And it might sound like it's not connected, but it is because something that we did, it's also really divided the role in a way of like having like an 80%, where they dedicate, obviously, to really the main goal for recruiters, which is like also really being like, at the end of the day, hire people we pretty like really plan and plan as well. But what is important also for me is really that scalable system as well, and how to relay that notion and knowledge management as well how those parameters are also able to grow in their careers, how to really make sure that the processes are automated, to be able to be more efficient as well. And also give them time as well for matters of diversity of really bringing the top of the funnel be more creative as well. So when it comes to practicality, to be more practical, let's say it's really important to obviously focus on what we need to do. But also really making sure that we give a space for them to really work as a team and really building their foundation. I've noticed that when companies as well try to go a bit more like really out of the box, but nothing is really built on the on the on the ground, everything just will fall apart. So I think it's really really important. As I said before, going back to basics basics, go to there have the knowledge management, set expectations really be aligned have and I think what's also what Mary-Kay really measure is that workforce planning was something that has been really a key key point as well and really connected that with a team of recruiters, it really, really helped a lot and then connected obviously, with how the market is now with employer branding, our diversity and inclusion, I think that really brings so much efficiency as well. And at the end of the day, it also sees practical in the short, very long term as well. To me that is something that is the best way of building like really a practical and a strong team as well for in different timelines.

Hung Lee 48:35
Yeah that they don't think there exists a tool that does this. This is I imagine there might be I mean, I guess they talk about AI at some point like is there a scenario whereby there may be a way in which some sort of artificial intelligence can connect with a bunch of systems the start giving us some insight and outputs there currently seems to be pretty scattered. I think most people who are building some type of recruitment ops efficiency metrics probably will be building this in Excel even or would be building it on you know, maybe some sort of consumer great app, you know, I think Visual Studio or something, I don't know the ways to do it, but it's not necessarily you know, a tool or kind of magically does it for you so perhaps there's an opportunity there for somebody. Okay, let's do the practicalities again as Stephanie How would you know you do it and in fact, you were the one that mentioned the scrap piece of paper so what was on the paper?

Stephanie Baysinger 49:37
Google Sheets can be your friend I have definitely built very, very easy equations of you know, a funnel in Excel that's you know, you can type in the past through rate percentages. You can build this yourself. Get to know your ATS if you have an ATS. Like just take an hour block off an hour this week and Just poke around with some of the basic funnel metrics like, take some time, I think, you know, Jose to your talk on like knowledge management, like, put the responsibility on yourself or your team to upskill. You want to do it all at once. But one task a week for the next couple of weeks. I'm going to analyse my ATS this week, and I'm going to see if they can give me the general you know, what are the events in my process? And do I have an understanding of what is going on in those events? Because I might be asked, or when I do my next role, I want something to go back to it's just setting the small habits and pieces every week to do that, I think that's the most practical thing to do. And then for those that are on the call that might be recruiting managers or leading teams, what is your role when you have one on ones or when you're holding the team accountable to things? What questions are you asking? And how are you reinforcing that knowing these metrics is actually part of the role, whether it's, I love what you said, Jose, I believe that's why my operations role kind of exists is taking that 20% of, you know, spending time on your metrics as I get to kind of build that at scale. But if you don't have that, still dedicating that 20% of your role to knowing what your pipeline looks like. And as if you're a manager, I know we can tend to say like, Alright, are you feeling good about the role? You feel like you got a good candidate? Okay, good. Okay, next one, like actually pausing and asking questions like, What are you noticing about your pipeline? Right now? Pause, let's talk about it. Let's get in the data together. You know, what, what have we not tried yet? You know, what, how can we brainstorm a little bit right, now, let's actually pull up a piece of paper or your ATS and map out some things and just dedicating five or 10 minutes of all of your meetings, to talk about those pieces, I think is just setting very practical habits and making this part of kind of the DNA of your team.

Hung Lee 51:49
And that's actually kind of one of those incremental. Incremental may not be the right word, but it's one of the ways in which you can move the your TA function into more data driven contexts, is from a manager's perspective, that may be the first five minutes of your meeting to on the one to ones to talk about this in this way. And as you say, it's moving away from the gut feel stuff. But talking about, hey, you know, what is the pipeline telling you? And then that forces the recruiter, however, experienced or not, there may be to start thinking, Yeah, I need to have those numbers for the manager when we have this chat. Okay, Mary, Kay, what are your thoughts on this? I mean, you kind of have kind of, you've got to this two year mark of putting together some of these things. Can you give us a few examples of of things that worked and things that didn't? I mean, now that you if there's time to kind of do a quick review? Like, what kind of measures do you think, okay, we read, that worked, worked in the sense it was implemented, and actually you use it to improve and give us an example of something that you've learned that actually turned out not to be particularly useful?

Mary-Kay Baldino 52:57
Yeah, I think we switched applicant tracking systems a little over a year ago. And so the the focus initially was just on making the data as transparent as possible, giving hiring managers direct access to reports and metrics and making sure that they they knew what was going on at all times, right? The worst thing is recruited to the position of, you know, just having to constantly provide updates, because managers can't see for themselves what is going on. So that is a huge efficiency gain. Right there. Getting to roll clarity is so much easier when you have that, that transparency. I think one of the things that we continue to work on is data visualisation, you can give people a tonne of data. But if that data doesn't tell a story, or you can't put it in a context or without visuals, that data visualisation, it's very difficult to get people to use that data to change behaviour. So that's kind of, for me, the big focus area right now is moving beyond just data transparency, and making sure everybody has access to real time information. That's, that's meaningful. And moving beyond that to really using data visualisation to change specific important behaviours.

Hung Lee 54:30
Really interesting, some really important points here, by the way, because obviously, we've been talking so far about what we're doing with regards to recruiting metrics, but of course, it may well be you got hiring managers that are part of this process. They are not directing it, but they're full stakeholders because they're doing the interviewing. They should be giving you feedback. They should be doing scorecards do all of that stuff. But are they doing it is the tooling provided for them to do that? That's probably still an ongoing conversation a lot of us may be having, because I'm just imagining, okay, you know, the default, maybe just a decent ATS that everyone has access to. But there's some folks out there that are on Excel still or, you know, the pre ATS in that way, how do you mobilise managers to do those types of stuff. So getting the managers involved and contributing to it can help release the report reporting burden from the TA team, which is actually a massive efficiency gain. Because you can just point the hiring managers to a dashboard and say, hey, you've got the same information as we do you. There's no point in asking us for a report. Okay, moving on to data visualisation. Super interesting, because we do have to end this conversation a little bit with AI because there's been some really interesting innovations hasn't there about, hey, suddenly, we can ask chatGPT to produce like, hey, a chart that tells us this. What's your view on generative AI's role in recruitment metrics? Do you think it's a powerful addition to the toolkit? Or do you think at the end of the day, it's not really going to do too much? We still have to, you know, do the hard work ourselves a little bit on this? Any thoughts? I'll throw it open? I had you experimented with chatGPT. What are you what's your take on it or any of the generative AI when it when it comes down to the recruitment operation, metrics on this

Stephanie Baysinger 56:23
Really quick, hot take on it. I'm excited about some of the things to come, I think the biggest thing is just clean data. So if you don't know the data that's in your system, or it's not organised correctly, asking an AI tool to spit out metrics, and then taking it at face value, I think goes almost against this entire conversation of building and knowing the basics. So my big thing is like, let's just get this data clean. And I'm and having people around to kind of piece what it spits out apart and just quality check it right now.

Hung Lee 56:55
Yep, your thoughts on this? Jose?

Speaker 3 56:58
I pretty much agree on these ideas. So when you go, but I think what is important is like we don't have any, we're better than the house and the foundation is not properly built, I think the races is gonna tumble down as well. So I completely agree with her as well, in the sense of like, we really need to have like clean data. And that's actually what has been really my role lately as well, because it is important for the when we build something, it's connected, and everything makes sense. And we really understand how to manage that tool as well. So So yeah, pretty much on the same on the same path, basically.

Hung Lee 57:27
Great stuff. Mary, Kay, your thoughts on this? Have you ever used it? Or do you think actually no, smoking mirrors? What?

Mary-Kay Baldino 57:33
I don't? Well, I don't think it's going to end up being smoking mirrors. I think at this point, you know, I would agree. Like, if the foundation isn't there, you don't have a solid process, then your data isn't clean? And then, you know, why are you bothering to play around with tools that are still fairly experimental? In some cases, I do love the opportunity for efficiency, that AI promises, like, I don't know, it's delivering on that promise. But, you know, there are so many things like creating, you know, cut more complex formulas and creating more interesting graphs and charts that you can have ai do that work without having to spend hours and hours of human effort. I think that is a really interesting application of AI. But so far, I would say, you know, from my experience, a lot of companies still are working on, you know, having essentially basics around clean data in their recruiting processes, having unbiased data, so things like, you know, interview feedback, for example, and whether or not that is unbiased. But, you know, I think there's tremendous potential for a streamline

Hung Lee 58:55
I'm and the fact the final bit of potential, by the way, folks, is that you can use it as a resource to learn about recruitment operations, you can learn it as a resource to learn about conversion rates and stuff like that, just ask it and see what it comes up with. There'll be stuff out there because it's been trained on the internet, so to speak, so somebody would have produced some content on there. It's useful at the very basics as a research and research and learning tool for this topic. Folks, we are out of time, so we have to put an end to an end here. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you to our wonderful guests Mary-Kay Baldino, Stephanie Baysinger and Jose Manuel Delgado, wonderful to have you on the panel guys. Thanks, everyone for watching. I hope you've enjoyed our second of our series with Cronofy. We're going to roll straight into webinar three, because Cronofy have done an excellent survey on candidate expectations, particularly when it comes down to the recruitment logistics. So if you're interested in exploring what those expectations might be. Make sure you tune into the next webinars that we're going to set up shortly. Kathryn, I'm sure we'll be sending you an email for that. Okay, that's about it, everybody. Thanks for watching. Wonderful to have you. We'll see you next time. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Bye bye

## Go beyond time-to-fill

Time-to-fill is a more controversial metric, and is starting to lose its relevance when looking at recruitment efficiency. Mary-Kay suggests focusing on time-to-fill variance instead.

“Start having conversations with the business about how we can measure things that actually change outcomes that improve efficiency. So for us, we have evolved towards measuring time to fill variance. It's not the actual time to fill that's interesting. It's about how much variance there is between roles. For example, we look at setting up a target start date, when we're doing an initial kickoff to search. So based on how long the interview is, how many interview cycles, and how small and specific the talent pool is for this job, we look at how close we are to actually hitting those target start dates. When you look at the outliers, you're able to really start focusing on what's going wrong in your process.”

It is undeniable that context is crucial when looking at KPI targets and what success looks like, as Jose explains.

“KPIs can be hard to generalize across the board as there’s often a huge variance within company roles a recruiter is hiring for. Some roles might be filled in 10 days, another might take 500 days. And obviously those things skew what the overall measure might be. So you need to do variance in terms of role, and then it's a case of can you improve on that so it's not necessarily one number is a bad number or a good number.”

For time-to-fill, simply subtract the opening date from the offer acceptance date, and look across all of your roles to see what the trends are.

‍

## Time to schedule

A recurring pain point for recruiters is coordinating a time for all the people necessary for an interview, particularly complex panel or sequenced interview scenarios. This can lead to a lag between each interview being scheduled, keeping the candidate stuck in the recruitment pipeline for longer. This waiting time is essentially dead time, leaving you susceptible to candidate drop-outs and essentially leaving the job unfilled.

People expect speed and efficiency in every area of their lives thanks to technology and our "everything now" culture, and the time to schedule an interview is no different. If the process takes too long, it's a lot harder to keep the best talent iterested. Jose mentions the importance of speed in recruitment:

"In the end, we're all fighting for the same talent. So it is important to understand how to remain competitive, and speed is a critical part of this. Automation is great for this as it can take out a lot of the time-consuming admin that recruiters hate."

Having scheduling automation in place is the best way to ensure the candidate is moving through the stages efficiently and there is no wasted time. The average amount of time it takes for recruiters to schedule interviews is 3-6 days – [our Scheduler](https://www.cronofy.com/scheduler-for-recruitment-teams) whittles this down to just 2 hours, which is a huge saving and a powerful tool for a recruiter to have under their belt.

‍

## Recruiting cost ratio

Recruiters should also be looking at recruiting costs relative to the salaries of the people who are being brought in. Stephanie explained how you would calculate this.

“Look at all of your recruiting costs, so your talent acquisition team, your employer branding, and recruitment, marketing expenses, and any agency fees. Then divide it by the salaries of the people being hired. And over time you’ll understand whether your costs are going up or down relative to how many people you're hiring and how those people are paid.”

Factoring in training is also critical, especially if they’re a specialized and highly paid professional. They need to be given the best chance of success and training is an important part of this.

“A general rule of thumb is the more expensive your labor force, the more specialized it is,” said Stephanie. “So you may need to spend more time and more effort attracting that kind of a workforce. And these things only mean something if you train them over time.”

So a good formula for this is:

(External Costs) + (Internal Costs) / Total Compensation of New Hires x 100

A metric that feeds into this is calculating the complexity of a job to establish how much effort and money you should be spending on the recruitment process. This all comes down to what your overall business goals are, as Mary-Kay explains.

“Ask yourself: what are the ultimate business goals, what should you be prioritizing? Which roles are going to impact those, and how do you prioritize them? What is the impact this role is going to have, and how complex is it? And then how do you resource that effectively, so that you can get those results?”

## Quality as a priority

Recruiters should focus on quality-of-hire rather than putting such an emphasis on time-to-hire. According to a [Linkedin report](https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/business/talent-solutions/global/en_us/c/pdfs/GRT16_GlobalRecruiting_100815.pdf), only 36% of recruiters measure quality-of-hire while 50% measure time-to-hire. Of course both should be assessed but the quality of the employee is what is most important in terms of making the money, time and effort a worthwhile endeavor.

“If you’re getting in a lot of job applicants but they’re all low quality, you are wasting time and money,” Jose says. "What's important for me is the quality of the hire, how good of a fit are they for your role. So if you're getting a low quality, you need to look at where these candidates are coming from, what recruiting marketing campaigns are you running, and are you assessing each role properly."

You can measure quality of hire while they're in the recruitment process by looking at referral rates and pre-hire assessments, then look at job performance and retention once they are part of the company. And example of how this could be calculated:

[**Quality of Hire**](https://resources.workable.com/blog/quality-of-hire) [(%)](https://resources.workable.com/blog/quality-of-hire) = (Job Performance + Engagement + Cultural Fit) / 3

## Conversion rates

The rate of conversion reflects the effectiveness of the recruitment process in keeping the candidates engaged and interested in the role, which is vital to uphold throughout each stage. Jose explains, “If we see the conversion rate throughout the stages is increasing, the cost is actually the lowest because we've done a good job in the beginning, aligning, setting expectations with everyone. And normally, you see them turn into a hire.”

This metric is also about quality of the candidate over quantity.

"If you're plugging in loads of candidates, you can actually over acquire them. Just because they're applying doesn't mean they'll stay within the recruitment process for long. And that's not a particularly efficient way to do things. Instead of looking at how many candidates are applying, look at how many are converting. This means you're more efficient yand you'll be spending less."

The best way to calculate this metric is:

Successful hires made / total vacant jobs x 100 = Coversion Rate (%).

‍

## The Enduring Value of Traditional Hiring KPIs

The overall consensus is metrics like time-to-hire and cost-per-hire remain fundamental in the recruitment world. When presenting to the C-suite, business leaders, or the board, these metrics offer a clear picture of your recruitment process's health.

“These traditional KPIs are the nuts and bolts when it comes to your recruitment metrics,” says Stephanie. “They're universally understood by various audiences. Once you know these, then you can expand into the things that help you hit business objectives, what your team is really passionate about. But knowing your general funnel metrics are super power tools to have going into any meeting.”

Mary Kay agrees:

“Those metrics are considered baseline and if you can't measure that, you definitely can't measure anything more sophisticated. If you can't produce basic metrics, then forget evolving.”

Here are the simple calculations for those basic metrics:

The time-to-hire calculation: **working days from first job post to official hire / number of roles hired = time-to-hire**

Cost-per-hire calculation: Internal costs + external costs / number of hires = cost-per-hire

‍

## KPIs For The Win

Many of the traditional KPIs are still relevant today, but they should be adapted and expanded on to get a holistic view of modern recruitment efficiency. By embracing a combination of metrics, understanding the nuances of each role, adapting to changing conditions, and fostering creativity in talent acquisition, recruiters can truly measure and enhance their operational efficiency.

The recruitment landscape is ever-evolving, and so should your metrics. Adapt, innovate, and measure what truly matters to ensure you're not just filling roles quickly but doing so efficiently and effectively.

### Losing Top Talent: How Common Recruitment Mistakes Risk Your Employer Brand

Poor communication, ghosting, and lengthy interview processes are driving candidates away and tarnishing your brand. How can you create a more efficient, transparent, and candidate-friendly hiring experience in 2024, and what role can automation play in this?

Blog Post

2024-07-15T14:00:40.161Z

---

### How Wise cut interview scheduling from 6 days to 90 minutes

Learn how Wise, a global technology company with a mission to move the world’s money, accelerated their time-to-schedule with Cronofy’s scheduling automation and transformed their candidate experience.

Case Study

---

### Internal Training vs External Training: Which is More Effective and Why?

I’m probably in the minority when I say that I love a good training session. Not the boring kind where the person sat next to you is falling asleep because they missed out on their morning coffee, but the interesting, engaging kind where you learn something new and leave feeling empowered.

Blog Post

2018-06-07T11:16:00.000Z