This video is on the topic of recruitment and the measure of success. What we'll be talking about includes how companies measure recruiting activities, why we need to evaluate recruitment, and how should we do it.

How is recruitment measured currently?

First of all, I think the biggest problem is that a lot of the time it's not (measured). Naturally, we know whether we happen to get someone to fill a position, so ability to fill a position is a metric, but we see it as something which just happens as opposed to something we really need to think about too much.

We don't have very many formal checks when it comes to recruitment metrics, and the shame about that is recruitment is arguably the most crucial function of any business. No matter what strategy we have, no matter what services, what products we have, if we don't have the right people to drive that strategy, it's a lot less likely to succeed.

So not hiring the right people in the first place can cause all kinds of problems for a business, and we'll talk about that, and a lot of money is wasted. The bottom line is your company is only as good as the people that you hire.

So how should we measure recruitment? There are a number of metrics that we can use both pre-hire and post-hire.

Recruitment Advertising

The first one, as we already discussed, is fill rate. So, we were able to actually fill the position, and usually that's as far as people will go. But it's really interesting to be able to work out how long it took to fill the position and also how much it cost to fill the position. We need to know that kind of information because when we go to hire again, it's really useful to know if it took 6 weeks, if it took 8 weeks, or if it took 12 weeks. How long do we need to set aside and plan before we can get someone into that position again? And again, for our budget, from our budgeting point of view, we need to know how much it cost as well so that we can plan.

Another thing that's really interesting to look at is the success of each of our sourcing channels. So we might put an advert in the newspaper, we might put an advert in various newspapers. We may use job websites online. We may use social media. There are various channels through which we will attract candidates. Job centres could be another one.

We need to look afterwards, at the end of each recruitment drive, to see how successful were each of those channels. Did we get a lot of applicants from one particular website? We also need to look then, even if we got a lot of applicants from one area, at how many of them turned into invites to assessment centres or interviews, and how many of them turned into job offers, and how many of them turned into accepted job offers as well because, again, that can inform where we spend our money and where we advertise jobs in future.

Another thing that we should look at is the number of candidates before we offered the jobs and the number of candidates per hire. How many people do we need to be inviting for assessment before we usually, typically, actually appoint someone for the role?

We should also look at the quality of the candidates. Part of the problem with recruitment is it's very separate. You've got your recruitment team, and then you have your actual operational teams and team managers etc., and, usually, there's a divide. So, the people who go out and look for new starts for teams are separate from the actual person who will be responsible for managing this new hire.

Did We Hire the Right Person?

So, the recruiters, they often lack the kind of information that comes with seeing how people performed once they joined the company, and how they performed in the role. There is no connection between, for instance, team leader and recruiter. And when it comes to hiring again, the recruiters just keep hiring what they've always hired for. They don't know what happened after they passed the new candidate on to the operational team. So, we need to look at the quality of the candidates, and also then we need to look at the quality of work done when the person started in the position.

Another thing to look at then, as I already mentioned, is the offer acceptance rate, because if we're offering two, three, four people a position before someone accepts it, maybe we need to revisit the circumstances that we're offering or we need to do some digging to understand why people aren't accepting the role.

So, post-hire then, as I already touched on, we need to look at the quality of the hire. We can look at first of all the stats, the performance stats for that person, whether we have access to quality scores, productivity scores, whether we have customer satisfaction metrics that we look at. What can we look at to see the quality of work that this person has done when they joined the company?

Another thing then that we should do is we should always have a joined-up approach between recruiter and new hiring manager so that we can understand, maybe three months down the line, how did the hiring manager feel the person fit in with the rest of the team, whether they felt they were the right person appointed for the role, whether we need to look at the type of profile that we usually seek when we're recruiting and adapt.

New Hire Satisfaction and Retention

The next thing that we can look at post-hire is the retention rate of those people. So, people who took jobs in our company, were they satisfied? Did they feel that what they were told the company was like to work for and what they were told the job was going to be, did they feel like that was accurate, because it can be really easy to turn around and pitch our job offer as we're a fantastic place to work, there's loads of growth opportunities, the bonuses are great, the perks are fantastic, and then people take the job and they join the company and they find out that it's not really like that. There's no point in lying to those people because then they quit and we have to go back through the recruitment and training process again. So, it's really useful to look at new hire satisfaction and the retention rate of those new hires.

So, that's it for this video. Just a recap, what we talked about was how recruitment is measured, how it should be measured, and why it matters.

In the next video, we'll be looking at transitioning into a leadership role for first-time leaders and providing some useful tips.