Josh TolanWe’re living in the time of big data. As a staffing professional, staffing metrics help you refine your strategy so it impresses candidates and clients, alike. However, the number of data-tracking opportunities make it overwhelming to decide what information to collect and analyze.
To ensure you’re focusing on the most important metrics in your staffing firm, we dug deep into recent research and asked a few experts what data is absolutely necessary to track.
Here are the KPIs that are indispensable to your staffing process:
1. Candidate satisfaction score
After the conclusion of every interview, we send our candidates a one-question automated survey over text that asks the following: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your Amplio Recruiting experience to date?” The metric is a strong predictor of whether a candidate will be a possible referral source, whether that is with their friends or on social media. It also correlates with whether a candidate will be hired.
In addition, it allows us to monitor our candidate workflow for any logistical issues that may cause us to lose a high-quality candidate or diagnose problems in a client’s interview process. For example, we had a client that had a consistently high time-to-fill and we couldn’t understand why.
We kept sending them what we believed were high-quality candidates and yet the positions remained unfilled. We decided to first implement this metric using them as a test case. Within about a month, we could see the problem. Our candidates were constantly reporting satisfaction scores in the 3-5 range, but only after interviewing with a certain member of HR.
We passed this information along to the company, the HR rep was immediately terminated, and the time-to-fill metric quickly moved to a normal level.
Chris Chancey, Founder of Amplio Recruiting
2. Cost-per-hire
Data surrounding the cost of filling a vacant position influences everything from how to source top candidates to what tools are used and time to fill the role.
Cost-per-hire is one of the most obvious metrics to track. And yet, many talent acquisition pros struggle to refine their process when hiring decision makers neglect it. In fact, Spark Hire’s latest report Making the Most of Your Hiring Budget: The Problems that Are Leading to Waste found that 24 percent of hiring professionals do not track cost-per-hire. As a result, staffing pros are unable to show their clients their ROI for using a staffing firm.
Cost-per-hire is especially important when you’re trying new tools or strategies. Analyzing how the metric fluctuates will let you know if the changes have had a positive impact on the staffing process.
3. Offer acceptance
Having a high acceptance rate is important for our firm, not just from a reputational point of view, but also to help keep costs down. When our offers are declined, we must spend more valuable resources connecting with other candidates. Sometimes, we have to even reinterview other finalist candidates.
If we notice a less-than-desirable acceptance rate, it signals to us that we need to review something in our process. For example, is it the offer itself that is not competitive or is something not connecting with the candidate during the interview process?
While doing a quarterly review of our data, we noticed relatively low acceptance rates for several positions. We also conduct a follow-up survey with candidates, so we dug further into our available data. It turns out although candidates had an enjoyable experience, the overall compensation packages were less than desired or anticipated. As our clients tend to be small businesses, offering competitive salaries can be a challenge.
However, we connected with our clients and came up with an overall incentives package to better attract candidates. We created a comprehensive package to include slightly higher salaries but emphasized more innovative benefits such as student loan repayments, wellness programs, and generous paid parental leave. Once we sent out offers with the new benefits package, our acceptance rate greatly improved.
Matt Dodgson, Director of Market Recruitment
Spark Hire
